Lawyer pleads Fifth in dramatic hearing at Guantánamo Bay

GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — An Ethiopian terrorism suspect who claims the United States outsourced his interrogation to torture in Morocco made a dramatic debut Thursday at his war-crimes trial, in a traditional bright orange tunic.

And that was only the beginning. Within hours, the U.S. Air Force officer assigned to defend him invoked her Fifth Amendment rights — three times — after declaring the Pentagon had created for her an ethical dilemma.

Air Force Maj. Yvonne Bradley became the first person to plead the Fifth in the short history of President Bush's disputed military commissions, now under review at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, her client challenged every portion of the proceedings, starting with what the government says is his name: Binyan Ahmed Muhammad.

Muhammad, 27, is accused of conspiracy as a member of al-Qaida who allegedly got explosives training and discussed radiological "dirty bombs" with Jose Padilla in Pakistan. The Bush administration has ruled against charging Padilla, now in federal custody in South Florida, with similar charges.

In a grisly Supreme Court brief, his civilian defense attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, said that Muhammad confessed to anything he thought his captors wanted to hear — after the United States sent him to Morocco, where he asserted interrogators sliced his genitals with a scalpel.

Muhammad, who lived in London for seven years after fleeing his country, says he never joined al-Qaida and was in Pakistan on a religious journey to shake a drug habit before he was outsourced for interrogation under a CIA policy called "rendition."

Muhammad dominated the session, declaring the rules unfair — and pointedly accusing the presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, of perpetrating an American legal justice fraud on the world.

"If you were arrested somewhere in Arabia and Osama bin Laden said, 'I'm going to force you to have a military lawyer and give you some bearded, turbaned person,' I don't think you'd agree with it," he said.

He also drew a sharp admonition to avoid slurs and insults by taunting the Marine with this: "I don't think your kids are going to be proud that there was a Ralph Kohlmann who sat in this commission. Just as I don't think Hitler's kids were proud that their father started this [stuff]," Muhammad said, using a profanity.

Kohlmann tried to press Bradley and Stafford Smith to take the defense lead.

But Bradley, 43, who was mobilized from private practice in Philadelphia, said she could not go forward because of a Pennsylvania Bar opinion. The opinion found that, by having a Pentagon defense team work in the same office, U.S. military attorneys had overlapping responsibilities toward captives who had allegedly implicated each other.