Long fight predicted in Guantanamo Sept. 11 case

BEN FOX

Asso­ci­ated Press

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The U.S. has finally started the pros­e­cu­tion of five Guan­tanamo Bay pris­on­ers charged in the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 peo­ple, but the trial won’t be start­ing any­time soon, and both sides said Sun­day that the case could con­tinue for years.

Defense lawyer James Con­nell said a ten­ta­tive trial date of May 2013 is a “place­holder” until a true date can be set for the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mas­ter­mind of the attacks, and his co-defendants.

“It’s going to take time,” said the chief pros­e­cu­tor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Mar­tins, who said he expects to bat­tle a bar­rage of defense motions before the case goes to trial.

“I am get­ting ready for hun­dreds of motions because we want them to shoot every­thing they can shoot at us,” he said.

Saturday’s arraign­ment lasted 13 hours, includ­ing meal and prayer breaks, as the accused appeared to make a con­certed effort to stall the ini­tial hear­ing, which didn’t end until almost 11 p.m.

“Every­one is frus­trated by the delay,” Mar­tins said on Sun­day. He noted that the civil­ian trial of con­victed Sept. 11 con­spir­a­tor Zacarias Mous­saoui took four years, and he pleaded guilty in 2006 before being sen­tenced to life in prison.

On Sat­ur­day, Mohammed and his co-defendants refused to respond to the judge or use the court’s trans­la­tion sys­tem and one of the men demanded a lengthy read­ing of the charges. Con­nell called the tac­tics “peace­ful resis­tance to an unjust system.”

The arraign­ment, Con­nell said, “demon­strates that this will be a long, hard-fought but peace­ful strug­gle against secrecy, tor­ture and the mis­guided insti­tu­tion of the mil­i­tary commissions.”

The defen­dants’ actions out­raged rel­a­tives of the victims.

“They’re engag­ing in jihad in a court­room,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles, was the pilot of the plane that flew into the Pen­ta­gon. She watched the pro­ceed­ing from Brook­lyn on one of the closed-circuit video feeds around the United States.

A hand­ful of those who lost fam­ily mem­bers in the attacks were selected by a lot­tery and flown to watch the pro­ceed­ings at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, where Mohammed and his co-defendants put off their pleas until a later date.

They face 2,976 counts of mur­der and ter­ror­ism in the 2001 attacks that sent hijacked jet­lin­ers into New York’s World Trade Cen­ter and the Pen­ta­gon. The charges carry the death penalty.

The detainees’ lawyers spent hours ques­tion­ing the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, about his qual­i­fi­ca­tions to hear the case and sug­gested their clients were being mis­treated at the hear­ing, in a strat­egy that could pave the way for future appeals. Mohammed was sub­jected to a strip search and “inflam­ma­tory and unnec­es­sary” treat­ment before court, said his attor­ney, David Nevin.

It was the defen­dants’ first appear­ance in more than three years after stalled efforts to try them for the ter­ror attacks.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion renewed plans to try the men at Guan­tanamo Bay after a bid to try the men in New York City blocks from the trade cen­ter site hit polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. Offi­cials adopted new rules with Con­gress that for­bade tes­ti­mony obtained through tor­ture or cruel treat­ment, and they now say that defen­dants could be tried as fairly here as in a civil­ian court.

Nevin said it would be impos­si­ble to present tes­ti­mony against his client that wasn’t cor­rupted by treat­ment that he says amounted tor­ture. “It’s not pos­si­ble to untaint the evi­dence any more than it is to unring a bell.”

Eddie Bracken of Staten Island, New York, was one of the vic­tims’ rel­a­tives allowed to attend the hear­ing, and said it was impor­tant to him to see the peo­ple accused of killing his sis­ter, Lucy Fish­man, a Brook­lyn mother of two who worked in the World Trade Center.

He said he came away impressed by the mil­i­tary jus­tice sys­tem, with defense lawyers putting up an aggres­sive defense.

“If they had done this in another coun­try it would have been a dif­fer­ent story,” Bracken said Sun­day. “But this is America.”

Human rights groups and defense lawyers say the secrecy of Guan­tanamo and the mil­i­tary tri­bunals will make it impos­si­ble for the defense. They argued the U.S. kept the case out of civil­ian court to pre­vent dis­clo­sure of the treat­ment of pris­on­ers like Mohammed, who was water­boarded 183 times.

Attor­ney Gen­eral Eric Holder announced in 2009 that Mohammed and his co-defendants would be tried blocks from the site of the destroyed trade cen­ter in down­town Man­hat­tan, but the plan was shelved after New York offi­cials cited huge costs to secure the neigh­bor­hood and fam­ily oppo­si­tion to try­ing the sus­pects in the U.S.

Con­gress then blocked the trans­fer of any pris­on­ers from Guan­tanamo to the U.S., forc­ing the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to refile the charges under a reformed mil­i­tary com­mis­sion system.

Mohammed, a Pak­istani cit­i­zen who grew up in Kuwait and attended col­lege in Greens­boro, North Car­olina, has admit­ted to mil­i­tary author­i­ties that he was respon­si­ble for the Sept. 11 attacks “from A to Z,” as well as about 30 other plots, and that he per­son­ally killed Wall Street Jour­nal reporter Daniel Pearl. Mohammed was cap­tured in 2003 in Pakistan.

Ramzi Binal­shibh was allegedly cho­sen to be a hijacker but couldn’t get a U.S. visa and ended up pro­vid­ing assis­tance such as find­ing flight schools. Walid bin Attash, also from Yemen, allegedly ran an al-Qaida train­ing camp in Afghanistan and researched flight sim­u­la­tors and timeta­bles. Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi is a Saudi accused of help­ing the hijack­ers with money, West­ern cloth­ing, traveler’s checks and credit cards. Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, a Pak­istani national and nephew of Mohammed, allegedly pro­vided money to the hijackers.

Dur­ing the failed first effort to pros­e­cute the men at the base in Cuba, Mohammed mocked the tri­bunal and said he and his co-defendants would plead guilty and wel­come exe­cu­tion. The lawyers’ state­ments indi­cate that plan has changed.

Posted by AP News on May 6 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.