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Thread: Key 9/11 Suspect To Be Tried In New York

  1. #91
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    Administration 'flexible' on 9/11 trial venue

    http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...hvxwgD9DSHIF00

    (AP) – 3 hours ago

    WASHINGTON — The Obama administration prefers a civilian trial for the alleged 9/11 mastermind, but says that in the face of public and political opposition it must be open to a military tribunal.

    In an interview published Monday in The New York Times, Attorney General Eric Holder said, "I have to be more forceful in advocating for why I believe these are trials that should be held on the civilian side."

    However, Holder did not rule out a military trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying, "You have to be flexible."

    Vice President Joe Biden defended the White House from critics of its approach to prosecuting accused terrorists, saying in interviews aired Sunday that it is not yet clear where Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 suspects held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be tried.

    However, Biden said he believes Mohammed will be found guilty regardless of the venue.

    President Barack Obama will make the final decision about the trial, Biden said.

    Republicans and some Democrats argue that terrorists should be treated not as criminals but as enemy combatants and tried by military commission.

    "These policies are ill-conceived and they need to stop and start over," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

    Graham said he favors closing the jail at Guantanamo Bay because its existence helps recruit terrorists to al-Qaida. But he said that treating terrorists as criminals to be tried in civilian courts "is a huge mistake that will come back to haunt us."

    Graham also said he thinks Obama should replace John Brennan, the president's counterterrorism adviser. Brennan on Saturday said that the rate of former Guantanamo inmates engaging in extremist or militant behavior — roughly one in five — "isn't that bad" compared to recidivism rates for U.S. prisoners of around 50 percent.

    "Do you want someone in charge of counterterrorism who finds a 20 percent return-to-the-fight rate is acceptable? He has lost my confidence, and it's the best evidence yet how disconnected this administration has come from the fact that we're at war," Graham said.

    Obama national security adviser James Jones, while not defending Brennan's statement, said Sunday the counterterrorism adviser does his job well and that the White House National Security Council is fortunate to have him.

    Holder announced last year that Mohammed's trial would take place in federal court in New York City. City officials later opposed the idea because of costs, security and logistical concerns, and some senators are trying to stop any Guantanamo detainees from being brought to the United States for a civilian trial.

    Jones said Holder is heading a review into the matter and will advise Obama on the course to take.

    Biden appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS' "Face the Nation." Jones appeared on "Fox News Sunday" and CNN's "State of the Union." Graham appeared on "Fox News Sunday."
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  2. #92
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    Liz Cheney: Civil terror trials led to 9/11

    http://rawstory.com/2010/02/liz-chen...rials-led-911/

    By David Edwards and Gavin Dahl
    Sunday, February 14th, 2010 -- 4:37 pm

    Liz Cheney must have forgotten about the presidential daily briefing ignored by Condoleeza Rice and the Bush administration before 9/11, that said Osama bin Laden was determined to strike within the US.

    The daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney said today on Fox that she believes military tribunals, instead of civilian trials, following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, would have produced intelligence that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

    "What you have is a situation where unquestionably we did go through a period in this nation's history where we dealt with terrorism as a law enforcement matter," Cheney explained to Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.

    "As Attorney General (Michael) Mukasey has pointed out recently, when we prosecuted and successfully convicted people after the '93 World Trade Center bombing, after the East African bombing, what it got us was 9/11 and 3,000 dead Americans."

    Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan said this week that 20% recidivism of released Guantanamo detainees is "not that bad." She called his remarks "a diversion."

    The discussion was centered on Brennan's accusation that critics of Obama were fear-mongering for political effect.

    "So the notion that, well, the Bush administration did this, I find it perplexing as a political argument to hear that from this administration," said Cheney, a former State Department official. "I think they're confusing the facts and the law with respect to many of those terrorists. But it's not surprising because there's a level of incompetence that you're seeing from people like Brennan and others that scares the American people. So I'm not surprised they're trying to divert attention to something else."

    In other words, Liz Cheney says it isn't fear-mongering because the American people are scared by Brennan, not Republican histrionics. And the 9/11 attacks could have been avoided, if only the American justice system could have been further bent to the whims of a security-minded government.

    She is sounding more and more like her father.

    This video is from Fox's Fox News Sunday, broadcast Feb. 14, 2010.

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


  3. #93
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    Attorney General Eric Holder: 9/11 terror trial in New York City is still on the table

    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_c...the_table.html

    BY Kenneth R. Bazinet
    DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
    Tuesday, February 23rd 2010, 4:00 AM

    WASHINGTON - Attorney General Eric Holder said the Najibullah Zazi case shows his department can handle terrorists - a hint he'd still like to prosecute the 9/11 thugs in a civilian court.

    "This demonstrates that our federal civilian criminal justice system has the ability to incapacitate terrorists, has the ability to gain intelligence from those terrorists and is a valuable tool in our fight against terrorism," Holder said at news conference after Zazi's guilty plea.

    Holder has faced Republican fire for dealing with the underwear bomber airliner plot as a civilian case and for his decision, now being reconsidered, to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four henchmen in lower Manhattan.

    A resolution of where to try Mohammed is expected "relatively soon," Holder said. But a Manhattan trial - strongly opposed by New York officials - remains in play, he added.

    Under pressure from congressional critics, the Justice Department is also considering sending Mohammed to trial before a military tribunal.

    Holder's comments came a few hours after Gov. Paterson lobbied administration officials against holding the trial in Manhattan.

    "We don't disagree with the way the White House wants to hold the trial. We just tried to point out to the White House that New York is a very vulnerable place," Paterson told the Daily News.

    Later, Paterson told CNN it would be "more appropriate" to move the trial upstate, mentioning West Point and Newburgh as alternatives.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  4. #94
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    9/11 Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be Tried by Military Commission
    Some Sept. 11 Suspects Were to Have Been Tried in New York City

    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/911-m...ry?id=13291750

    By JASON RYAN and HUMA KHAN
    April 4, 2011

    Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and four co-conspirators will be tried in a military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Department of Justice officials said today.

    Mohammed was to have been tried in New York City, but city officials strongly objected to the move and Congress refused to appropriate funds to house Guantanamo inmates on mainland United States and to provide funds for a trial of extraordinary expense.

    New York City projected it would cost more than $400 million to provide security for the pre-trial preparation and trial of the suspects in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It would have cost another $206 million annually if the trial ran beyond two years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office estimated.

    Mohammed confessed to his role in the attacks in 2008. He will be tried alongside Walid Muhammed Salih Mubarak Bin Attash, Ramzi Bin Al Shibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi, the four Sept. 11 co-conspirators Mohammed was undergoing proceedings with the first time around.

    President Obama announced in March his decision to resume military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay after heavy resistance from both Democrats and Republicans over trying suspects in U.S. courts.

    Closing the detainee center at Guantanamo Bay was one of the Obama administration's first orders of business. But the president has faced months of fierce, bipartisan resistance from Congress on his proposal to try Guantanamo detainees on U.S. soil.

    The $725 billion National Defense Authorization Act that Obama signed Jan. 7 explicitly prohibits the use of Defense Department funds to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to the United States or other countries. It also bars Pentagon funds from being used to build facilities in the United States to house detainees, as the president originally suggested.

    The move essentially barred the administration from trying detainees in civilian courts. The president objected to the provision in the bill before signing it, calling it "a dangerous and unprecedented challenge to critical executive branch authority" but also said his team would work with Congress to "seek repeal of these restrictions."

    There are about 170 prisoners remaining at the detainee center in Guantanamo Bay, 30 of whom were due to face trial in criminal courts or before military commissions. Since 2002, 598 prisoners have been transferred to other countries.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  5. #95
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    Pentagon prepares for media focus on 9/11 trials

    http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/22488/p...-on-911-trials

    Agence France-Presse
    10:03 am | Saturday, July 9th, 2011

    WASHINGTON—Pentagon officials said Friday they were looking at how to accommodate media interest in upcoming trials of the accused 9/11 plotters after journalists requested a live video feed of the proceedings from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

    Only a handful of reporters are allowed into the small court rooms at Guantanamo and other journalists at the base watch the proceedings from a separate room with a video monitor.

    Defense officials permit only about 60 reporters at a time at the base in southeastern Cuba, but the high-profile nature of the pending 9/11 cases has prompted the Pentagon to review an appeal from news organizations to provide a video feed outside Guantanamo.

    “We think this is a fair request from the media,” said spokesman Douglas Wilson, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

    “And I have put together a team to look at the options available to be able to address and accommodate the request,” he told AFP. “I should have those options for review very shortly.”

    In May, prosecutors filed charges against 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators, with Guantanamo military trials expected to start later this year.

    Another defense official said the Pentagon was considering allowing reporters to watch a closed-circuit video feed of the proceedings outside of Washington.

    Similar arrangements were being planned for families of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

    The video access for reporters would be subject to the same restrictions imposed on journalists at Guantanamo, officials said.

    In previous tribunal hearings, reporters watching the video monitors are not allowed to record the proceedings and broadcasters are not permitted to air the footage.

    Defense officials say the restrictions are required due to security precautions.

    It was also unclear if the video feed would be live or delayed, to allow officials to prevent the disclosure of potentially classified information.

    In requesting a video feed outside of Guantanamo, the Pentagon Press Association said the remote location of the Guantanamo base, the restrictions on entering and leaving the base and the limited facilities there “all serve to impose significant practical limitations on meaningful press access to the proceedings of the military commissions.”

    The Pentagon also has promised news outlets that legal motions and other relevant documents will be posted promptly on the military commissions’ official website.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  6. #96
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    Woods prepares Guantanamo for 9/11 tribunals

    http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/1...anamo-for.html

    By Carol Rosenberg
    The Miami Herald

    In the few weeks since Rear Adm. David B. Woods took charge here, he has looked in on the men accused of killing two of his Naval Academy classmates, walked the camps where President Barack Obama’s closure order has faded in the Caribbean sun and presided over a somber ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of America’s 21st Century Day of Infamy.

    Or, as the sturdy, 6-foot-4 career Naval aviator with a flat-top buzz cut sees it: It’s just his latest job in 30 years in uniform.

    Woods, 53, considers himself part of “the 9/11 Generation.” He calls it “the event that defined us.” He acknowledges that two fellow midshipmen from his Class of 1981 were killed on Sept. 11, 2001. They were Navy Capt. Robert Dolan, who was inside the Pentagon and former Navy nuclear engineer turned insurance broker Michael McGinty, who lived in Massachusetts but was doing business at the World Trade Center.

    The admiral wasn’t assigned to the Pentagon that day. He went on to command an air wing that flew missions meant to jam enemy air defenses in Afghanistan. He worked on a program to thwart deadly roadside bombs in Iraq.

    Now, he’s the 11th commander of the controversial detention and interrogation center that Congress wouldn’t let his commander-in-chief close. Resistance was so intense to holding trials in Manhattan that the administration reversed course and now the military gets to put on the capital mass murder trial of the five alleged 9/11 conspirators at the base.

    And it is Woods’ job to not only incarcerate those men after years of secret interrogation by the CIA but to prepare Camp Justice for the trial — a role he sees as a natural extension of his career.

    “Obviously, over the last 10 years being in the military at 9/11 and the aftermath, the Global War on Terror has been a focal point for much of my operational career,” he said.

    “This is just another one of those missions.”

    It’s a mission that was never meant to be. He has inherited a prison compound where visitors can glimpse fading copies of Obama’s Jan. 22, 2009 closure order in the recreation yards of the camp for low-value captives — al Qaeda foot soldiers, training camp wannabes, Taliban militiamen. An earlier admiral had guards hang the order for the captives to see while his team built a blueprint for closure.

    But recently, the guard force began taking some copies down. “They were tattered or unreadable,” said Navy Cmdr Tamsen Reese, camp spokeswoman.

    Far from closing, Woods is expanding: Plans are underway to build a new detention center hospital closer to the camp where seven months ago an Afghan died of a coronary after working out. Workers are doubling the workspace of a crude media center. The admiral has requisitioned reinforcements — troops to secure the court , staff to inspect news photos for “operational security” concerns that doom the images to deletions, and escorts to squire reporters and lawyers around the 45-square-mile base.

    The Pentagon plans death penalty trials for six of the 171 captives. So far, Woods has made no contingency plans for how to execute them.

    “I don’t have instructions and we don’t have a plan to do it.,” he said. “There’s been no order.”

    When he took charge Aug. 24, in a ceremony that was atypically unaccompanied by a news release, Woods told fellow U.S. forces that the eyes of the world would be on this corner of southeast Cuba. But he likened the operation to the flight deck of an aircraft carrier at sea — hot, busy, remote, cacophonous, in constant motion of aircraft coming and going with “spit-second accuracy.”

    Did he volunteer for this post, far different from any in a career that has focused on electronic jamming warfare?

    “I guess I did when I signed up for the Naval Academy in 1977,” he said.

    He confirmed that he’s met former al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man who boasted he planned the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z,” but said he never looked up the names of his dead classmates on the Pentagon charge sheet that seeks to execute Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators. He’s seen and spoken to the men accused of starting his generation’s war — he wouldn’t say more.

    “I have,” he said. “It wasn’t uncomfortable.”

    Soon, it may be his duty to deliver them to a trial that presumes them innocent, which he says doesn’t cause concern.

    “I guess it’s the professionalism I learned over 30 years that takes the emotion out of it. I’ve got a job to do; it’s pretty clear,” he said, reciting the mantra of management on the base: “Safe, humane, legal, transparent care and custody of the detainees.”
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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    Obama administration insists on Guantanamo closure

    http://www.abc6.com/story/15502638/o...tanamo-closure

    Posted: Sep 20, 2011 7:15 AM EDT Updated: Sep 20, 2011 7:16 AM EDT

    BRUSSELS (AP) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says that the Obama administration will do its utmost to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay ahead of next year's presidential elections despite political opposition.

    Holder said at the European Parliament on Tuesday that even if the current administration fails to close it ahead of elections, it will continue to press ahead if it wins the November 2012 presidential vote.

    Republican presidential rivals Rick Perry has said he was happy the U.S. prison at Guantanamo has been kept open.

    Holder said that the administration wants to close the facility "as quickly as possible, recognizing that we will face substantial pressure."
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  8. #98
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    The General Who Would Try KSM
    This Army lawyer tried to bring a justice system to Afghanistan. Next assignment: chief prosecutor at Guantanamo.

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...413286118.html

    By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
    9/30/2011

    In July of 1999, I met a young Army lawyer on a muddy farm field in southern Kosovo. His résumé (first in his class at West Point, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Law) suggested that Major Mark Martins had his pick of private-sector jobs. But there was this tall and down-to-earth Ranger in a cramped tent, working late into the night. Days after NATO bombers forced Serbia out, Kosovo was scarred by civil war and ethnic strife. There was no government, no courts and effectively no laws. The military had to fill this gap and Maj. Martins was trying to sort out how. At the time, many thought troops were wasting time better spent on tank training in Germany. "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten," said Condoleezza Rice, then the foreign policy adviser to an ambitious Republican governor from Texas.

    Fast forward a dozen years. Brig. Gen. Martins, 51, who deployed three times to Iraq, has just wound up a two-year tour in Afghanistan. Far from a distraction, Kosovo was a preview of things to come. The post-9/11 conflicts jolted the military out of the Cold War mindset for good and into the messy work of hunting terrorists, fighting insurgencies and, once again a dirty word in Republican presidential politics, nation-building in failed states.
    Related Video

    Matt Kaminski on the killing of Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki.

    Gen. Martins serves at the innovative wedges of this long war. He fashioned military-led efforts to provide Afghans and Iraqis with basic governance "in that difficult time that we call the meantime"—the months, usually years, from the collapse of the old regime to the rise of a functioning new state. In between, he helped "detoxify" (his words) American detention and interrogation policies in Afghanistan. He helped draft guidelines for U.S. military commissions adopted by Congress in 2009.

    On Monday, a general whom Pentagon chief counsel Jeh Johnson calls a "superstar" begins as the chief prosecutor at the tribunals, which are gearing up to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terror suspects held at Guantanamo.

    As the legal system struggled to adapt to the post-9/11 world, so did military doctrine. The army once favored "a hands-off approach" to civilian governance, says Gen. Martins. That was for the locals. But in the last decade, "important lightbulbs went off," he says. During the 2007 surge in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus decided that to succeed, the military had to step in and help Iraqis deliver justice to their citizens. Gen. Martins set up "rule of law green zones" in seven Iraqi cities. U.S. forces secured courtrooms and protected judges and prosecutors. When Gen. Petraeus moved into Afghanistan last year to lead that surge, Gen. Martins got his own command, a Rule of Law Field Force, that built on the Iraq experiment. The U.S. had written new constitutions and set up legal systems in Japan and Germany after World War II. This was the first time that rule of law was at the heart of counterinsurgency.

    The Afghan insurgency feeds off frustration with the ineptitude and rapaciousness of Kabul. "The Taliban is using the idiom of justice as its calling card and recruiting card," says Gen. Martins. "Afghanistan puts in very high relief the need for governance and dispute resolution—not the classic Western form of justice, but more resolution of disputes in a way that's seen as legitimate."

    At the beginning of the year, a fifth of Afghanistan's 500 districts, spread out across half its provinces, didn't have a prosecutor or judge. These areas, principally in the south and east, were also the most violent. The Taliban sent shadow courts and traveling judges into this vacuum. Their form of justice is brutal but efficient.

    The extra 30,000 troops ordered by President Obama in late 2009 pushed the Taliban out of strongholds. Gen. Martins's teams of up to 25 lawyers, engineers and trainers followed into the areas cleared by the Marines and Army in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in the south and Khost and Paktika in the east. They scouted out space for courts and police offices. They brought in land clerks to address the most common dispute in Afghanistan—who owns what. They put and protected 23 new prosecutors and judges in the districts without them, and plan to have 52 in all.

    Yet the formal judicial system is foreign to most Afghans in this tribal, rural society. Four-fifths of disputes are settled by councils of village elders, called jirgas, or the Taliban. The U.S. has tried to support this informal system. Forces have provided security to the elders and brought in Afghan experts to train them. "There's squabbling. There's real vituperative dialogue. But there's no shooting," says Gen. Martins of the jirgas. "This really is about turning shooting into shouting."

    The field force is an overdue experiment in the projection of governance. And time is short. Mr. Obama wants to bring home the surge contingent by next summer and finish the military drawdown by 2014. If the Taliban regain control over this territory, the effort of the past year will be wasted. Surveys suggest an improved perception of the Afghan government in the south. Yet as any military officer will tell you, none of this is irreversible, all of it fragile. Every town in Iraq had a courthouse; in all of Helmand province, there's only one. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has resisted the push by Gen. Petraeus, who left last month to head up the CIA, to empower local authorities beyond his direct control. "There's no silver bullet to this," says Gen. Martins.

    In previous jobs, he worked to strengthen the legitimacy of weak states and fix tarnished military programs. The next one gets no easier. The challenge for Gen. Martins will be to try to show that the military tribunals can prosecute the men behind 9/11 legitimately and fairly. He certainly has the credentials for it.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  9. #99
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    No 9/11 trial this year at Guantánamo war court
    A briefing scheduled outlined in an email to lawyers makes clear that the alleged Sept. 11 plotters won’t be back at a military commission until next year.

    http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/0...uantanamo.html

    By Carol Rosenberg
    crosenberg@miamiherald.com

    The trial of five Guantánamo captives accused of the Sept. 11 mass murder cannot begin until next year at the earliest under a timetable set out Monday by the legal authority in charge of the war court.

    Retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald notified lawyers on both sides of the case that he will accept recommendations on whether the case should go forward as a death penalty prosecution until Jan 15, 2012. Moreover, he also set the same deadline for Pentagon-appointed lawyers to offer their opinions on whether all five men should be tried simultaneously.

    Prosecutors swore out a capital case against confessed 9/11 plot mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators in May after Attorney General Eric Holder abandoned a plan to have a civilian judge and jury hear the case in a Manhattan federal court.

    Since then, the case has been mired in delay while some members of the Pentagon-paid defense teams try to obtain security clearances to meet the accused at Guantánamo and start work on their cases.

    They have been held at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba since their transfer from CIA custody in September 2006. The government alleges the five men were the organizers, financiers and trainers of the 19 men who hijacked the four aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, and then slammed them into the World Trade Center, Pentagon building and a field in Pennsylvania.

    The Obama administration halted the Bush-era 9/11 prosecution while it reformed the military commissions and considered where to put them on trial.

    MacDonald’s instruction to both prosecutors and defense attorneys on Monday was the first written indication that the Navy’s former top lawyer, now overseeing commissions, was considering whether to have the five men tried separately.

    He had already indicated that he would entertain arguments on whether the case should go forward seeking the execution of the five men but added in his email to attorneys Monday that, “you may include any comment on the issue of a joint trial.”

    Only one other Guantánamo war court prosecution is in the pipeline — the death penalty case against alleged USS Cole bombing architect Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, also a former CIA captive. The chief military commissions judge, Army Col. James Pohl, is expected to hold an arraignment in that case later this month.

    Meantime, the Pentagon is preparing a viewing site at Fort Meade, Md., near Washington, D.C., for reporters to watch the proceedings by a 40-second-delayed closed circuit feed as an alternative to making the trip to Camp Justice at Guantánamo. The military is also preparing a viewing site in Norfolk, Va., for the families of the 17 American sailors who were killed in the Cole attack off Yemen in October 2000.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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    Lawyers of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators Object to Mail Monitoring

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

    By JESS BRAVIN
    11/2/2011

    WASHINGTON—Defense lawyers for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 conspirators said Tuesday the Defense Department was reading their correspondence with the defendants and called on officials to halt the practice.

    In a letter to the Pentagon's top detainee official, William Lietzau, nine defense lawyers said the security procedure violated military-commission rules as well as domestic and international humanitarian law.

    The defense lawyers, including seven military officers and two civilians, said the monitoring "destroys the attorney-client relationship" by undermining the trust they must build with the defendants. The lawyers said they had raised the issue repeatedly with Pentagon officials over the past five months, but "received no response to any of our letters."

    A spokesman for Mr. Lietzau and other Pentagon officials didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Guantanamo prison officials have said their procedures are necessary to maintain security at the facility.

    The Obama administration has said it plans to try the five accused 9/11 conspirators at a military commission on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reversing an earlier plan to try them in a New York City federal court. However, formal charges against the five have yet to be filed at Guantanamo.

    The same issue involving lawyer-client communications has arisen in the case against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who has been formally charged at a Guantanamo military commission with organizing the 2000 attack on the USS Cole.

    The Pentagon has scheduled a Guantanamo hearing for Mr. Nashiri on Nov. 9. Mr. Nashiri's attorney, Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Reyes, has filed a motion with a military judge seeking to end the monitoring of communications with his client, a person close to the defense office said.

    The lawyers for Mr. Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators said the trial, already long delayed, could be even more difficult to carry out because professional ethics require them to maintain confidential communications with their clients. The practice of monitoring mail "will effectively stall this case," they wrote.

    Military commissions proceedings have been bedeviled for years by conflicts between Guantanamo prison authorities and the offshore trial system. Prosecution and defense attorneys alike periodically have complained that their access to inmates has been impeded and that detention conditions sometimes interfere with the trial process.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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