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Thread: Military Prosecutors Set To Open Major 9/11 Case

  1. #131
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    US military assigns Army colonel to judge trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
    Timing of move questioned as President-elect Barack Obama restates his vow to close Guantánamo prison camps

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008...sheik-mohammed

    Wednesday November 19 2008

    The US military has assigned an Army colonel to take over the coming war crimes trial of alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a sign that the Pentagon is plunging ahead with plans for military commissions of alleged 9/11 co-conspirators.

    Army Col Stephen R Henley replaces Marine Col Ralph Kohlmann, who at an earlier 9/11 hearing revealed he was retiring from active-duty service in April. He will join a legal clinic at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as a civil servant.

    Henley has been a military judge for 10 years and has a law degree from George Washington University. As an Army judge, he presided at the courts martial of Maryland soldiers accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Iraq. As a commissions judge, he is the only officer so far to exclude a confession on grounds it was derived from torture.

    The American Civil Liberties Union derided the timing of the assignment: a day after President-elect Barack Obama restated his vow to close Guantánamo prison camps in a post-election interview on CBS' 60 Minutes.

    ACLU executive director Anthony Romero called the timing "highly suspect and disturbing" and a bid "to sabotage President-elect Obama's plans by ramming through these cases while the new administration is making plans to dismantle the military commission system".

    War court spokesman Joe DellaVedova said there was nothing sinister about the timing or the selection of Henley by Kohlmann to replace him.

    "Retirements happen all the time in the military," said DellaVedova, a civilian who had been an Air Force public affairs major. He called the announcement, three weeks before the next 9/11 hearing at Guantánamo, "an effort to establish some continuity for the accused".

    At issue is what, if anything, a future Obama administration would use in place of military commissions, the special post-9/11 war court the Bush administration created to prosecute accused terrorists as war criminals.

    Obama has said that he wants terror suspects tried in criminal courts or, in some instances, by traditional military courts martial.

    The ACLU, which has mounted a defence fund for those accused in death penalty cases at Guantánamo, wants Obama to close the commissions by executive order on inauguration day and switch cases that should be prosecuted to traditional courts.

    The ACLU's John Adams Project funds seasoned civilian criminal defence attorneys working with Pentagon lawyers assigned to the five 9/11 suspects for whom the prosecution proposes military execution.

    Mohammed and four others allegedly financed, orchestrated and trained the September 11 hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon.

    The timing leaves Henley to decide some thorny pre-trial issues, among them what evidence might be heard about the treatment of the five men across years of secret CIA interrogation before their arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006.

    The spy agency has confirmed it used the waterboarding technique on Mohammed to extract al-Qaeda secrets.

    Also, still hanging is what to do about the mental health status of alleged co-conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who is being prescribed psychotropic drugs at a secret Guantánamo detention called Camp 7.

    In pretrial hearings, the two judges have displayed starkly different styles.

    Kohlmann is a sharp-tongued Marine who at the commission chambers allowed the accused terrorists to deliver monologues but displayed little patience for attorneys.

    On occasion, he has cut off an attorney's effort to argue a point with statements like: "Which part of no do you not understand?" or "Sit down".

    Henley has shown more patience, particularly at the pre-trial hearings of a young Afghan, Mohammed Jawad, in which he engaged in legal discussions with military defence attorneys.

    He also has excluded Jawad's Kabul confessions from his upcoming January trial. In a war court first, Henley ruled that an accused was tortured - notably through threats against his family - while he was interrogated at an Afghan police station into confessing that he threw a grenade in December 2002 which maimed two US soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.

    Henley's first 9/11 hearing is scheduled for December 8, when the Pentagon has plans to bring down five family members of those killed on September 11 to watch the proceedings.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  2. #132
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    Judge Orders Five Detainees Freed From Guantánamo

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/us...o.html?_r=2&em

    By WILLIAM GLABERSON
    Published: November 20, 2008

    In the first hearing on the government’s justification for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled Thursday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release.

    By reviewing government documents, court records and media reports, The Times was able to compile an approximate list of detainees currently at Guantánamo.

    The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington, also ruled that a sixth Algerian man was being lawfully detained because he had provided support to the terrorist group Al Qaeda.

    The case was an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, which critics have long argued swept up innocent men and low-level foot soldiers along with high-level and hardened terrorists.

    The six men are among a group of Guantánamo inmates who won a Supreme Court ruling that the detainees have constitutional rights and can seek release in federal court. The 5-4 decision said a 2006 law unconstitutionally stripped the prisoners of their right to contest their imprisonment in habeas corpus lawsuits.

    The hearings for the Algerian men, in which all of the evidence was heard in proceedings that were closed to the public, were the first in which the Justice Department presented its full justification for holding specific detainees since the Supreme Court ruling in June.

    Judge Leon, in a ruling from the bench, said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.

    “To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation,” he said. He directed that the five men be released “forthwith” and urged the government not to appeal.

    Judge Leon, who was appointed by President Bush, had been expected to be sympathetic to the government. In 2005, he ruled that the men had no habeas corpus rights.

    Lawyers said the decision was likely to be seen as a repudiation of the Bush administration’s effort to use the detention center at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a way to avoid scrutiny by American judges. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to close the prison.

    “The decision by Judge Leon lays bare the scandalous basis on which Guantánamo has been based — slim evidence of dubious quality,” said Zachary Katznelson, legal director at Reprieve, a British legal group that represents many of the detainees. “This is a tough, no-nonsense judge.”

    Because of the Bush administration’s claims that most of the evidence against the men was classified, Judge Leon ordered the entire case to be heard in a closed courtroom after brief opening statements on Nov. 5.

    The government argued that the six Algerians, who were residents of Bosnia when they were first detained in 2001, were planning to go to Afghanistan to fight the United States and that one of them was a member of Al Qaeda.

    The five men who were ordered freed on Thursday include Lakhdar Boumediene, for whom the landmark Supreme Court ruling in June was named. The one detainee Judge Leon found to be lawfully held, Bensayah Belkacem, has been described by intelligence agencies as a leading Al Qaeda operative in Bosnia.

    It was not immediately clear whether the government would appeal, but some lawyers said they considered an appeal likely.

    The case has become an example of the Bush administration’s pattern of changing strategy in its long legal war over Guantánamo as the courts have scrutinized the government’s justification for its detention policies in general and its reasons for holding individual detainees.

    In 2002, President Bush made the government’s allegations against the men a showcase of his administration’s approach to dealing with terrorists. He said in his State of the Union address that the six men had been planning a bomb attack on the United States Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Last month, however, Justice Department lawyers said they were no longer relying on those accusations to justify the men’s detention.

    The habeas corpus cases have moved slowly despite the Supreme Court decision that directed federal judges in Washington to act quickly after nearly seven years of detention for many of the 250 men still held in Guantánamo.

    Detainees’ lawyers said Thursday’s ruling by Judge Leon would be a signal to other judges that they should be skeptical of the government’s efforts to delay hearings.

    P. Sabin Willett, a lawyer for the Uighurs, said that Judge Leon’s decision “sends a powerful message to all the other judges to get these cases moving.”

    J. Wells Dixon, a detainees’ lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the ruling made clear that Guantánamo Bay had failed. But, he said, “Justice comes too late for these five men.”

    Earlier this week, the Justice Department filed legal motions seeking to stop more than 100 of the other Guantánamo habeas corpus cases from proceeding, a move that lawyers for detainees said was a government effort to avoid further court scrutiny.

    The Justice Department lawyers argued in motions filed Tuesday that there were flaws in the ground rules of other judges for the Guantánamo cases that would require the government to reveal classified evidence.

    Last month, another district court judge in Washington, Ricardo M. Urbina, ordered the release of 17 other detainees, all ethnic Uighurs from western China. The judge did not hold a hearing on the evidence in that case because the government conceded that the men were not enemy combatants.

    The Justice Department won a stay of Judge Urbina’s release order and is appealing. Arguments are scheduled for Monday in the United States Courts of Appeals in Washington.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  3. #133
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    Guantanamo judge rejects 'forced' confession

    http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Guantan..._11212008.html

    11/22/2008

    A US military judge in Guantanamo Bay has thrown out the US government's evidence against an Afghan detainee because it was obtained under coercion, a rights group said Friday.

    The decision came late Wednesday in a preliminary hearing in the trial of Mohammed Jawad, arrested in Kabul in 2002 as a teenager on charges of throwing a grenade that wounded two American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.

    A representative for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who was present at the hearing at the tribunal at the US military base in Cuba, revealed that Jawad's confession had been rejected as evidence in the case.

    "Colonel Stephen Henley held that evidence collected while Jawad was in US custody cannot be admitted in his trial" because the evidence was "gathered through coercive interrogations," the ACLU said in a press release.

    Accused of having committed "war crimes," Jawad, who is now about 23 years old, is set to face trial on January 5 before a military commission at the Guantanamo prison.

    "Previously, the government had told the judge that Jawad's alleged confessions were the centerpiece of its case against him," the ACLU said.

    "If the government continues to prosecute this case, it will only provide further evidence that the military commissions system is a sham aimed at obtaining convictions regardless of the facts or the law," said ACLU staff attorney Hina Shamsi.

    The lead prosecutor in Jawad's case, lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, quit in September due to "ethical concerns."
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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    Guantanamo ex-prosecutor slams system in interview

    http://www.canada.com/topics/news/wo...tml?id=1023681

    Agence France-Presse
    Published: Tuesday, December 02, 2008

    LONDON - Tribunals used to try suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp were defective, immoral and "sullied" the U.S. constitution, a former U.S. military prosecutor said in an interview Tuesday.

    Former Lieutenant-Colonel Darrel Vandeveld told the BBC in his first interview since resigning earlier this year that the way detainees were treated at the camp on Cuba was "appalling, wrong, unethical and finally, immoral".

    "I was convinced... that it was impossible to guarantee that they would get a fair trial," he told the British broadcaster.

    Vandeveld was a reservist called up as a military lawyer after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and served in Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

    In 2007, he became a prosecutor for the military commissions set up to try suspects in the US 'war on terror' who were being held at Guantanamo. He said he approached the job with enthusiasm and "zero doubts".

    When he arrived, however, he found the prosecutor's office in "disarray", and defence lawyers were not being given evidence that could help their clients - sometimes evidence that they had been "mistreated" to obtain a confession.

    Unable to share his doubts with friends and family, the devout Catholic emailed his concerns to peace activist and Jesuit priest Father John Dear. Dear replied telling him to quit.

    Vandeveld said he regarded that time as "the most anguished period of my life", but now had to speak out.

    "I know so many fighting men and women whose honours have been stained by the taint of Guantanamo, and they don't deserve that," he said.

    "So I'm here to tell the truth about Guantanamo and how it involves a few people... who have sullied America's military and who have sullied our constitution, and that is unacceptable. It makes me angry."

    In response, a Pentagon spokesman told the BBC: "We dispute Darrel Vandeveld's assertions and maintain the military commission process provides full and fair trials to accused unlawful enemy combatants who are charged with a variety of war crimes."

    The special tribunals were created to prosecute the alleged perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Comprised of a judge and a military jury, they bear little resemblance to the federal and court martial systems.

    Although U.S. president-elect Barack Obama has said he is eager to end the tribunals, what to do with the detainees housed at Guantanamo is one of the thorniest issues he will have to address early in his presidency.

    One of the suspects Vandeveld was prosecuting was Mohammed Jawad, who was arrested as a teenager in Kabul in 2002. He faces trial on Jan. 5, 2009.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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    Families of 9/11 victims seek answers at Gitmo

    http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...gv0HQD94SQ1400

    By MIKE MELIA – 1 day ago

    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The mothers of two men killed in the Sept. 11 attacks are traveling to Guantanamo Bay this weekend hoping to look into the eyes of the man who says he is responsible for the worst terrorist strike on U.S. soil.

    The two will be among those present next week as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the attacks' self-professed mastermind, and four co-defendants appear in one of the final sessions of war-crimes tribunals under outgoing President George W. Bush at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

    "I hope they stare us in the face and we stare back," said Maureen Santora, whose firefighter son Christopher was killed at the World Trade Center. "I want these folks to know it wasn't just two towers they knocked down. They have altered our lives permanently."

    The two mothers, separated from the al-Qaida chieftain by only a glass partition, want to size up an unrepentant defendant prone to anti-U.S. outbursts in the courtroom.

    "I'd like to take the measure of the man and his buddies, his ugly lieutenants, and see what kind of a man brags about planning the ugly events of Sept. 11, 2001," said Alice Hoagland, of Redwood Estates, California. Her son, Mark Bingham, is believed to be one of the passengers who fought hijackers on the United flight that crashed that day in rural Pennsylvania.

    Santora, a 63-year-old retired educator from Long Island City, N.Y., said she will scrutinize the men's behavior and mannerisms for clues to their motives. "Why does somebody have so much hate in their heart?" she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

    Santora and Hoagland were invited to Guantanamo through a new Pentagon lottery system. Five victims' relatives are now selected to observe each tribunal session along with one other family member of their choice. In the past, the Pentagon said family members could not attend because it was too difficult logistically to accommodate all who wanted to.

    Hoagland, a 59-year-old writer and speaker, said she hopes the defendants are spared the death penalty so they can "live out their miserable lives in prison."

    "I think they have demonstrated the very worst of humanity. They have much to do in the way of redemption," she told the AP.

    The family members will watch the proceedings from a gallery at the rear of the cavernous, high-security courtroom and will not be allowed to address the defendants.

    Relatives of about 30 other victims, mainly firefighters, have given Santora memorial cards that she plans to bring into court "to know their spirit is with us." She is traveling to Guantanamo with her husband, Alexander, a retired deputy fire chief in New York.

    Santora likes to think how her son, a history buff, would feel about her representing the victims at such a historic event.

    "It would have pleased him greatly," she said.

    The 10 spectators, chosen from a pool of about 100 applicants, will join prosecutors, defense lawyers and journalists for a flight Sunday from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington to the base at the southeastern tip of Cuba.

    A pretrial hearing also is scheduled Friday for Omar Khadr, a Toronto-born detainee accused of lobbing a grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan. His trial is slated for late January.

    But the election of Barack Obama has raised doubt over whether any more trials will be held at the U.S. base in Cuba. The president-elect has pledged to close the military prison, though he has not yet revealed how he will handle the specially designed tribunal system, which critics say lacks legitimacy because of political interference and rules that allow coerced and hearsay evidence.

    Human rights groups have called for Obama to move the prosecutions to U.S. federal courts.

    "Justice for the 9/11 victims would be better served by having fundamental due process assured in the federal system," said Sahr MuhammedAlly, a New York-based lawyer with Human Rights First.

    The U.S. has said it needed special military tribunals to protect classified evidence and its methods of gathering evidence in the war on terror.

    On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion seeking to prohibit the government from cutting off audio feeds when a prisoner testifies about past interrogations — and any alleged torture — during commission proceedings at Guantanamo's war court.

    Military prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Mohammed and his co-defendants on charges that they organized the attacks that killed 2,973 people in New York and Washington. The hearings next week will include arguments on several motions challenging the fairness of the tribunals.

    The trial is not expected to start before Bush leaves office.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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    Barack Obama storms the Guantánamo Bay torture chamber
    The 'terrorism trial of the decade’ begins on Monday in Guantánamo Bay – so why is the US President-Elect planning to derail it? Tim Shipman reports from Washington

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...e-chamber.html

    12/6/2008

    On Monday morning, a heavy-set man in thick spectacles will be led from a concrete cell, whose narrow-slit window overlooks the Caribbean, by soldiers whose name tags have been removed from their uniforms and replaced with a Velcro strip reading: “I don’t know”.

    He will be taken to a maximum-security courtroom to sit with four co-defendants 30 ft from a glass wall — all that will separate him from 10 families who lost loved ones in the terrorist atrocities for which he has claimed credit.

    The moment marks the start of five days of trial hearings against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-styled architect of the September 11 attacks and one-time number three in the al-Qaeda hierarchy. The guards at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, scene of the military tribunal, will be anonymous, to prevent reprisal attacks on their families.

    The KSM trial — as its primary defendant is known in security circles — ought to be a moment of catharsis for America. It will be pregnant with meaning for the Bush administration, which will have just 43 days left in power; for President-Elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the detention camp; and for Alice Hoagland, who will sit behind the glass screen looking at the man responsible for the death of her son, Mark Bingham. He died on United Airlines Flight 93, which plunged into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers tried to take back the hijacked aircraft.

    But what is being dubbed “the terrorism trial of the decade” could be in vain if Mr Obama tears up the laws under which it is being conducted.

    The US Supreme Court ruled in June that the detainees have a right to go before federal judges, but officials in the Bush administration pushed to have Guantánamo’s most notorious captives tried before the President leaves the White House next month.

    Lt-Col Darrel Vandeveld, a former Guantánamo prosecutor who resigned over what he calls a culture of secrecy and mismanagement at the base, said: “It’s clear that civilians running the commissions wanted to charge the 9/11 defendants to meet an arbitrary deadline.They wanted to rush what they viewed as the 'worst of the worst’ through the system, regardless of the evidence or whether it had been obtained by waterboarding or other forms of torture.”

    KSM is one of three detainees the CIA admits to waterboarding, an “enhanced interrogation” technique that simulates drowning.

    Clive Stafford Smith, the lawyer representing the former British resident Binyam Mohamed, awaiting trial in Guantánamo, is dismissive of the KSM trial: “This is just a PR exercise. Nothing will come of it. It will all be shut down before the trial is completed.” Everything said in the courtroom will be broadcast to the watching press and families on a 20-second delay, so that classified material on their treatment can be muted.

    The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that, in conversations with Western diplomats, Mr Obama’s senior aides have made clear that he will announce the closure of the Guantánamo Bay facility and an end to torture as soon as he is sworn in, perhaps in his inauguration speech. He is also planning a speech in a Muslim city, probably Cairo, during his first 100 days to help repair relations with the Islamic world.

    Lt-Col Vandeveld said: “We should end the shame of Guantánamo now, close it down. The handful of bona fide terrorists, who have been held at Guantánamo for as long as seven years, should be tried in a civilian court.”

    But the status of the 242 remaining Guantánamo detainees is such that it could take months to arrange for secure detention facilities in the US and to return other prisoners to their countries of origin, most of whom do not want them back.

    One Washington diplomat said: “Obama will start things off pretty fast. We’re expecting a very early announcement. There will be a road map to closure and there will be some proper process of law. But it won’t shut down immediately. We recognise that there are real security threats with some of those left.”

    The remaining detainees include 14 high-value captives, plus members of the so-called Dirty Thirty, who include bodyguards of Osama bin Laden caught fleeing to Pakistan in 2001.

    A study by the Weekly Standard magazine of those still held found that of the 242 prisoners, 174 either ran or attended terrorist training camps, 146 have either operated or stayed in an al-Qaeda or Taliban guesthouse, 116 have links to jihadist recruiting networks, and 112 participated in hostilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

    KSM’s co-defendants include Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who are all accused of aiding and training the hijackers. Each is charged with 2,973 counts of murder, one for each person killed on September 11.

    KSM is the most hated “important” terrorist in US custody. The 9/11 Commission report labelled him the “principal architect of the attacks”. Without him, there might well have been no 9/11 or “war on terror”.

    Born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents, he moved to the US as a teenager and earned a degree in mechanical engineering at a university in North Carolina. After fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, he funded his nephew Ramzi Yousef’s 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, as well as the abortive Operation Bojinka, a plot to explode a dozen airliners over the Pacific.

    The CIA says he also confessed to beheading the journalist Daniel Pearl.Captured in Pakistan in 2003 and sent to Guantánamo in 2006, he has been fingered as the mastermind of the show-bomb plot that ensnared Briton Richard Reid and was indirectly implicated in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings.

    But for all that, KSM has subsequently retracted his confessions, claiming translators “put many words in my mouth” and accusing his captors of torture.

    His trial is a test, in part, of whether torture can ever be an effective or ethical part of the armoury of a Western nation. Lt-Col Vandeveld is clear that it cannot. “Torture may result in reliable information — no question about that. But is torture reconcilable with our basic humanity or with America’s desire to be an example to the rest of the world? The answer is no. Torture, however you define it, is wrong, appalling, immoral.”

    As someone who saw the system from the inside, he believes that the military tribunals have also been incompetently handled, something that might give pause to their more gung-ho supporters.

    He calls the handling of the first military commission trial, earlier this year, which saw Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan jailed for just six months, after his five years of time already served, as “incompetent to the point of disbelief”.

    “The supervisory prosecutor should have been summarily relieved of command, but I suspect that none of the military services could find anyone willing to replace him.”

    Lt-Col Vandeveld says most military lawyers dragooned into serving at the base were “unmotivated, untrained and unsuitable”, deficiencies he believes “created a stain on American military honour and America’s standing in the world”.

    But his most serious allegations are that key evidence has never been presented to prosecutors, let alone defence counsel for the detainees (who are in any case only allowed to see unclassified summaries of intelligence evidence gathered against their clients).

    Lt-Col Vandeveld recalls one case. “I was handed a file that supposedly contained every document, every witness statement, every lab report. But when I started to go through the disk of information there were huge gaps. As a career prosecutor, I found that astonishing and disturbing.”

    These claims have huge implications for Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian who moved to the UK in the 1990s and is now held in Guantánamo. He is accused of meeting senior al-Qaeda figures in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he was allegedly tasked with attacking targets in the US. The British Government wants him to stand trial in the UK.

    Mr Mohamed says that he was tortured in a secret “dark prison” in Afghanistan and his genitals attacked with razor blades after he was interrogated in Morocco.

    A US judge has ruled that Defence Secretary Robert Gates must sign an affidavit by Thursday swearing that no exculpatory evidence has been withheld from his defence team.

    Mr Stafford Smith, Mr Mohammed’s lawyer, said: “The material they’ve shown doesn’t breathe one word about where Binyam was for two years.” He believes Mr Gates is vulnerable to a charge of perjury if he signs such a document.

    In a letter to Mr Gates, seen by the The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Stafford Smith writes: “The government has at no point in this case even acknowledged that Mr Mohamed was rendered by the US to Morocco on July 21, 2002, or that he was held there for 18 months, or that he was abused there.

    “It pains me to have to say that the government continues to ignore its own obligations, and is risking sanctions.”

    This is the mess that Barack Obama is inheriting. By waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, US officials may have made it impossible to put him on trial in a civil court, but US intelligence officials insist that he also gave up vital information that helped them thwart future atrocities and save lives.

    A former CIA officer close to the National Security Council said: “The Bush people have been spelling this out real clear for the transition team. They’re saying: 'You want to close Gitmo [Guantánamo], fine, but make damn sure you know what you’re going to do with these people before you do.’ If you will only put them on trial after the fact, it’s harder to prevent attacks.”

    Mr Obama’s team is divided between those who want a rigid adherence to the rule of law and those who believe the terrorist suspects who can be neither released or tried must have a third legal category of their own.

    The choice he makes may determine whether his presidency, like that of George W. Bush, is dominated by the war that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed unleashed in 2001.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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    9/11 suspects ask to make 'confessions' at Gitmo

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081208/...o_sept11_trial

    (Gold9472: Sounds to me like someone that is repeatedly "interrogated" to the point of being broken, and wants to be put to death.)

    12/8/2008

    GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants told a military judge Monday they want to immediately confess at their war-crimes tribunal, setting up likely guilty pleas and their possible executions.

    The five said they decided on Nov. 4, the day President-elect Barack Obama was elected to the White House, to abandon all defenses against the capital charges. It was as if they wanted to rush toward convictions before the inauguration of Obama, who has vowed to end the war-crimes trials and close Guantanamo.

    Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others said they would postpone entering pleas until the military determines their two co-defendants are mentally competent. "We want everyone to plead together," he said.

    Mohammed and another defendant have said they would welcome execution as a path to martyrdom, but the announcement came as a shock to some of the victims' families.

    A select group of relatives of the 2,973 people killed on Sept. 11, 2001 were able to see the proceedings in person. Maureen Santora, of Long Island City, N.Y., whose son Christopher died responding to the World Trade Center attacks, wore a black top and black pants and clutched a photo of him in his firefighter uniform.

    Alice Hoagland, of Redwood Estates, California, was there for her son Mark Bingham, who is believed to be one of the passengers who fought hijackers on United Flight 93 before it crashed in rural Pennsylvania. She said the defendants' announcement was "like a real bombshell to me."

    She told reporters during a break that she hoped Obama, "an even-minded and just man," would ensure the five alleged mass murderers are punished. She did not elaborate. She said she welcomed the opportunity to see the trial because it was a "historic" moment. But she said it did not heal the loss of her son.

    "I do not seek closure in my life," she said as she blinked back tears.

    Nine family members came to Guantanamo for the pretrial hearing but it was not immediately clear if all attended.

    In a letter the judge read aloud in court, the five defendants said they "request an immediate hearing session to announce our confessions."

    The judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, asked all five if they were prepared to enter a plea, and all five said yes. But Henley said competency hearings for two of the detainees precluded them from immediately filing pleas.

    The letter implies they want to plead guilty, but does not specify whether they will admit to any specific charges. It also says they wish to drop all previous defense motions.

    Mohammed, who has already told interrogators he was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, also said Monday that he has no faith in the judge, his Pentagon-appointed lawyers or President George W. Bush.

    Sporting a chest-length gray beard, Mohammed said in English: "I don't trust you."

    He also dismissed one of his standby military attorneys because he had served in Iraq.

    The five defendants calmly passed notes between each other and consulted laptops at their individual defense tables. One observer who lost his parents in Sept. 11 told reporters he supports the military commissions, and criticized the defendants for not taking it seriously.

    "The U.S. is doing its best to prove to the world that this is a fair proceeding," said Hamilton Peterson of Bethesda, Md., whose parents Donald and Jean were on United Flight 93. "It was stunning to see today how not only do the defendants comprehend their extensive rights ... they are explicitly asking the court to hurry up because they are bored with the due process they are receiving."

    The first U.S. war-crimes trials since World War II are teetering on the edge of extinction. Obama opposes the military commissions — as the Guantanamo trials are called — and has pledged to close the detention center holding some 250 men soon after taking office next month.

    Even if a trial were held, it is all but certain none would begin before Obama takes office on Jan. 20. Still, the U.S. military is pressing forward with the case until it receives orders to the contrary.

    "We serve the sitting president and will continue to do so until President-elect Obama takes office," said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.

    Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch also observed the hearing. She urged Obama to try terror suspects in federal court "where attention will focus on the defendants' alleged crimes rather than the unfairness of the commissions."

    The military commissions have netted three convictions, but have been widely criticized for allowing statements obtained through harsh interrogations and hearsay to be admitted as evidence.

    The victims' family members watched from a gallery at the rear of the cavernous, high-security courtroom on the U.S. Navy base, and were not allowed to address the defendants.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  8. #138
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    Coercion and Military Law
    Does a Plea After Torture Stand?

    http://washingtonindependent.com/213...d-military-law

    By Spencer Ackerman 12/8/08 6:30 PM

    Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks whom the U.S. tortured, attempted to plead guilty on Monday four co-defendants to their roles in the 2001 conspiracy that killed almost 3,000 Americans. Civil libertarians wondered whether his proferred plea would be compromised by the fact of his torture and the dubious constitutionality of the military tribunals hearing the cases.

    The senior counterterrorism adviser for Human Rights Watch, Jennifer Daskal, said in a statement issued by the organization that the attempted pleas by Mohammed and the other co-defendants should not be accepted before an investigation. “In light of the men’s severe mistreatment and torture, the judge should require a full and thorough factual inquiry to determine whether or not these pleas are voluntary,” said Daskal, who is at Guantanamo Bay observing the proceedings.

    According to the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which governs the tribunals, evidence obtained through coercive means is inadmissible. “A statement obtained by use of torture shall not be admissible in a military commission,” states Sec. 948r, subsection B. Subsequent sections of the act, however, permits a judge to determine the admissibility of certain evidence “in which the degree of coercion is disputed,” particularly in the case of evidence obtained before passage of a 2005 law meant to safeguard the human rights of detainees.

    Stacy Sullivan, another counterterrorism adviser with Human Rights Watch, said the Military Commissions Act is unclear on what happens if a guilty plea is allegedly coerced from a detainee. “It’s not clear whether a judge can accept the plea or if there has to be a jury” empaneled to accept it, she said. If the act requires the empanelment of a jury for a pretrial hearing, it would create a new complication to a process fraught with difficulty since its inception.

    U.S. Army Col. Steven Hendley, the presiding judge in the case, said he would hold a separate hearing to determine whether he can, in fact, accept the pleas, Sullivan said.

    Pakistani forces captured Mohammed, one of Al Qaeda’s most important operatives, in March 2003 in Rawalpindi. The CIA took custody of him shortly thereafter and placed him in an undisclosed location to interrogate him outside U.S. law and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors prisoners of war and detainees worldwide. In testimony to the Senate intelligence committee in February, Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, confirmed that CIA interrogators waterboarded Mohammed, meaning they forced water into his nostrils and mouth to restrict his breathing in an attempt to coerce Mohammed into answering their questions. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. considered the interrogation method to be uncontroversially felonious.

    Mohammed was moved to Guantanamo Bay in Sept. 2006. It is unknown what sort of treatment he has received from interrogators or jailers after the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act.

    The pleas appear to be the result of frustration over the fairness of the commissions process. “All of you are paid by the U.S. government. I’m not trusting any American,” Mohammed told the tribunal, according to The New York Times. McClatchy reported that the five detainees — Mohammed, his nephew Ammar al Baluchi, his deputy Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Al Qaeda trainer Walid bin Attash and Saudi detainee Mustafa al-Hawsawi — crafted their joint pleading during a rare meeting Nov. 4 that was sanctioned by Guantanamo Bay officials. Later Monday, Mohammed, al-Baluchi and bin Attash abruptly announced they would postpone entering their pleas until the competency of bin al-Shibh and al-Hawsawi to plead guilty — something Hendley questioned that morning — could be determined.

    Sullivan said that basic circumstances of the military commissions give reason to suspect that the confessions are coerced — coerced either by the administration or by Mohammed. “These guys have been subjected to seven years of detention, much in secret CIA detention facilities,” Sullivan said. “We know they’ve been seriously abused and tortured. If these guys were before a real judicial process, not one that’s made up and fundamentally unfair, there would be a full hearing into what kind torture and abuse went on and whether [the pleadings] are voluntary.” She pointed out that only after Mohammed announced his refusal to cooperate with the commissions did his four co-defendants refuse their defense counsel, raising the specter of whether Mohammed coerced their pleadings.

    Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, blasted the commissions from Guantanamo Bay, where he is observing the tribunals. “No one should be surprised that a system that allows for serial torture and abuse and holds detainees for years without charging them or granting them access to attorneys has led the defendants to capitulate and seek to plead guilty,” Romero said in a statement released by the ACLU. “Anyone who believes that this is a victory for American justice is sadly mistaken. History will show that any guilty pleas in these proceedings were the result of an inhumane, unjust process designed to achieve a foregone conclusion.”

    It is unclear why Mohammed and his accomplices pleaded guilty. The U.S. has signaled its attention to seek the death penalty for all five defendants in the 9/11 conspiracy case, and so one explanation is that they are daring the U.S. to put them to death, a gambit designed to grant them the exalted status of “martyr” in some extremist circles. Another is that some measure of coercion compelled the pleadings.

    Aitan Goelman, a former federal prosecutor for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings, said he was unsurprised by the confessions given the detainees’ evident pride at having pulled off the attacks. “It’s not really an adversarial process if both sides are intent on proving the same thing,” Goelman said, adding that despite the “unprecedented nature” of the military commissions it was unclear to him how the pleadings could have been coerced.

    The commissions have been fraught with controversy from the beginning. Several military lawyers have quit or sought reassignment from the commissions out of concerns over their basic fairness. “The military commissions are fundamentally at odds with American ideals of fairness, due process, the rule of law and justice,” said U.S. Air Force Reserve Maj. J.D. Frakt, a legal defense counsel at Guantanamo. He made his remarks in a video released Monday by the ACLU to pressure President-elect Barack Obama to keep his stated promise of closing Guantanamo Bay.

    Nor was it clear that the confessions represented a moment of closure for families of the victims of 9/11. Reached on Monday afternoon, Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband Ronald died in the World Trade Center, said she had not heard of the pleadings and wanted to know whether the administration gave Mohammed anything in return for his admission of guilt. She did, however, say that she hoped any information about the attacks that remains classified pending Mohammed’s trial “would be swiftly released.”

    Sullivan blasted the commissions as inadequate to heal the U.S.’ psychic wounds from 9/11. “When you have a confession in a process that has lost all its integrity [and] that no one believes in, the confession doesn’t have any meaning,” she said. “If we had a guilty plea in a judicial process that was real, then we’d be welcoming the guilty plea. But before a sham, that’s not very meaningful.”
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  9. #139
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    Turley: 'Strange alliance' between Bush and alleged 9/11 mastermind

    http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Turley..._and_1209.html

    David Edwards and Muriel Kane
    12/8/2008

    Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often described as the mastermind of 9/11, and four other prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay told a military judge on Monday that they wish to plead guilty to all charges.

    Law professor Jonathan Turley sees this confession as a "strange alliance" between Mohammed and George W. Bush, where both men get what they want -- martyrdom in Mohammed's case and vindication in Bush's -- and President-elect Barack Obama is stuck in the middle with a dilemma on his hands.

    Mohammed and the other accused terrorists first announced their plan to confess on November 4, which -- as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow pointed out in introducing Turley -- was "the day America elected a president who is expected to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and is expected to close the military tribunal system."

    "Could it be that they want to beat the clock?" Maddow asked. "They want to make sure they are convicted, and probably executed, under Bush's tribunal system because that feels more like martyrdom to them than risking going into an actual non-kangaroo court trial in a real legal system?"

    "What Khalid Sheikh Mohammed just did is to hand George Bush a considerable victory," Turley replied. "We were very close in his case to addressing the fact that he was tortured and ... that his case was put in the spotlight on the gross unfairness of the Bush tribunal system. And he essentially took all that off the table and saved the Bush administration the need to answer to those charges."

    "So the result is rather strange for a mastermind," Turley continued. "He's probably a certifiable moron, because what he's doing is he's shifting this over to the death penalty question. He's not likely to be executed under George Bush. The person that most supports what he did is likely George Bush and you have the strange alliance between Sheikh Mohammed and George W. Bush and Barack Obama is the guy in the middle."

    Turley believes that Mohammed's guilty plea will be accepted but that because death penalty hearings take time, "it's unlikely that he would be sentenced -- and certainly very unlikely to be executed -- before there is a President Obama in the White House.

    "But then [Obama's] going to have a dilemma," Turley explained, "because at that point he would have to execute someone under the Bush tribunal system. The alternative, if [Mohammed] isn't sentenced at that point -- and the one that I think President Obama should do -- would be to force him into the federal court, have him reindicted ... and have him sentenced under a real court and a real judge."

    Turley concluded, however, that ultimately Mohammed will probably get the death penalty he's seeking, because "it's likely that if he wants to be a martyr, he's going to find a lot of people who want to help him along."

    This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Dec. 8, 2008.

    Video At Source
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  10. #140
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    Five 9/11 Suspects Offer to Confess
    But Proposal Is Pulled Over Death Penalty Issue

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...120801087.html

    GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Dec. 8 -- Five of the men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said Monday that they wanted to plead guilty to murder and war crimes but withdrew the offer when a military judge raised questions about whether it would prevent them from fulfilling their desire to receive the death penalty.

    "Are you saying if we plead guilty we will not be able to be sentenced to death?" Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed operational mastermind of the attacks, asked at a pretrial hearing here.

    The seesaw proceedings Monday raised and then postponed the prospect of a conviction in a case that has become the centerpiece of the system of military justice created by the Bush administration. A conviction would have capped a seven-year quest for justice after the 2001 attacks, but the delay in entering pleas will probably extend the process beyond the end of the Bush presidency.

    The willingness of the defendants to "announce our confessions and plea in full," according to a document they sent to the judge in the case, Army Col. Stephen Henley, potentially bestows some hard decisions on the incoming administration. President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, but he has not indicated whether he will retain the military commissions that may be close to securing the death penalty for suspects in the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

    If the judge ultimately accepts guilty pleas, the ability of the Obama administration to transfer the case to federal court -- a desire expressed by some Obama advisers -- might be constrained, said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. That could mean the new administration may have to oversee an execution resulting from a process that many Obama supporters and legal advisers regard as deeply flawed.

    A guilty plea, however, could shield the Obama administration from what some legal experts view as potentially hazardous proceedings in federal court, where evidence obtained by torture or coercive interrogation would not be admitted. CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, an interrogation technique in which a prisoner is restrained as water is poured over his mouth, causing a drowning sensation.

    Although legal analysts say Mohammed and his co-conspirators would probably be convicted of terrorist offenses, the ability to obtain a capital conviction may have been undermined by the use of practices that have been criticized as torture.

    "It is absurd to accept a guilty plea from people who were tortured and waterboarded," said Romero, who is observing the proceedings. He said in an interview that the Obama administration should clearly signal that it intends to abolish the military commissions as well as the detention system, so the judge and other Pentagon officials will not move forward with the proceeding. The Obama team declined to comment Monday.

    Offering to plead guilty along with Mohammed were Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Tawfiq bin Attash and Ammar al-Baluchi, also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. Baluchi is a nephew of Mohammed. "Our success is the greatest praise of the Lord," Mohammed and the four others wrote of the attacks in a document they sent to Henley last month.

    Binalshibh and Hawsawi have not yet been judged competent to represent themselves, and Mohammed and the two others said they would defer a decision on a guilty plea until all five could act together. But the motivation behind withdrawing the plea offer appears to be the prospect of execution, lawyers here said. Mohammed has expressed a desire to die as a martyr, yet Henley questioned whether a death sentence is permissible without a verdict by a military jury.

    The Pentagon, in announcing formal charges against the five in May, said each was accused of "conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, terrorism and providing material support for terrorism."

    "We all five have reached an agreement to request from the commission an immediate hearing session in order to announce our confessions," the defendants said in their letter, parts of which Henley read aloud Monday. They said they were not under "any kind of pressure, threat, intimidations or promise from any party." (Gold9472: Interesting thing to say.)

    The five wrote the note Nov. 4 after meeting here that day to plot legal strategy, the court heard. The men, who are being held at a secret facility on the military base here, were allowed to meet together for at least 27 hours in recent weeks, a prosecutor said.

    Outside the courtroom, the defendants' civilian attorneys, who were organized by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said they had considered walking out on the proceeding if the judge accepted guilty pleas. "This show trial is nothing more than an effort to blackmail" Obama and limit his options, said Tom Durkin, a civilian attorney for Binalshibh.

    Prosecutors rejected any suggestion that there was a politically motivated rush to justice.

    "There are some decisions that are unique to the accused; the first of them is how he pleads," said Army Col. Lawrence Morris, chief military prosecutor. "The government has nothing to do with that decision."

    Attending the Guantanamo Bay proceedings for the first time were relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. The Defense Department chose the relatives of five victims by lottery and arranged for them to travel to the U.S. naval base on the eastern tip of Cuba, a Pentagon spokesman said. "It's clear to me they know what they did and they are willing and want to plead guilty," said Hamilton Peterson of Bethesda, who lost his father and stepmother on United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. "I think [Obama] will come to the realization that this is a very appropriate and fair venue."

    The families were divided on the death penalty. Peterson and others said it was appropriate. But Alice Hoagland, who lost her son Mark Bingham on United Flight 93, said the defendants "do not deserve to be dealt with as martyrs."

    Henley asked three of the defendants representing themselves -- Mohammed, Attash and Baluchi -- whether they were willing to enter guilty pleas. All said Monday morning that they were ready to do so.

    Henley said he would not be able to accept pleas from Binalshibh and Hawsawi because the court has yet to hold hearings on whether they are mentally competent to represent themselves. An attorney for Binalshibh, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, objected to filing the Nov. 4 document on behalf of her client, saying he had "been permitted to go to this meeting" and others "without notice to me."

    When the court resumed after a late-morning break, Mohammed, joined by Attash and Baluchi, changed tack and said he would not enter a plea until a decision was made on Binalshibh and Hawsawi. Lawyers had told them during the break that a plea could mean that they might not receive the death sentence and that it could cut off their two co-conspirators, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

    "I want to postpone pleas until decision is made about the other brothers," Mohammed said.

    The military court was told in an earlier hearing that Binalshibh, an alleged liaison between the hijackers and al-Qaeda's leadership, is being administered psychotropic drugs. And an attorney for Hawsawi, a Saudi and alleged financier of the attacks, said Monday that he had requested a mental competency hearing for his client.

    Anticipating future pleas, Henley said Monday that he wanted a briefing from the prosecution and a defense response by Jan. 4 on whether he could accept guilty pleas in a death penalty case under the language of the military commissions statutes, which suggest that a death penalty could arise only from a decision by a military jury.

    "The fact that the judge and the prosecution and the defense clearly don't know the consequences of a guilty plea shows the sorry state of these commissions," said Diane Marie Amann, a professor at the University of California at Davis, who is observing the proceedings here for the National Institute of Military Justice.

    The prospect of a guilty plea and a possible death sentence would represent a major victory for the Bush administration, which had given up on bringing Mohammed and the others to trial before leaving office Jan. 20. In the seven years since the Guantanamo Bay detention camp opened, only three people have been convicted, one as a result of a plea agreement. Two of those found guilty have been returned home. None of the "high-value" detainees transferred from CIA custody to Guantanamo in 2006 has gone to trial.

    Human rights groups said the judge should hold a full hearing to determine that any pleas are free from coercion. "In light of the men's severe mistreatment, the judge should require a full and thorough factual inquiry to determine whether or not these pleas are voluntary," said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. Daskal also said Mohammed's possible influence over the others should be explored.

    Baluchi, a Pakistani accused of having been a key lieutenant of Mohammed, told a military court this year that he was an ordinary businessman who had no knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot. And at a hearing in June, Army Maj. Jon Jackson, the military lawyer for Hawsawi, said his client was subjected to "intimidation by the co-accused" during courtroom conversations.

    But the defendants insisted Monday that there was no coercion. "All of these decisions are undertaken by us without any pressure or influence by Khalid Sheik," Baluchi told the judge Monday.

    Mohammed, born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents, was captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and held in secret CIA prisons for three years before President Bush ordered the transfer of 14 high-value detainees to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006 (Gold9472: After a fierce battle to have them moved there). Mohammed told a military hearing in March that he planned the attacks. "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z," Mohammed said.

    On Monday, Mohammed injected humor into his statements. Citing delays in getting documents from the defendants to the judge, he asked whether the commissions are "using carrier pigeons."

    In a final outburst as court ended Monday evening, Binalshibh, speaking in Arabic, said that because it is a Muslim feast day, he wanted "to send my greetings to Osama bin Laden and reaffirm my allegiance. I hope the jihad will continue and strike the heart of America with all kinds of weapons of mass destruction."
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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