MIAMI — Pretrial hearings in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals have been delayed to address the mysterious disappearance of defense legal documents from Pentagon computers, military officials said on Thursday.

The defense lawyers said their confidential work documents began vanishing from Pentagon computers in February and that there was evidence their internal emails and internet searches had been monitored by third parties.

They want all the hearings in both death penalty cases halted until the issues have been satisfactorily addressed.

A weeklong hearing was scheduled to start on Monday in the case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who is charged with masterminding an attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors aboard the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000.

That has been pushed back to June 11, the judge overseeing the war crimes court at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base said in an order on Thursday.

Defense lawyers said they also would ask the judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, to delay a week of pretrial hearings set to begin on April 22 for five prisoners charged with plotting the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks.

Navy Commander Walter Ruiz, who represents 9/11 defendant Mustafa al Hawsawi, said "three to four weeks' worth of work is gone, vanished."

He said what appeared to be a computer folder of prosecution files had turned up on the defense lawyers' system, though none of them had opened the files.

The chief defense counsel for the tribunals, Colonel Karen Mayberry, ordered military and civilian defense lawyers on Wednesday night to stop using their government computers for sensitive information or drafts of their work.

"I'll be filing a hand-written motion very shortly to ask for an abatement of the proceedings," in the 9/11 case, said defense attorney James Connell, who represents defendant Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

In another case, system administrators were searching files at prosecutors' request and were able to access more than 500,000 defense files, including confidential attorney-client communications, the lawyers said.

That incident involved an appeal on behalf of Ibrahim al Qosi, a Sudanese prisoner who had finished his sentence at Guantanamo and gone home, they said.

Defense lawyers said their files began disappearing after a February hearing during which intelligence agents outside the courtroom cut the closed-circuit feed that was broadcasting the proceedings to spectators and journalists. The judge ordered technicians to dismantle the system that allowed them to do that.

During that hearing, the Guantanamo detention camp's legal advisor also disclosed that what appeared to be smoke alarms in the rooms where defense lawyers met with their clients were actually microphones. He said private attorney-clients conversations had not been monitored, a claim met with skepticism by defense lawyers.

Human Rights First, a longtime critic of the Guantanamo tribunals, called the latest disclosures "absolutely outrageous."

"This is just further evidence that the military commission system is a sham and that all terrorism trials should be held in real U.S. federal courts on U.S. soil, where the rules are clear, defendants' rights are respected and the verdicts will have credibility," said Daphne Eviatar, who has monitored the tribunals for the rights group.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

The last of the emails that the state of Alaska could recover from Sarah Palin's brief term as governor were released on Thursday.

Editor's note: Here's a link to msnbc.com's previous coverage of a release of Sarah Palin's public records, and our database where you can read those public documents. The Associated Press was apparently the only news organization to be notified by the state that new records were available. Here is the AP's report. Others that had requested them said they had not been informed of the release. They include Mother Jones magazine (which blogged about the odd release), CNN, The Washington Post, ABC News, and the Republican political activist Andrée McLeod, who said Thursday, "The culture of corruption continues unabated."

By Becky Bohrer
The Associated Press

JUNEAU, Alaska—In the final months before she resigned as Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin displayed growing frustration over deteriorating relationships with state lawmakers and their perceived efforts to "lame duck" her administration, along with outrage over ethics complaints that she felt frivolously targeted her and prompted her to write: "I can't take it anymore."

The details are included in more than 17,000 records released Thursday by state officials -- nearly 3 1/2 years after citizens and news organizations, including The Associated Press, first requested Palin's emails.

By the spring of 2009, the emails show, Palin was regularly butting heads with lawmakers of both parties over her absences from the Capitol and over her picks for vacancies in the state Senate and her own cabinet. The emails she sent to staff illustrate Palin's growing suspicion that those legislators were seeking to undermine her administration by harping on how often she was away from Juneau, the state capitol.

She asked her aides to tally how many days she was out of Alaska in 2008. The staff came up with 94 days, but 10 less if you count travel days when she was in the state part of the day, The absences included all of October and most of September while she was on the campaign trail as the GOP vice presidential candidate.

"It's unacceptable, and there must be push back on their attempts to lame duck this administration," Palin wrote to her top aides on April 9. "That's only going to get worse as they try to pull more bs and capitalize on me being out of the capitol building for 36 hours," she wrote aides.

Palin also asked her aides to see if they could hold certain legislators' "feet to the fire" and hold votes on her nominees. She wrote words of encouragement to Wayne Anthony Ross, her nominee for attorney general, telling him to "stay strong."

"Those who want to turn this into a kangaroo court will soon see you confirmed as Alaska's AG," Palin wrote.

Ross was not confirmed, the first ever cabinet level candidate rejected by the Alaska Legislature. Palin traveled to an anti-abortion rally in Indiana the day he was defeated.

Tim Crawford, treasurer of Sarah Palin's political action committee, encouraged everyone to read the emails. "They show a governor hard at work for her state," he said.

The emails are the last of her emails from her time as governor, according to Alaska state officials. Citizens and news organizations, including the AP, first requested Palin's emails in September 2008, as part of her vetting as the Republican vice presidential nominee. The state released a batch of the emails last June, a lag of nearly three years that was attributed to the sheer volume of the records and the flood of requests stemming from Palin's tenure.

The 24,199 pages of emails that were released last year left off in September 2008. When it became clear that the June release would not include all the emails from Palin's tenure last June, requests were then made for the remaining emails. Thursday's release includes 17,736 records, or 34,820 pages, generally spanning from October 2008 until Palin's resignation, in July 2009. Of those, 13,791 records were released without redactions, according to the governor's office. Another 965 documents were withheld.

Several media organizations, including msnbc.com, said they were not informed of Thursday's release.

Sharon Leighow, a spokeswoman for the current governor, Sean Parnell, said she was looking into why msnbc.com was not on the list.

Palin's frustration over a series of ethics complaints filed against her, one of the issues she cited when stepping down, emerges in a series of e-mails on March 24, 2009.

"These are the things that waste my time and money, and the state's time and money," she wrote to then-Lt. Gov. Parnell.

In an April 2009 email, she commiserated over a story indicating another ethics complaint was to be filed: "Unflippinbelievable... I'm sending this because you can relate to the bullcrap continuation of the hell these people put the family through," she wrote to Ivy Frye, an aide during the first part of her term, and to Frank Bailey.

Later that day, in an email to her husband and two top aides, on the issue, she said: "I can't take it anymore."

The first batch of emails released last June, before she announced she would not run for president, showed that Palin was angling for the vice presidential slot months before John McCain picked her to be his running mate. Those records produced no bombshells, while painting a picture of an image-conscious, driven leader, struggling with the gossip about her family and marriage, involved in the day-to-day duties of running the state and keeping tabs on the signature issues of her administration.

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