AG Eric Holder says government will appeal release order for Guantanamo detainee
By APThursday, March 25, 2010
US to appeal release order for Guantanamo detainee
PHOENIX — Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday that the government will appeal an order to release a Guantanamo Bay detainee described in the 9/11 commission report as a significant al-Qaida operative.
Holder said he hopes an appeals court will reverse the order in favor of detainee Mohamedou Ould Salahi, which was revealed Monday in a two-sentence court entry. Holder was asked about the case while he was attending a mortgage fraud task force summit in Phoenix.
“We obviously respect the decision that the judge made,” Holder said. “Hopefully an appeals court will look at the evidence that we presented in the habeas proceeding and come to a contrary conclusion.”
A written decision explaining U.S. District Judge James Robertson’s reasons for granting the detainee’s petition will be released at a later date.
Salahi was known to U.S. and German intelligence a decade ago, and he was living in Germany when he gave instructions to four men about how to reach Afghanistan to train for jihad, according to the 9/11 commission report.
Three of the men later became Sept. 11 hijackers — Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al Shehhi. The fourth was Ramzi Binalshibh, who helped coordinate the 9/11 plot and who now faces trial.
Salahi was arrested in his home country of Mauritania late in 2001.
Former military prosecutor Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who prosecuted terrorism planners and financiers for the Marine Corps for three years, has said Salahi was one of the men he was assigned to prosecute.
Couch told a University of Georgia audience last year that he discovered interrogators had obtained much of the evidence against Salahi through torture and refused to press charges.
Couch said he tried to resign, but was told he would be demoted to captain and sent into combat in Iraq if he quit. He dropped the Salahi case and stayed on as a prosecutor until his assignment ended, when he was named an appellate judge.
