A federal appeals court docket on Tuesday rejected a bid by a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay to have a brand new navy jury rethink his life sentence for conspiring to commit conflict crimes as a propaganda chief for Al Qaeda and an aide to Osama bin Laden.

Earlier appeals struck down two of the three crimes for which Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was convicted in 2008. His lawyer, Michel Paradis, had argued {that a} new sentencing jury must be assembled on the base to listen to proof and arguments on whether or not his remaining conspiracy conviction deserved a lesser sentence.

Mr. Paradis additionally sought reconsideration of the sentence as a result of, a 12 months after Mr. Bahlul’s trial, Guantánamo’s navy fee system was overhauled to explicitly prohibit using proof “obtained by the use of torture or by cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”

A 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that the sentence should stand and that the prisoner’s legal professionals introduced up the query of torture too late within the appellate course of.

Mr. Bahlul, 53, was tried in October and November of 2008 however didn’t enable his lawyer to supply a protection or query witnesses. He rejected the authority of the navy fee system, which was established by President George W. Bush.

At instances he protested by waving an indication in Arabic that mentioned “Boycott.” During sentencing, he waved a paper airplane when a prosecutor talked about the assaults of Sept. 11, 2001. At the point out of Al Qaeda’s suicide bombing of the usS. Cole off Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, he waved a paper boat he had made whereas sitting in court docket.

Evidence on the trial confirmed Mr. Bahlul admitted that he made an Al Qaeda recruiting video concerning the bombing of the Cole, helped two of the Sept. 11 hijackers put together martyr wills for propaganda functions, and, whereas on the transfer in Afghanistan, tried to function a satellite tv for pc receiver so Bin Laden might monitor broadcasts concerning the Sept. 11 assaults.

Mr. Bahlul’s authorized staff is prone to search full appellate court docket overview earlier than deciding whether or not to enchantment to the Supreme Court. This is Mr. Bahlul’s sixth case earlier than the civilian appeals court docket, together with one in 2014 that overturned two different convictions on fees of offering materials assist for terrorism and solicitation of others to commit conflict crimes.

Mr. Bahlul is the one prisoner nonetheless at Guantánamo Bay who was introduced earlier than a tribunal throughout the George W. Bush administration, and the one one of many 30 prisoners held there serving a life sentence.

A United Nations human rights investigator who visited the jail this 12 months talked about Mr. Bahlul in a report that condemned situations of the detention operation.

As the one convict on the jail, he’s saved “in isolation, raising serious concerns of solitary confinement in contravention of international law,” in keeping with the report by Fionnuala Ni Aolain, who’s serving because the U.N. particular rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights.

Ms. Ni Aolain mentioned a jail coverage letting him socialize with different detainees 4 hours a day has been carried out inconsistently and arbitrarily.