Legal Commentary

NY Terror Trial To Begin Tuesday

By Jeralyn

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, presiding over the case of former Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, barred the testimony of Hussein Abebe, a key government witness, because he was identified as a result of statements Ghailani made during secret CIA interrogation using harsh interrogation techniques.

Today the Government announced it won't appeal the decision and will proceed to trial Tuesday without Abebe's testimony. Ghailani is charged with conspiracy in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa:

Hussein Abebe, would have testified that he sold TNT to Mr. Ghailani that was used in one attack, the bombing of the embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, prosecutors have said. Without Mr. Abebe’s testimony, prosecutors had told the judge, they had “no way of putting such evidence in front of the jury at all.”

In 2001, the Government tried and convicted four other men in the Embassy bombings. All got life and are serving their sentences at Supermax in Colorado. Ghailani was captured in 2004 in Pakistan and moved to Gitmo in 2006.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on October 10, 2010 (boomark / email).