Judge Weighs How to Keep Guantánamo’s 9/11 Trial on Track

So the question confronting the judge, in the short term, is whether to order Mr. Harrington to return to the court next month for scheduled pretrial testimony, which Mr. Harrington said he was not fit to do.

Mr. bin al-Shibh has been the most difficult of the Sept. 11 defendants — he was ejected from the court four times in two days in 2013 for interrupting the judge — and Mr. Harrington said their working relationship was broken. He said a cardiologist he saw last month helped him conclude that the stress of working on the case was harmful to his health.

While he intends to return to his 11-employee, two-partner private practice in Buffalo, he said, he believes it would be in a diminished role, perhaps supporting another lawyer in a domestic trial.

All sides agreed that Mr. Harrington would at minimum assist the next capital defender during a transition period to prepare for the estimated nine-month trial. Mr. Ryan, the prosecutor, said that keeping Mr. Harrington on the case, and presumably repeatedly traveling to Guantánamo, would provide “leverage” to motivate the general in charge of the defense teams to swiftly hire a new qualified capital punishment defense lawyer.

In a filing over the weekend, according to those who read it, the prosecutors estimated that Mr. Harrington had been paid around $3 million in the eight years he had been on the case, based on a mandatory, federal learned counsel hourly rate of $192.

Mr. Harrington said he found aspects of that filing “petty” and “vindictive.” In January, he said, the court heard testimony from a former C.I.A. contract psychologist, James E. Mitchell, who with his partner received $81 million for their work in the black sites where Mr. bin al-Shibh was held incommunicado from 2002 to 2006.

Like Dr. Mitchell, Mr. Harrington said not all the money was pure income. Mr. Harrington said, like Dr. Mitchell, that he had employees to pay, insure and provide benefits — extras that prosecutors get with their government jobs. Moreover, he said, his firm would charge about twice the government’s learned counsel hourly rate to a paying client.

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