Colonel James Pohl, 61, is deemed to be unfit to preside over the Guantánamo war crimes tribunals because of the way he conducted the court-martials that followed the 2004 Iraq prisons scandal, The Daily Telegraph can reveal. A motion filed by defence lawyers in the 9/11 trial requested that the judge "recuse" himself. The lawyers say they fear that the Guantánamo trials under Judge Pohl will turn into a repeat of the Abu Ghraib hearings where senior officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, escaped having to testify. "Judge Pohl assigned himself to the vast majority of the Abu Ghraib trials and prevented the defence from going up the chain of command," Richard Kammen, the lead defence lawyer for Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri, the accused in the USS Cole bombing, told The Daily Telegraph.