Ghailani Update: Yesterday's Testimony by a Key Would-Be Government Witness

In an earlier post I noted that the defense in the Ghailani prosecution (involving a former GTMO detainee now on trial in New York in connection with the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings) seeks to prevent the government from calling a key witness, on the ground that the government only learned of the witness by coercively interrogating Ghailani himself.   The government argued in response that any taint is too attenuated to matter.  Judge Kaplan in his first ruling on the topic identified the factors relevant to testing that proposition, and concluded that an evidentiary hearing would be necessary to determine how most of those factors would cash out in this case.  That hearing occurred yesterday, and the AP's account of it appears here.  One gets the impression from the report that the evidence was mixed and that the outcome will be a close call.  Whatever the outcome, the situation illustrates the difference between a wholly-clean approach in which the government's case rests entirely on information with no link to allegedly-abusive interrogation and the intermediate, and potentially more-common scenario, in which the case rests at least in part on information that is not the direct fruit of an allegedly-abusive interrogation but nonetheless was obtained with assistance from such fruits.