Prisoner's female no-touch rule lifted

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — A military judge has lifted his restraining order and is again allowing female prison guards to touch an alleged war criminal while moving him between Guantanamo’s most clandestine prison and legal appointments.

Navy Capt. J.K. Waits lifted the restriction in a Feb. 24 ruling, according to lawyers who had seen it. It was still under seal at the Pentagon’s war court website on Sunday.

Last year, the judge forbade female guards from touching Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, 54, who invoked Islamic and traditional doctrine and said he had been handled only by men at Guantanamo. Hadi, captured in Turkey and sent to Guantanamo in 2007, is accused of commanding al-Qaida’s army in Afghanistan after the 2001 U.S. invasion. He could be sentenced to life in prison if he is convicted.

Some guards responded by lodging gender discrimination complaints against Waits. The U.S. Southern Command investigated but has had no comment.

Waits made no mention of the guards’ bias complaint in his decision. He lifted the no-touch order based “on a very strict line of case law rather than the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” said Marine Lt. Col. Thomas Jasper, Hadi’s Pentagon-paid defense attorney.

Prosecutors opposed the religious accommodation request as at odds with a Pentagon move toward greater gender neutrality in the U.S. military. One dismissed the question in court last month as a manufactured al-Qaida conspiracy.

Jasper was considering whether to appeal the decision. He cast the issue in an email Sunday as “a very simple accommodation so a devout Muslim, pending trial, can continue to practice his religion without restriction and being subjected to a violent-force cell extraction before attending mandatory medical appointments, legal meetings, court sessions and all other essential visits.”

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