The civilian trial of terrorist suspect Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani begins Tuesday, and the proceeding is already clouded by a judge's decision to ban a key prosecution witness who could help clinch a guilty verdict, dpa reported.
Ghailani, 36, is the first detainee at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to appear before a federal District Court in Lower Manhattan since the Obama administration said it would empty the military facility of imprisoned terrorist suspects and close it.
He is accused of plotting to blow up the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Those bombings killed 224 people and wounded hundreds of others.
US prosecutors said Ghailani received explosives to bomb the embassies from Hussein Abede, the key witness. But Judge Lewis Kaplan last week stunned Washington by banning a prosecution demand to call Abede to the stand, on the grounds that Ghailani was tortured while under detention in secret CIA camps overseas.
"The court has not reached this conclusion lightly," Kaplan wrote in his decision, made public last week in the first hearing of the Ghailani case.
"(The court) is acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live, but the (US) Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests," Kaplan said. "We must follow it not when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction."
Kaplan said the prosecution had failed to prove that testimony by the witness would be "sufficiently attenuated from Ghailani's coerced statements to permit its receipt as evidence."
The US attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, on Sunday informed Kaplan in a letter that the government would not appeal the decision, even though it disagreed with the ruling.
Bharara said the government was "prepared to meet its burden of proving the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
Ghailani was captured by US agents in 2004 in Pakistan and detained by the CIA for five years before he was sent to Guantanamo and taken last year to New York in the first test by the Obama administration to try overseas terrorist suspects in federal courts.
If Ghailani is found guilty of terrorist acts against the United States, other Guantanamo detainees could follow. But local officials in New York have rejected Washington's request to try 9/11 mastermind and Guantanamo detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four accomplices, citing hefty security and legal costs.
Without the key witness, law experts said Ghailani may be acquitted. But he was declared an enemy combatant under US President George W Bush and may be sent back to Guantanamo.
Matthew Waxman, an adjunct senior fellow for law and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the Obama administration's efforts to close Guantanamo are now on hold until mid-term congressional elections in November.
"Depending on the results, the White House is likely to find itself in an even tougher political position as it works with Congress on the future of US detention policy," Waxman said.
"The Ghailani trial won't settle those debates one way or the other, but any problems that arise in this prosecution will make it more difficult for the Obama administration to fulfil its commitment to close Guantanamo."