15 February 2018 :

Military judge wants civilian attorneys arrested for quitting USS Cole case. The judge in the Abd al Rahim al Nashiri’s terrorism case, Col. Vance Spath, ordered prosecutors Tuesday to draft warrants instructing U.S. Marshals to seize two civilian defense attorneys who have quit the case and ignored his orders and a subpoena to appear at the war court. Air Force Col. Vance Spath is the military judge presiding at the accused USS Cole bomber’s trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He is also chief of the Air Force judiciary. Spath said he would sign the “writs of attachment” on Wednesday and cautioned from the bench that the lawyer for Pentagon-paid attorneys Rosa Eliades and Mary Spears should hustle to federal court, if the lawyer wants to stop what are essentially arrest warrants. Eliades and Spears quit the case in October (see Oct. 11), along with death-penalty lawyer Rick Kammen, over an ethics issue involving intrusion of attorney-client confidentiality, which the judge does not recognize. The three were released from the case by the chief defense counsel, Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker. When Baker, 50, White, refused to rescind that permission on Nov. 1, the judge found Baker in contempt of court and sentenced him to 21 days confinement in his quarters and to pay a $1,000 fine. Unlike Kammen, who was a defense attorney by contract, Eliades and Spears are full-time employees in Baker’s military commissions defense office. Spears has been acting general counsel and Eliades is on an unspecified special project. In addition, Kammen in November had obtained a federal court restraining order protecting him from a forced appearance at the war court. Spath had U.S. Marshals seize a no-show witness before, in October 2016. The judge had earlier Tuesday expressed a reluctance to have the women seized. He said in court that their arrests could cause them to lose their security clearances and jobs with the Department of Defense and thwart his goal of having them return to the defense team of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. The Saudi, a former CIA prisoner, is awaiting a death-penalty trial as the alleged mastermind of al-Qaida’s Oct. 12, 2000, USS Cole bombing. Seventeen sailors died in the attack. The resignations have left Nashiri without a defense attorney with expertise in capital punishment cases, a learned counsel. Spath has alternately said that, since he didn’t approve Kammen’s resignation, the learned counsel is still on the case but refusing to appear — or that a Navy Lieutenant with no death-penalty defense experience is qualified to handle the case. That lawyer, Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, has sat in court through a series of hearings refusing to participate until a learned counsel arrives. In court Tuesday, case prosecutor Mark Miller called a series of FBI agents to describe how they gathered trial evidence in Yemen in the aftermath of the 2000 bombing: They arrived at suspected safe houses that had been pre-searched by Yemeni forces, who took pictures, seized evidence and then, on second thought, returned items to the buildings. Former FBI agent Steven Krueger described that search as unusual. It began, he said, with a Yemeni brigadier general introducing himself, taking the agent by the hand, leading him inside and pointing to a blue tissue paper with a substance on it and declaring, “there’s your evidence.” For this week’s hearing, the judge had prosecutors swear out subpoenas for Eliades and Spears to come to Military Commissions headquarters in Virginia on Tuesday and explain their positions by a video link to Camp Justice here. Their lawyer, Brandon Fox, filed a motion with the court to quash the appearance orders because the two women have been released from the case. Spath refused to accept the filing on Monday, and then denied an earlier effort to quash the subpoenas. The two women did not show up at the headquarters on Tuesday. Spath has declared Baker’s decision to release them “null and void” and said at the conclusion of court Tuesday that he was compelling their attendance to “assist them in getting to the commissions so they can tell what their good cause is” for quitting.