Guantanamo court holds secret session

By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - The Guantanamo war crimes court conducted its first secret session on Thursday to hear defense testimony from a U.S. Army psychiatrist who helped train mental health officials involved in prisoner interrogations.

Yemeni defendant Salim Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan, was allowed to hear testimony from Army Col. Morgan Banks, a clinical psychologist at Fort Bragg. But journalists and human rights observers were banished from the courtroom at the remote U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba.

According to newspaper reports, Banks oversees psychologists involved in the Army's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program that trains U.S. soldiers to resist harsh interrogation if captured.

It involves sensory and sleep deprivation, nakedness and sexual humiliation, loud noises, use of dogs, extreme temperatures and "stress positions" and was adapted and sanctioned by the Pentagon for use in detainee interrogations, according to U.S. congressional testimony in June.

Banks was at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan when Hamdan was taken there in December 2001, a defense lawyer said.

Banks later briefed Guantanamo-bound mental health officials on the "exploitation, oversight and treatment of detainees and staff in a captivity environment," according to congressional testimony from a former Guantanamo official.

He was one of two defense witnesses on Thursday whose testimony was closed to the press. Defense lawyers objected to closing the courtroom for their testimony.

"It is my hope that the American public will someday hear Mr. Hamdan's defense," said his lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer.

The closed session came after military prosecutors finished presenting their evidence against Hamdan in the first trial at the Guantanamo war crimes court and after the judge issued a ruling that was largely blacked out.

FACES LIFE IN PRISON

The jury of six U.S. military officers could begin deliberating their verdict within a week. Hamdan faces life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support for terrorism.

Over nine days, 14 prosecution witnesses testified against Hamdan, including 10 federal agents who questioned him without telling him his words would be used against him in a criminal trial.

Hamdan acknowledges bin Laden hired him as a driver in Afghanistan, but denies joining al Qaeda or having advance knowledge of its attacks.

The government's final witness was Robert McFadden, an agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who interviewed Hamdan at Guantanamo in May 2003.

"He said he pledged bayat to Osama bin Laden," McFadden said of Hamdan, using an Arabic term for loyalty oath.