Page 15 of 31 FirstFirst ... 5131415161725 ... LastLast
Results 141 to 150 of 308

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

  1. #141
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    US to air 9/11 hearing from Guantanamo at 4 bases in Northeast, rather than planned 6 spots

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...9rT_story.html

    By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, April 30, 4:48 PM

    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The arraignment of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and four other Guantanamo Bay prisoners will be broadcast to only six sites at four military bases in the U.S. Northeast, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday.

    A military judge had authorized closed-circuit TV at eight sites in six locations but not all of those spots will be ready for Saturday’s arraignment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants on charges of helping to plan and carry out the attacks, Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said.

    Families of people killed in the attacks can view the proceedings at Fort Hamilton in New York City; Joint Base McGuire Dix in Lakehurst, New Jersey; and Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

    Firefighters and other emergency services personnel who responded to the attacks as well as relatives of the first-responders who were killed can view the proceedings at a separate facility at Fort Hamilton, Breasseale said.

    Viewing sites for the general public and media will be at Fort Meade, Maryland.

    A planned Fort Meade viewing site for family members of victims won’t be ready in time for Saturday’s hearing and an additional site in the Washington area is still under consideration, the spokesman said.

    Mohammed and his co-defendants are expected to be arraigned on charges that include terrorism and murder. They could get the death penalty if convicted.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  2. #142
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    Gitmo trials ‘not the U.S. at its best’

    http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/3...us-at-its.html

    BY DONALD J. GUTER
    dguter@stcl.edu

    I was in the Pentagon on 9/11. One moment I was chairing a meeting of senior Navy Judge Advocates, the next moment we were all viewing breaking news coverage of the World Trade Center attacks. Then the building shook. American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. One of my Judge Advocate officers, Mari-Rae Sopper, was on the plane.

    For me, the 9/11 attacks are personal. So is the need to bring those responsible to justice. This week, more than a decade after 9/11, I will be sitting a short distance away from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other al Qaida defendants as they stand trial for their alleged involvement in the attacks.

    Unfortunately, this will not be a trial in the hallowed U.S federal court system but a tribunal in the beleaguered military commission system at GuantĂĄnamo Bay, Cuba.

    There has not been, and will not be, a more important 9/11 trial. As a former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, as an American, I want it to be fair, legitimate and exemplary. Likewise, I want the verdict to be credible, certain and, perhaps above all, final. But the military commission system is still largely untested and constitutional questions remain. When compared to the solid history and foundation of our federal court system, the commissions leave us with only unfounded hope that they will be able to bear the weight of this trial.

    Given some politicians’ insistence that KSM be tried at Gitmo, you would think the military commissions system had a sterling record. In fact, bogged down by ever-changing rules, it has held a paltry seven trials, which have led to five plea bargains.

    The impact of the trial will be felt far and wide. The world will be watching, and the system of justice on display will not be the United States at its best. Al Qaida will be watching, too. They will see their members facing wartime trials in a system designed specifically for them. To deny them the martyrdom they seek, the United States should be treating them as common criminals, not warriors.

    The constitutionality of the system itself is in doubt. Last month, in a hearing for a separate military commission at Guantánamo , a lawyer for Abd al Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al Nashiri credibly argued that the system violates the Equal Protection Clause because only noncitizens are subjected to it. Furthermore, some charges in the 9/11 trial aren’t war crimes, making it unclear whether the commissions even have jurisdiction.

    The Supreme Court declared the original military commissions unconstitutional; it has not yet ruled on the most recent incarnation. If the Court were to rule that it violates the U.S. Constitution, it would call into question every verdict it has produced.

    In response to 9/11, the U.S. government took a number of steps that treated American ideals and the rule of law as liabilities instead of the assets that they are. One of the country’s major mistakes was to create a separate, inferior system of justice to try foreign terrorist suspects. Now, as the war in Afghanistan winds down, so too should this second tier system of justice. The country should shut down Gitmo and the military commissions along with it.

    It’s not as if we don’t have a proven alternative. The U.S. federal courts have held hundreds of terrorism trials since 9/11, resulting in more than 400 convictions, all the while protecting rights and setting an example of justice before the world. This is the time-tested system the U.S. government is forgoing out of misguided security concerns, fear, and political calculation.

    A court system with credibility and a record of success will be nowhere near when I walk into the military tribunal tasked with trying the alleged masterminds of 9/11. Let’s hope that the trial and the verdict hold up better — in fact and in perception — than we have any reason to believe they will.

    Victims of 9/11 have waited more than 10 years for justice. They shouldn’t be made to wait even longer.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  3. #143
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    Al Hawsawi Files Motion to Dismiss

    http://www.lawfareblog.com/2012/05/a...on-to-dismiss/

    By Raffaela Wakeman
    Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 2:38 PM

    In the 9/11 military commission case, counsel for Mustafa al Hawsawi has filed a motion to dismiss, which was joined by all of his co-defendants in the trial. Here is the press release that came from al Hawsawi’s counsel, along with the redacted motion.

    The text of the press release reads as follows:
    Last week, lawyers for Mustafa al-Hawsawi filed a motion, joined by all 9-11 defendants, which asserts that the Military Court lacks authority to proceed with trial due to critical omissions in the past year during the death penalty authorization period, known in the commissions as the pre-referral stage.

    The defective referral motion highlights how defense efforts to develop “significant mitigating factors” have been thwarted by the ongoing deliberate and systematic interference with attorney client communications. The rules require the charging authority, Mr. Bruce McDonald, to consider those factors before authorizing a death penalty prosecution. Defense preparation efforts have also been crippled due to the lack of access to classified evidence and essential resources, such as cleared personnel, Arabic translators and investigators.

    “The odds continue to be silently and deliberately stacked against a fair process. These men are represented on paper only, not in substance. We have been stripped of our ability to communicate and denied essential resources to carry out our duties,” said Commander Walter Ruiz, a military lawyer representing Mr. Hawsawi.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  4. #144
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    9/11 Mastermind Says He Wants to Die; Gitmo Trial May Be His Chance

    http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012...m-trial-death/

    By Spencer Ackerman
    May 2, 2012

    A year after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the United States has another opportunity on the horizon to take down a major terrorist figure, albeit in a much different way. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, will finally begin a military commission for the murders of 3,000 Americans at Guantanamo Bay on Saturday morning, when he’ll appear at a Guantanamo Bay courtroom for his belated arraignment. But even as the U.S. boasts about the justice its reformed military trials will dispense, those trials might ironically give the man known as KSM the conclusion he sees as a final victory: death.

    It’s been a long time since KSM was last in court. In 2008, during an arraignment for a commission that ultimately got cancelled, he quickly pled guilty to multiple murder counts. “This is what I want,” he told the court, in English. “I’m looking to be martyr for long time.”

    That case was interrupted for a variety of procedural reasons, and KSM never got his chance. In the intervening years, Congress and the Obama administration reformed the controversial military trials — making it easier to seek capital punishment, by providing detainees with so-called “learned counsel” lawyers specifically skilled at death-penalty cases, which makes such sentences less likely to be reversed on appeal. Last month, after flipping a key detainee to testify against KSM, the government brought charges against KSM and four alleged accomplices for the 9/11 plot. “If convicted,” the Defense Department clarified, “the five accused could be sentenced to death.”

    However much the commission procedures have changed, KSM’s ambitions probably haven’t. “He wants to die because it fits into his massively egotistical narrative,” says Josh Meyer, author of the recent book The Hunt for KSM. “He’s like Napoleon. Wasting away in a cell is not his style. Going out in a bang of glory is.”

    That calculation means that the 12 U.S. military officers who will decide if a convicted KSM lives or dies will face more than a narrow legal choice. They’ll also, however unfairly for them, have the burden of a policy choice. Should KSM be put to death, it might simultaneously provide a measure of closure for the families of his victims and allow al-Qaida’s remaining acolytes to portray him as a martyr.

    That burden has weighed on military lawyers for years. Some think that KSM’s chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, should forgo seeking the death penalty.

    “The worst thing we could do to KSM is to keep him alive for as long as possible while making him totally irrelevant,” says retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, one of Martins’ predecessors as chief commissions prosecutor. “Not mattering matters more to him than dying. I’d hate to see us give him what he wants.”

    That ultimate decision is likely to be a very long time in coming. Even if KSM pleads guilty on Saturday, his lawyers will doubtlessly pursue a number of procedural gambits to tie the commission up ahead of the abbreviated trial that will precede sentencing. If his lawyers enter what’s called a reserved plea, they’ll start filing motions to exclude evidence ahead of trial that will mean months, if not years, before the trial can actually begin. Pentagon officials talk of a process that, whatever happens on Saturday at Guantanamo Bay, will not be resolved in 2012.

    But before a sentence is handed down, KSM wants something else: a soapbox. He’s after “an opportunity to tell the world, again, what he thinks, why he did it, how he’s really the good guy and a commanding general on par with George Washington, leading an insurgent army fighting the oppressive forces of tyranny and evil,” Meyer says. His lawyers have an incentive to stopping any such outburst — it will alienate the panel of officers who will decide KSM’s fate — and the judge in the commission, Army Col. James A. Pohl, has wide latitude to shut him up.

    But even if KSM gets either his soapbox or the martyrdom he seeks, the global terrorist movement may not be so captivated. “This generation of al-Qaida supporters generally know that he played an important role in 9/11, but since al-Qaida never profiled him in its videos, there’s no in-depth knowledge about the man nor does the global movement hold strong feelings of solidarity with his plight, as they do with men like the Blind Sheikh or Abu Qatada,” says Jarret Brachman, author of Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice.

    “I would anticipate that a death sentence would provoke a flurry of the predictable ‘we will avenge his death’ statements from across the al-Qaida world,” Brachman adds, “but I don’t foresee it being a very meaningful or enduring rallying flag for al-Qaida.”

    Being forgotten might be the biggest fear for KSM, a well-known narcissist. His original idea for 9/11 wasn’t to knock down the World Trade Center. It was to hijack a plane, land it on a U.S. runway, and then emerge to deliver a diatribe about the perfidies of U.S. foreign policy.

    “We used to joke that we should charge all of his co-accused as death-penalty eligible, but not him, just to piss him off,” says Morris. “The thought that others are more significant than he is and deserve death, but not him, would annoy KSM to no end.”
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  5. #145
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    9/11 families prepare for Guantanamo arraignment

    http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...o_arraignment/

    By Meghan Barr
    Associated Press / May 3, 2012

    NEW YORK—It has been a year of milestones for the families of those killed on Sept. 11, with the death of Osama Bin Laden followed by the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Now another painful chapter is set to begin: the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of 9/11.

    Victims' relatives will gather at military bases along the East Coast on Saturday to watch on closed-circuit TV as Mohammed and four co-defendants are arraigned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they will eventually be tried in front of a U.S. military tribunal. The trial is probably at least a year away.

    For some, the arraignment is a long-awaited moment in a case fraught with years of frustrating delays. For others, watching the proceedings holds no appeal at all. They simply want to move on with their lives.

    Jim Riches, a retired firefighter from Brooklyn who pulled his firefighter son's body out of the rubble at ground zero, said he plans to watch from New York City's Fort Hamilton.

    "I think it will give the whole world a look at how evil these men are and that they deserve what they get," he said. "I think it's going to be very upsetting for some families who haven't seen their act before. I'm sure they'll be walking out crying."

    The vast majority of victims' families have never seen Mohammed, aside from a widely disseminated photograph of a disheveled-looking Mohammed in a white T-shirt immediately after his arrest. A small number of them have traveled to Guantanamo and seen him there. Five of them, chosen by lottery, will fly there on Friday to see the arraignment in person.

    Mohammed and the others are expected to be arraigned on charges that include terrorism and murder. They could get the death penalty if convicted in the attacks that sent hijacked airliners slamming into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.

    "I just hope for the sake of the 3,000 families that they get what they deserve," Riches said. "Because it's not enough. They were broken into pieces."

    It's unclear exactly how many families will watch at military bases. At Fort Meade, between Baltimore and Washington, organizers are preparing for about 150 members of the public. A spokesman for Joint Base McGuire Dix in Lakehurst, N.J., said very few people were planning to go, though he declined to give a number.

    Barbara Minervino of Middletown, N.J., whose husband, Louis, an executive at an insurance and investment firm, died in the twin towers, said she will be attending a happy occasion on Saturday instead: a Communion party for a member of the family.

    "We're looking toward living," she said. "We're looking toward the future and not the past."

    Mary Fetchet, who lost her son Brad at the trade center and founded the support group Voices of Sept. 11, said she has a prior engagement and can't watch arraignment but will be closely following the trial.

    Fetchet surveys the 9/11 survivors every year and said she found that they are dealing with the tragedy in vastly different ways, even within the same family.

    "Some people will follow it on media reports, and some people just want to put it behind them," she said. "I think the trial is another roadblock in them being able to move forward. I think the thing you have to realize is that everybody goes through it differently, and you just have to respect what the needs of each individual are."

    There's a sense of bitterness among many that it took more than 10 years just to get to this point in the case.

    "We've had him in custody for so many years, and now we're finally getting to it," said Jim Ogonowski, the brother of John Ogonowski of Dracut, Mass., the pilot of one of the jetliners that crashed into the World Trade Center.

    Ogonowski will not join other families on Saturday at Fort Devens, Mass., though he said he might watch later developments, which the Pentagon also plans to show to the public.

    "The reality is it's been over 10 years since the 9/11 tragedies. This is not going to bring my brother back or any other victims of that day," he said. "I do want to see justice done, but the fact is, to go watch an arraignment isn't going to bring them back."
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  6. #146
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    ACLU seeks broad public access to secret testimony in 9/11 trial

    http://india.nydailynews.com/newsart...-in-9-11-trial

    Thursday, May 3rd 2012, 08:00 AM

    WASHINGTON _ The public should be allowed to hear the five alleged 9/11 conspirators describe what the CIA did to them in secret overseas prisons, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a motion filed at the Guantanamo war court late Wednesday.

    "The eyes of the world are on this military commission," the civil liberties group wrote in its motion. It was posted on the court website uncensored and included graphic references to water torture from a leaked International Red Cross report.

    At issue is the court system that employs a 40-second delay of the proceedings, time enough to let an intelligence official hit a white-noise button if any of the men describe what CIA agents did to them after their capture in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003 and before their arrival at Guantanamo in September 2006.

    The ACLU called the practice censorship, and said it was premised on "a chillingly Orwellian claim" that the accused "must be gagged lest he reveal his knowledge of what the government did to him."

    A court security officer used the white noise at an earlier, aborted effort in 2008 and 2009 to put the five men on trial for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

    It was not immediately clear whether the war court judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, would rule on the motion before Saturday's arraignment of alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantanamo captives.

    The ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, said Thursday morning that his organization's National Security Project director, Hina Shamsi, was seeking to join a Pentagon flight to Guantanamo on Friday in an attempt to argue the point to Pohl _ before the arraignments on Saturday.

    The Pentagon had no immediate comment. "The judge will decide whether the merits of their complaint have standing," said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale.

    The ACLU lawyers also wrote that the 9/11 defendants obtained information about the CIA's secret prison network and techniques only "by virtue of the government forcing it upon them."

    They wrote that the government already had declassified parts of an investigation by the CIA's inspector general that concluded that agents subjected their captives to abusive treatment, and that it was in the public's interest to hear the descriptions from the captives.

    All five face a death penalty trial by military commission at Guantanamo as the alleged organizers, funders and trainers of the 19 hijackers who commandeered four passenger aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington, and a Pennsylvania field, killingly nearly 3,000 people.

    The brief included an affidavit from a scholar of military commissions who noted that past American tribunals were open, although held at remote locations that made it largely impossible for the public to see them.

    Rather than presume information that comes from former CIA captives is classified, the ACLU lawyers wrote, the judge is obliged to review each statement beforehand and "make factual findings on the record before permitting any national-security-related closure."

    The argument echoes one made last month to Pohl by a First Amendment lawyer at Guantanamo in the case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, accused of orchestrating al-Qaida's October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Aden, Yemen.

    Ten U.S. news organizations sought to challenge plans to have Nashiri testify in a closed pretrial hearing about his treatment by the CIA during overseas interrogation.

    The judge did not rule on the issue at the hearing because Nashiri was not called to testify.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  7. #147
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    Hundreds vie for seats at GuantĂĄnamo's 9/11 trial
    Hundreds of observers, members of the media and family members of 9/11 victims applied to attend Saturday’s arraignment of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and 4 others in Guantánamo.

    http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/0...#storylink=cpy

    WASHINGTON -- About 250 kids and kin of men and women killed on 9/11 vied for six courtroom seats. Around the same number of journalists sought to work at GuantĂĄnamo this weekend. Senior human rights lawyers swept aside staff attorneys and interns for a three-night stay in a six-bunk tent.

    Competition has been fierce to secure a weekend spot at Camp Justice, Guantánamo’s crude war court compound in southeast Cuba where Pentagon prosecutors will once again charge confessed mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four co-defendants with orchestrating the terror attacks by hijacked passenger aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001.

    “It’s the Nuremberg of our times,” said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, accounting for the crush of press applications to report from Guantánamo on Saturday when the one-day arraignment hearing restarts the clock on the death penalty trial by military commissions.

    Reporters emailed from as far away as Australia and Pakistan, willing to cross the globe at short notice to join the press flight from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., to the U.S.-controlled corner of Cuba.

    About a dozen German newspapers and broadcasters sought seats, probably because Yemeni defendant Ramzi bin al Shibh, 40, is accused of organizing the cell of hijackers from Hamburg, where he also allegedly helped them apply for Florida flight schools. Only Der Spiegel among the Germans got one of the 60 reporter beds in tent city.

    Although nearly 3,000 people were killed in the terror attacks, only about 250 of their survivors submitted their names for a Defense Department lottery for seats set aside for “victim family members” — spouses, siblings, grandparents, parents or children of those killed.

    Those chosen include two women who lost their husbands on 9/11, a man who lost his wife, and two sisters who lost their two brothers inside the World Trade Center that day, said Karen Loftus, the Pentagon’s coordinator for Sept. 11 victims.

    All are from the East Coast and will decide, at GuantĂĄnamo, whether to tell their stories and make their names public.

    Interest in watching the proceedings has been building, said Loftus, who anticipates the lottery pool to expand for any actual trial. Saturday’s hearing follows years of legal controversies surrounding the court, which was initially closed by the Supreme Court in the Bush years, then twice reformed, most recently by President Barack Obama and Congress.

    “People need to see that it’s really going to happen,” Loftus said Wednesday. “The Supreme Court has weighed in, Congress has weighed in, both presidents have weighed in. And this is happening.”

    All four New York City newspapers, site of Ground Zero, got seats as well — The Post, The Daily News, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as major television news networks from FOX and CNN to Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.

    First-time journalists include Terry McDermott, author of The Hunt for KSM, just released, and former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, who was a colleague of murdered Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Pearl and his wife were staying in Nomani’s rented home in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002 before his kidnapping and beheading, which Mohammed boasted at Guantánamo he did “with my blessed hand.”

    Nomani will be reporting for Washingtonian magazine. McDermott’s going to file dispatches for Newsweek’s online blog, The Daily Beast.

    McDermott’s co-author, Josh Meyer, secured a slot as an observer on behalf of The Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, where he now works. The last time he was there, he reported on the Bush-era efforts to prosecute Mohammed for The Los Angeles Times.

    The observers will also include for the first time the Navy’s senior lawyer on 9/11 — retired Rear Adm. Donald Guter, who is being sent by the legal group Human Rights First to observe. Guter, who was at work and felt Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon that day, is no fan of the military commissions system.

    “I think it should be in federal courts,” said Guter, calling the U.S. civilian system “the gold standard” of criminal justice.

    Even the Obama administration’s reformed war court system, he says, is too burdened by questions of legal jurisdiction and hearsay exceptions to be credible in many human rights and international law circles.

    Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the Pentagon’s chief prosecutor, has urged critics to give the court a chance. “If observers will withhold judgment for a time,” he told a gathering at Harvard Law School last month, “the system they see will prove itself deserving of public confidence.”

    But, Guter said in an interview this week, the alleged 9/11 perpetrators don’t deserve the dignity of a military commission.

    “They’re thugs, not soldiers,” he said. “Put them through the federal system with all the real miscreants there. We’re giving them a status as real warriors by giving them commissions.”

    Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to hold the trials in New York City, but Congress closed off any possibility of federal trials through legislation.

    Other lawyers taking up observer seats offered by the Office of Military Commissions include Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has funded some of the 9/11 defense work; former New York prosecutor and Iran-Contra investigator Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International’s Tom Parker and Judicial Watch’s Lisette Garcia.

    With only sporadic interest in earlier Obama-era proceedings, the 9/11 hearing puts a renewed spotlight on the expeditionary legal compound the Bush administration fast-tracked in 2008 for $12 million by requisitioning supplies from existing Defense Department inventories.

    It’s built atop an abandoned airstrip on a remote corner of the base overlooking Guantánamo Bay.

    Its centerpiece is a pre-fab maximum-security, state-of-the-art courtroom built inside a building that looks like a warehouse, and is surrounded by fencing topped with barbed wire and displaying signs that forbid photography. It was brought in by barge in pieces and can be dismantled and taken away.

    Reporters and observers are put up in nearby tents that look like Quonset huts, with drinking water chilled in a $32,000 U.S. Air Force refrigeration container meant to ship the dead home from war. Lawyers get a nearby trailer park while senior court staff and the 9/11 victims get guest officers quarters.

    The compound has been sparsely used during the Obama administration, with the tent city only filled to capacity as emergency transition housing for troops and journalists bound for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  8. #148
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    ACLU seeks public access to 9/11 trial at GuantĂĄnamo, secret testimony
    ACLU files motion with war court seeking to open 9/11 trial to general public and permit testimony the accused make about their time in secret detention to be heard.

    http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/0...#storylink=cpy

    WASHINGTON -- The American people should be allowed to hear the five accused 9/11 conspirators describe what the CIA did to them in secret overseas prisons, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a motion filed at the GuantĂĄnamo war court late Wednesday.

    “The eyes of the world are on this military commission,” the civil liberties group wrote in the 32-page motion. It was posted on the war court web site uncensored and included graphic references to water torture from a leaked International Red Cross report.

    At issue is the war court system that employs a 40-second delay of the proceedings, time enough to let an intelligence official hit a white noise button if any of the men describe what CIA agents did to them after their capture in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003 and before their arrival at GuantĂĄnamo in September 2006.

    The ACLU called the practice censorship. And said it was premised on “a chillingly Orwellian claim” that the accused “must be gagged lest he reveal his knowledge of what the government did to him.”

    A court security officer used the white noise at an earlier, aborted effort to put the five men on trial for the terror attacks in 2008 and 2009.

    It was not immediately clear whether the war court judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, would rule on the motion before Saturday’s arraignment of accused Sept. 11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantánamo captives.

    The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, said Thursday morning that his organization’s National Security director, Hina Shamsi, was seeking to join a Pentagon flight to Guantánamo on Friday in a bid to argue the point to Pohl — before the men are formally charged at Camp Justice at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay on Saturday.

    The Pentagon had no immediate comment. “The judge will decide whether the merits of their complaint have standing,” said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale.

    The ACLU lawyers also wrote that the 9/11 accused only obtained information about the CIA’s secret prison network and techniques “by virtue of the government forcing it upon them.”

    They added that the government already had declassified portions of an investigation of the CIA’s own inspector general that had found agents subjected their captive to abusive treatment, and that it was in the public’s interest to hear the descriptions from the captives’ own lips.

    All five face a death penalty trial by military commission at GuantĂĄnamo as the alleged organizers, funders and trainers of the 19 hijackers who commandeered four passenger aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001 and flew them into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killingly nearly 3,000 people.

    The brief included an affidavit from a scholar of military commissions who noted that past American tribunals were open, although held at remote locations that made it largely impossible for the public to see them.

    Rather than presume information that comes from the mouths of former CIA captives is classified, the ACLU lawyers wrote, the judge is obliged to review each statement beforehand and “make factual findings on the record before permitting any national-security-related closure.”

    The argument echoes one made last month to Pohl by a First Amendment lawyer at Guantánamo in the case of another waterboarded captive, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, accused of orchestrating al Qaida’s October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole warship off Aden, Yemen.

    Ten U.S. news organizations sought to challenge plans to have Nashiri testify in a closed pretrial hearing about his CIA treatment during overseas interrogation.

    The judge did not rule on the issue at the hearing because Nashiri was not called to testify.
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  9. #149
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    9/11 plot suspects head back to court at Guantanamo

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/s...,6967494.story

    5/4/2012

    MIAMI (Reuters) - The last time Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in the top-security courtroom at the Guantanamo Bay naval base more than three years ago, the admitted architect of the September 11 attacks was trying to confess, plead guilty and achieve martyrdom.

    Before the judge could determine whether the murky rules allowed defendants to plead guilty and be executed, something that is not allowed in regular U.S. courts-martial, President Barack Obama pulled the plug on the Guantanamo tribunals.

    If Mohammed is still interested in pleading guilty, he and four co-defendants will get their chance on Saturday when they are arraigned anew on charges that carry the death penalty.

    They face seven charges stemming from the 2001 hijacked plane attacks that killed 2,976 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania and propelled the United States into a deadly, costly and ongoing global war against al Qaeda and its supporters.

    "The stakes are as high as they can be in any prosecution. These are the prosecutions of the century," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union and a longtime observer and critic of the tribunals.

    Since the five defendants last appeared in court in December 2008, the law authorizing the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals has been overhauled and the ambiguity over guilty pleas was resolved.

    "The changes to the statutes allow the military judge to accept pleas of guilty in a capital case and make findings accordingly," said a Pentagon spokesman, Army Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale. "If the members (jurors) vote unanimously on a sentence, then an accused who has pleaded guilty to a capital charge could be sentenced to death."

    'TERRORISTS TO THE BONE'
    Mohammed and the other defendants, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa al Hawsawi, are charged with conspiring with al Qaeda, attacking civilians and civilian targets, murder in violation of the laws of war, destruction of property, hijacking and terrorism.

    They said in a 2009 letter to the previous tribunal judge that they were "terrorists to the bone" who considered the accusations against them "badges of honor" that they carried with pride.

    Mohammed said in one hearing that "I am looking to be martyred." In November 2008, the defendants sent a note to the judge saying all five were ready to "announce our confessions" and plead guilty.

    The Obama administration halted that prosecution and tried to move the case into a New York federal court just blocks from where the Twin Towers fell during the attack, but caved to political pressure and moved the case back into the Guantanamo tribunals.

    Formally known as military commissions, the tribunals have been criticized as a second-class system, rigged to convict, since they were first authorized in 2001.

    The chief prosecutor, Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, acknowledged in a speech at Harvard University last month that earlier versions were flawed.

    "That is not where we are any more," he said. "While appreciating the criticisms and concerns, we believe that these reformed military commissions are fair and that they serve an important role in the armed conflict against al Qaeda and associated forces."

    On Saturday at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba, the defendants will be escorted into the cavernous courtroom by Navy guards in camouflage uniforms, and seated with their lawyers and translators at rows of reddish-hued fake mahogany tables.

    Most eyes will be on Mohammed, who in earlier hearings sang Koranic verses in Arabic, lectured the judge and insisted that the courtroom sketch artist redraw him with a slimmer nose. Described by those how have dealt with him as egotistical and manipulative, he seemed to relish being the center of attention.

    'JIHADI POSTER BOYS'
    The judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, will ask him and his colleagues whether they want to plead not guilty and be tried by a panel of at least 12 U.S. military officers, plead guilty and proceed to sentencing by such a panel, or defer entering a plea until later.

    The panel would not be chosen until after all the legal and evidentiary challenges are resolved, which could require several hearings over many months or even years.

    Defense lawyers have already asked that the charges be dropped because of what they called critical omissions during the process used to refer the case to trial as a death penalty case. They said they did not get translators and experts in a timely manner because of long delays in obtaining security clearances, and that they still had not received interrogation and medical records they requested.

    "The odds continue to be silently and deliberately stacked against a fair process," said Navy Commander Walter Ruiz, an attorney appointed to represent Hawsawi.

    He said the case was hampered by the "gaping black hole of information" about what happened to his client after his arrest in 2003.

    All five defendants were held for more than three years in secret CIA prisons before being sent to Guantanamo in 2006, and all have said they were tortured there. The CIA said Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times.

    A sixth defendant, Mohammed al Qahtani, was dropped from the case because the Pentagon appointee previously overseeing the tribunals found that he was tortured during Guantanamo interrogations that included long periods of isolation and exposure to cold, sleep deprivation, nudity and sexual humiliation.

    At Saturday's hearing, the judge will ask the defendants whether they want to keep their military and civilian lawyers or act as their own attorneys. In the earlier hearings, the defendants said they did not trust any U.S. lawyers, and the judge ruled that Mohammed, bin Attash and Aziz Ali could represent themselves.

    He was still mulling whether Binalshibh, who was receiving psychotropic medication for an undisclosed illness, and Hawsawi were mentally competent to act as their own attorneys when the case was halted.

    If the defendants plead guilty this time around or are ultimately convicted at trial, it would likely be many more years before appeals are completed and the sentences are carried out. The secretary of defense would decide how they would be executed.

    Critics have suggested that U.S. interests would be better served if the defendants were sentenced to prison for life with no chance of parole.

    "It would be a mistake to execute them and make them martyrs for the al Qaeda extremists worldwide," Romero said. "How is converting these five defendants into jihadi poster boys a furtherance of American foreign policy in the Muslim world when modern Western democracies reject the death penalty?"
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


  10. #150
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    America
    Posts
    30,749
    Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, lead prosecutor in 9/11 case, in fight of his career

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...50T_story.html

    By Peter Finn, Friday, May 4, 8:24 AM

    When the biggest terrorism trial in U.S. history resumes this weekend at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Khalid Sheik Mohammed will retake his place at the defense table, the alpha dog among the five defendants accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

    Across the courtroom from Mohammed, facing him for the first time, will stand the tall, one-star general the Pentagon has entrusted with not only securing a death penalty conviction but also convincing a skeptical world that a military commission can deliver a fair trial.

    In 2009, the Obama administration, working with Congress, modified military commissions in an effort to offer more due process to defendants. But more than a decade after the system was originally set up under George W. Bush, much of the human rights community continues to lambaste it as a sham — one that should not supplant federal criminal trials for terrorism suspects.

    Now, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, who will be the lead trial prosecutor in the Sept. 11 case, wants to bolster support for the modified process, and he’s in the fight of his career.

    “If observers will withhold judgment for a time, the system they see will prove itself deserving of public confidence,” Martins said last month in a speech at his alma mater, Harvard Law School.

    The address, which Martins delivered in full dress uniform, was the third in a series of appeals he has made to the legal community since becoming chief military prosecutor in October. Speaking in the particular language of the law and drawing on history and precedent, Martins has been urging the country’s lawyers — and by extension the larger public — to reexamine what he knows is a deeply ingrained belief that the tribunals at Guantanamo can provide only second-class justice.

    The hope, proponents of reformed military commissions say, is that the public will come to see the system as one that provides defendants with the resources to mount a robust defense — including expert counsel — while barring the use of evidence tainted by torture or abuse and treating classified information in much the same way as it is handled in federal court.

    “Mark understands the need for public legitimation, and he’s definitely making inroads,” said Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard who was a senior Justice Department official during the Bush administration. “He’s given [commissions] the appearance and the reality of more transparency.”

    Critics of the system acknowledge that he has brought a new willingness to engage with detractors and a commitment to opening up the proceedings. They are, for instance, now screened for journalists and the public via closed-circuit television at Fort Meade in Maryland.

    “He has the power to get things done, and that’s a change,” said a military defense lawyer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a superior officer. “If he says he will do something, it gets done.”

    Martins takes to a broader stage to make his case on Saturday, when Mohammed and his co-defendants will be arraigned at Guantanamo and could indicate whether they plan to defend themselves.

    Defense attorneys for the five defendants say their preparations for trial have been “crippled” by government interference with attorney-client communications. They also complain that they have been unable to obtain some classified evidence, and do not have enough Arabic translators and investigators.

    “The odds continue to be silently and deliberately stacked against a fair process,” said Navy Commander Walter Ruiz, who represents one of the five men, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, in a statement this week. “These men are represented on paper only, not in substance.”

    Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, said she worked with Martins on detention issues in Afghanistan and found him to be “really interested in hearing our comments.” And he oversaw improvements in the detention system at Bagram air base, she said.

    But Prasow insists that the justice system at Guantanamo is fundamentally flawed and cannot be salvaged by any one individual, no matter how well-intentioned. Federal court simply provides greater due process, she said, adding that any verdict that emerges from a military commission will never have the same legitimacy as one in a civilian criminal proceeding.

    Prasow said commission proceedings could allow the admission of intelligence or information whose exact source is unknown — and whose origin the government would not have to divulge — leaving open the possibility that some of it was obtained through torture. She also said that the commissions appear designed to hide the history of the CIA’s secret overseas prisons and that defendants might not be allowed to testify publicly about any mistreatment.

    Martins said that under the Military Commissions Act of 2009, prosecutors are barred from using any evidence derived from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and that cases will be built on a host of other material.

    Critics in the human rights community “perform an invaluable role of accountability,” Martins said in a recent interview, adding that they are sometimes focused on “a vision of rights” that is not attainable. “I believe there is a narrow category of cases where military commissions are the appropriate choice and the best choice.”

    He said a hearing would be closed temporarily only to protect “sources and methods,” not to shield the government from any embarrassment stemming from the past actions of any agency.

    “I very much see the job in the tradition of the public prosecutor — dedicated to implementing the law, not winning at all costs,” Martins said. “There is definitely a vigorous debate [about commissions], but I’m seeing people who are listening. I’m hearing people say, ‘I didn’t know that.’ ”

    Last April, in the face of fierce congressional and local opposition, the Obama administration abandoned plans to move the trial of Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators to Manhattan. Officials at the Pentagon immediately began to scout for what Goldsmith called a “game-changer,” a figure with the kind of national security and intellectual chops to engage with the civil liberties establishment.

    “Mark Martins is one of the finest and smartest officers in the U.S. military,” said Jeh Johnson, general counsel at the Defense Department. “I urged his appointment because Mark was involved in the reforms we developed in 2009, and I knew he would bring the right sense of military justice and care for the credibility of the system.”

    Martins, 51, grew up in the military, the son of an Army neurosurgeon who became the head of neurosurgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. After a year at the University of Maryland, Martins was admitted to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated at the top of the Class of 1983. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford University, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics from 1983 to 1985.

    After a couple of years in the infantry and study at Harvard Law School, Martins rose through the ranks.

    He served as trial counsel at Fort Campbell, Ky., where he was assigned to a battalion of the 101st Airborne Division — at the time commanded by a lieutenant colonel by the name of David H. Petraeus. The two have remained close since, and Martins served with Petraeus, who is now director of the CIA, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    In a statement, Petraeus described Martins as a “true national asset” and a “once-in-a-generation officer.”

    After returning to Washington, Martins served on an interagency task force created by President Obama to look at future policy and helped draft the Military Commissions Act of 2009. In August 2009, he went to Afghanistan, where he was deputy commander of a joint task force running detention operations.

    “I’ve worked a lot of detention policy,” said Martins, noting that when his superiors offered him the Guantanamo position, “I could not parry the idea that I was well prepared for this.”

    Martins’s role as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo will be his last military assignment. He would almost certainly have been promoted to a two-star position next year, but he said that leaving before the major trials at Guantanamo were over would be disruptive.

    “To place myself beyond suspicion of self-advancing motives and to offer continuity to the prosecution team through at least the end of 2014,” he announced at Harvard, “I have recently requested ... that I not be considered for promotion.”
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


Similar Threads

  1. New York 9/11 ballot initiative
    By Diane in forum 9/11 Justice Forum
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 11-22-2008, 09:46 PM
  2. US foils 'New York tunnel plot'
    By Partridge in forum The New News
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 07-07-2006, 05:25 PM
  3. REOPEN911 Comes To New York
    By Gold9472 in forum 9/11 Justice Forum
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 11-06-2005, 04:56 PM
  4. 29% Of New York Voters Like Dubya
    By Gold9472 in forum The New News
    Replies: 4
    Last Post: 10-05-2005, 07:32 PM
  5. Body Parts Rain Down on New York
    By beltman713 in forum The New News
    Replies: 0
    Last Post: 06-09-2005, 04:04 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •