The email accounts of lawyers for the five men accused of plotting the September 11, 2001, attacks were monitored, the chief defense counsel alleged Wednesday.
Colonel Karen Mayberry also claimed that, at one point, “hundreds of thousands” of files went missing from a computer network used by the legal team to communicate.
Mayberry testified during a preliminary hearing at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, transmitted via video link to the Fort Meade base near Washington.
The lawyers for the suspects want proceedings to be frozen due to alleged violations of the computer system.
They say their emails were monitored during a large-scale operation to transfer and duplicate files from a server in the US state of Virginia to one in Guantanamo.
Over several hours, Mayberry recounted how entire files, some of them confidential, disappeared.
She also told of the difficulty of accessing documents, saying this was impossible at times. She also claimed that emails were at times able to be consulted by the US government.
Some of this activity was still ongoing, Mayberry said during questioning by defense lawyers. Some of it she noticed over the course of several months.
Interrogated by David Nevin, lawyer for self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Mayberry testified that last January all of his files handed up in the hands of the prosecution.
“Uncertainty was the rule of the day,” she said in reference to a “massive loss” of documents.
At one point, there were “hundreds of thousands of missing files,” she added.
“I had severe concerns in the integrity of the information we were using.”
Concerns about confidentiality led her to ask the lawyers, in April, to stop using the common system and to only rely on their personal email accounts.
“This network didn’t provide reasonable security,” she said.
The proceedings, expected to continue until Friday, started Monday but were suspended for a day and a half because a defense lawyer became ill.
The five accused face the death penalty if convicted of plotting the attacks 12 years ago on New York and Washington, which left nearly 3,000 people dead.
The preliminary hearings began in May 2012 but a date for a trial has yet to be set.
Lawyer emails for 9/11 suspects monitored: defense
