WASHINGTON — A naval judge who presided over a war crimes trial in Guantanamo Bay resigned Thursday after being offered a scholarship to the FBI, the latest staff change in what has become a revolving door at the courthouse.
Lieutenant Colonel Michael D. Zimmerman was the fourth judge to preside over the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, 61, who was arraigned in 2014. targeting troops and civilians with roadside suicide bombings and explosives and by firing on medical evacuation helicopters in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004.
Colonel Zimmerman’s departure illustrates a major problem that has plagued the military-civilian hybrid court created by President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Unlike federal judges, who receive lifetime appointments, military judges generally serve on military commissions for a few years and then move on to other legal positions or retire, causing delays and disrupting business continuity. .
The September 11 trial has seen four judges sit in Guantánamo in nearly a decade, and three military judges have administratively handled cases remotely during the coronavirus pandemic. The Saudi prisoner accused of plotting the 2000 suicide bombing of the naval destroyer Cole has had four judges in ten years. The case of Qaeda courier Majid Khan involved four judges, from guilty plea to jury verdict.
The twisting nature of the military commission’s judiciary has also raised conflict of interest issues in cases where judges or their staffers secretly sought post-service positions with the Justice Department, which sends prosecutors and FBI agents to Guantánamo cases. . In the USS Cole case, an appeals court quashed two years of work by an Air Force judge who hid his pursuit of a civilian job as an immigration court judge while on the case.
Colonel Zimmerman’s case is different. He enters the FBI fellowship for a year through an in-service educational program that sends active-duty Marines to war colleges, private universities, and government scholarships for career advancement.
The colonel wrote in a 10-page statement released with unusual haste by the Pentagon that he ranked the FBI program as his first-choice grant on Nov. 6 in an online filing.
He learned last week that he had been chosen, he said, and suspended all work on the Guantanamo case as he considered his options.
Colonel Zimmerman also said he was privileged to decline the scholarship, which begins in the summer, and remain on the case.
Instead, he said he chose to leave the case because “under the set of circumstances, the fact that the FBI is likely to play a major role in this case raises the prospect that an average citizen, knowing all the facts, could reasonably ask questions.” my impartiality.”
The colonel also canceled the next hearing in the case, scheduled for Jan. 4-7, which would deal in part on possible reconsideration of rulings by a previous judge who sought employment with the Department of Justice while presiding over the case but had not made it. it known.
Defense attorneys in the case on Monday called on Colonel Zimmerman to stop and cancel the statements he had made since he was assigned to the case in September 2020. He rejected that part of the request, saying he would still be paid by the Marine Corps while being assigned to “any outside agency” and not seeking employment with the FBI.
In 2014, when Mr. Hadi was brought before the court, the case was expected to be one of Guantanamo’s more straightforward battlefield cases and faster to trial than the joint death penalty case against five men accused of plotting the September 11 attacks. The case has been under investigation for nearly a decade.
For starters, it’s a no-caps prosecution, meaning Mr. Hadi, who says his real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, was entitled to fewer resources and possibly less evidence. In addition, the CIA held him from his imprisonment in Turkey in 2006 until his transfer to Guantanamo Bay in April 2007, a shorter time incommunicado than most other high-value detainees in prison.
But the case still has no trial date and is under investigation, in part due to health concerns. All public hearings were postponed during the first roughly 500 days of the pandemic. Colonel Zimmerman presided over some secret hearings remotely at the time, and he presided over his first public hearing in Guantanamo Bay in July.
Before that, the inmate underwent a series of emergency surgeries in less than a year, beginning in 2017, after guards discovered him incontinent and paralyzed in his cell. The Pentagon brought a neurosurgical team to the base for Hurricane Irma this summer for the first of five spinal surgeries in nine months.
The prosecution has highlighted the challenges of providing complex medical care to the elderly inmates in the prison.
Congress prohibits the transfer of detainees to the United States for health care or any other reason, so specialists and surgical equipment were repeatedly flown to the base. Defense attorneys discovered an email in October 2017 from a doctor in Guantánamo recommending that one of Mr Hadi’s surgeries had failed and that he should undergo surgery at a United States naval hospital.
Since the operations, Mr. Hadi has used a wheelchair, walker and hospital bed in court. In 2019, the Department of Defense sent a jumbo, wheelchair-accessible cell to the court, Camp Justice, so he could spend nights there rather than risk pain on a bumpy daily commute from prison.
Lawyers reported this year that Mr. Hadi had become paralyzed in his prison cell and cared for by other former CIA inmates.
