Morris Davis says allowing evidence from torture means the world will never see Guantanamo Bay trials as fair

The former chief US prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay has denounced the military trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks due to appear in court at Guantanamo on Saturday, as intended primarily to prevent the defendants from presenting evidence of torture.

Morris Davis, a former colonel who was chief prosecutor when Mohammed was brought to Guantanamo in 2006, said the military commissions will be badly discredited by the use of testimony obtained from waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques used on the accused men.

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.

But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

Traveling from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Florida, the Frank family was yanked out of line as it boarded the plane in a dispute over how 7-year-old Dina had been screened. The little girl, who has cerebral palsy, walks with crutches and leg braces.
“They make our lives completely difficult,” said her father, Dr. Joshua Frank, a Long Island pediatrician. “She’s not a threat to national security.”

Silverstein laughs all the way to the bank

Larry Silverstein, a reputed illicit-sex-industry mobster, purchased the World Trade Center in 2001, shortly after the New York Port Authority lost an asbestos lawsuit and was ordered to remove all asbestos from the Twin Towers.  Cost estimates for that asbestos removal ranged from the low billions to the tens of billions – far more than the outdated, half-empty buildings were worth. (The City of New York had been desperately seeking a way to demolish the Towers since around 1990, but was prevented from doing so by asbestos issues.)