wanted to represent himself; he "rejected his appointed military lawyer, Navy Lt. William Kuebler, and said he wanted neither a military replacement nor a civilian defender." In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), the United States Supreme Court held that the executive branch did not have the authority to set up a separate system of military trials outside the civil and military justice systems, and that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) and military commissions were unconstitutional. That year, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, authorizing a separate system for prosecuting enemy combatants and responding to Court-identified issues. The act restricted the detainees from using habeas corpus and federal courts; all pending cases were stayed. On May 29, 2008, Ghassan Abdullah Ghazi al-Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi and Jabran al-Qahtani were charged separately before military commissions authorized under the 2006 act. On October 21, 2008, Susan J. Crawford, the official in charge of the Office of Military Commissions, announced that charges were dropped against al-Sharbi and four other detainees: Jabran al Qahtani, Sufyian Barhoumi, Binyam Mohamed, and Noor Uthman Muhammed. Carol J. Williams, writing in the Los Angeles Times, reported that all five men had been connected to Abu Zubaydah by his testimony. The CIA has acknowledged that Zubaydah is one of three high-value detainees who were interrogated at length under the technique known as "waterboarding", generally considered a form of torture, before the CIA transferred them to military custody in September 2006 at Guantanamo Bay. Evidence which Zubaydah gave under such coercive interrogation could not be used in court against other suspects. The men's attorneys expected that the five men would be re-charged within thirty days. They told Williams that: "... prosecutors called the move procedural," and attributed it to the resignation of fellow Prosecutor Darrel Vandeveld. He publicly announced his resignation on ethical grounds. Williams reported comments by Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, who represents several Guantanamo detainees. He speculated that the Prosecution's dropping of the charges, and plans to subsequently re-file charges was intended to counter and disarm the testimony Vandeveld was expected to offer, that the Prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence in relation to each of the men. Sleep deprivation On August 7, 2008, the Washington Post reported that the Guantanamo guards defied orders to discontinue the illegal practice of arbitrarily moving captives multiples times a day to deprive them of sleep, after it was banned