A army decide is weighing whether or not to renew hearings within the Sept. 11 case regardless of two potential hitches: Prosecutors are nonetheless awaiting phrase from the Biden administration on a proposed plea settlement, and a court-ordered examination is underway to find out whether or not one of many defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, is sane sufficient to face expenses.

Hearings within the case have been on maintain since prosecutors initiated plea talks a yr in the past. But in a current order, the decide, Col. Matthew N. McCall, invited prosecutors and legal professionals for the 5 defendants to suggest what points is perhaps tackled in a listening to in July at Guantánamo Bay.

In April, the decide ordered the appointment of a panel of three psychological well being specialists to research whether or not Mr. bin al-Shibh “is suffering from a mental disease or defect that renders him mentally incompetent to stand trial.” A report is due July 13.

A discovering of incompetence would disqualify Mr. bin al-Shibh from pleading responsible or being prosecuted. It might result in a courtroom inquiry to find out what psychological well being suppliers may do to revive his competency, together with probably forcing him to take extra aggressive psychotropic medicine.

The analysis is happening at a time of outspoken international concern over the capability of the Pentagon to offer advanced well being care on the jail in southeast Cuba. Last month, the chief of the Washington workplace of the International Red Cross issued a rare statement declaring that the 30 detainees’ “physical and mental health needs are growing and becoming increasingly challenging.”

In his order, Colonel McCall granted the medical doctors entry to details about what had occurred to Mr. bin al-Shibh throughout his 4 years of interrogations within the C.I.A.’s secret “black site” community the place prisoners had been tortured.

The whole report won’t be made public. Prosecutors will likely be supplied with the choice, not the underlying details. But the medical investigation could supply insights into the long-term results of the C.I.A.’s use of nudity, sleep deprivation and bodily abuse to get the prisoners to reveal Qaeda plots.

Mr. bin al-Shibh claims that he has been laid low with noises and vibrations as a part of a yearslong marketing campaign to deprive him of sleep. Court testimony and filings present that he typically screams within the night time, berates guards, vandalizes his cell digicam and disrupts different prisoners’ sleep. Doctors have given him antipsychotic medicine, though opinions vary about his situation — from a delusional dysfunction to psychosis attributable to post-traumatic stress dysfunction, or different psychological well being maladies.

One member of the psychological well being panel is Paul Montalbano, a forensic psychologist who evaluated John W. Hinckley Jr., the person who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Hinckley was discovered not responsible by motive of madness in 1982 and confined to a psychiatric hospital in Washington for 3 many years. Dr. Montalbano assessed his suitability for launch, which occurred in phases between 2016 and 2022.

The identities of the 2 different panel members will not be identified.

The query of competency emerged behind the scenes even earlier than prosecutors entered into plea negotiations in March 2022 with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 assaults; Mr. bin al-Shibh; and the three different defendants. Prosecutors who had been making an attempt to deliver the death-penalty case to trial since 2009 proposed the plea talks as they struggled to adjust to the decide’s orders to offer protection legal professionals with extra details about the prisoners’ time with and therapy by the C.I.A.

In change for admitting to their roles in the hijackings, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, on the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania discipline, the defendants need assurances that they might not should serve their sentences in solitary confinement. The prisoners, that suffer a variety of situations they blame on their torture, additionally need the Pentagon to comply with arrange a civilian-run trauma care program for them.

Prosecutors have presented some of those questions to the Pentagon normal counsel as “policy principles,” which require the administration to take a place on whether or not they are often accommodated.

Prosecutors have requested to name witnesses through the subsequent listening to, together with Frank Pellegrino, a retired F.B.I. agent who took half within the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed in 2007 at Guantánamo Bay.