Guantanamo lawyers want 9/11 trial delay

Lawyers for five Guantanamo Bay prisoners charged in the September 11 attacks have urged a military judge to put proceedings on hold because of alleged security flaws in their computer network.

The lawyers on Friday said they had no confidence that their private emails and confidential files are safe as they wrapped up three days of jargon-filled testimony on network security at the US base in Cuba.

The defence teams asked the judge to suspend future proceedings until a secure network could be established for their exclusive use.

"To keep going at this point without a secure infrastructure is to penalise my client, who is looking at the possibility of death, and it undermines the integrity of the system," said Cheryl Bormann, a civilian lawyer for defendant Walid bin Attash.

Ed Ryan, a Department of Justice prosecutor, said the defence complaints about the computer network were exaggerated and that there was no evidence of significant data loss.

The request for the suspension of proceedings was "the emergency motion to abate du jour," he said, comparing it to an earlier defence request to halt the case because of allegations of government eavesdropping on their private meetings.

"We had to stop everything else and spend days proving no one was listening. This time we had to prove no one was reading," Ryan said.

This was the sixth round of pre-trial hearings since the five prisoners were arraigned in May 2012 on charges that include terrorism, hijacking and nearly 3000 counts of murder for their alleged roles planning and aiding the September 11 attacks. A trial date has not been set.

The judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, did not issue an immediate ruling, but appeared sceptical that he could order the government to set up computer servers that were segregated from the rest of the Department of Defence.

The court is scheduled to reconvene in October for another round of pretrial hearings.