The Obama administration's military trial for the accused 9/11 architects was dealt another blow on Monday when lawyers for one of the co-defendants asked the court to review evidence of his alleged torture in CIA custody.



Ammar al-Baluchi, also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, requested the disclosure days after the military judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, reaffirmed his order for CIA documentation of its treatment of a different defendant in a separate war-crimes case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.



Even before the petition for CIA records, the military tribunal of al-Baluchi and his co-defendants – a death penalty case – was years away. The proceedings at Guantanamo Bay have stacks of pre-trial motions to wade through, more than two years after the commissions brought a second round of charges against the five co-defendants, replacing one abandoned in 2009 and an aborted attempt at trying them in a New York federal court.



The case, which defence lawyers doubted would reach the trial phase by 2015, could now face the additional complication of persuading the CIA to open its files to defence attorneys – not necessarily the general public – to learn some of the darkest secrets of the agency's post-9/11 detention practices.



Baluchi, believed to be the basis for the "Ammar" character abused at the beginning of the Hollywood movie Zero Dark Thirty, was in CIA custody following his 2003 capture in Karachi. In September 2006 he and thirteen other CIA detainees were sent to Guantanamo.



Baluchi attorney James Connell, who has for two months announced his intention to seek his client's CIA history following Pohl's ruling, said that a proper defence of his client required disclosure around the alleged torture.



"Torture has corrupted everything in the military commissions. It touches everything: pretrial confinement, tainted interrogations, the reliability of witness statements, and ultimately whether or not the United States can sentence Mr al Baluchi to death," Connell said in a statement.



Baluchi's attorneys seek the same sort of information Pohl authorised for Nashiri's attorneys. Among them are the locations of the prisons that held Baluchi; names and correspondences of CIA personnel that handled or interacted with Baluchi; and accounts of brutal interrogation techniques applied to him.



The CIA has for months declined to comment about the Nashiri order. It has yet to specify if it will comply with Pohl's order, which represents new and tricky legal territory for an agency that has labored for years to keep accounts of its post-9/11 interrogations secret, taking measures from the destruction of videotapes to the transgression of a digital firewall on a computer network it set up for its Senate overseers as they examined torture-related documents. It is unknown if Pohl, an Army colonel and military tribunal judge, possesses the power to compel the CIA to turn over any of its documentation or provide witnesses.



After Pohl's original April order for CIA disclosure, attorneys for Baluchi's 9/11 co-defendants indicated they would also seek similar material. Accused mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is known to have been subjected to the waterboard, which creates a sensation akin to drowning, 183 times in a single month.



Later this summer, the CIA and White House are expected to release a public version of sections of a landmark Senate intelligence committee report into post-9/11 CIA torture. Even if Pohl rules in favor of Baluchi, the information sought would most likely only ever be seen by Baluchi's attorneys.

