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Thread: Military Death Penalty Trial Delayed in 2001 NY 911 Attacks for Mastermind and Four Others

  1. #31
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Will accused 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ever come to trial?

    The chief suspect in the attacks that changed the world will spend another anniversary in Guantánamo. His own lawyer says he may die before he is tried

    By Joanna Walters
    The Guardian

    Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
    , the accused “architect” of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, will spend the 16th anniversary of the atrocity sitting in Guantánamo Bay, preparing for his 25th pre-trial hearing.

    That hearing will take place next month. Military prosecutors’ latest estimate is that jury selection in Mohammed’s terrorism trial will begin in January 2019. Most interested experts think that is wildly optimistic and are asking if a man arrested in Pakistan in 2003 will ever stand trial at all.

    “It will take another two, three or four years to get the case to trial and it will take a year or so to try,” the 53-year-old’s lawyer, David Nevin, told the Guardian.

    Nevin estimated there would likely follow an initial appeal that could take five years, then that appeal going up to the circuit court – another three or four years – and, maybe four years after that, a conclusion in the US supreme court up to 18 years’ from now – 34 years after the attacks.

    “There’s every possibility that my client will die in prison before this process is completed,” said Nevin.

    “I don’t have the life expectancy statistics of someone in a US prison, also taking into account it would be someone who’s been tortured, but I’m sure it’s lower than normal. So you have to ask, why exactly are we doing this, or doing it in this way? We are spending millions and millions of [public] dollars every week for something that could be pointless.”

    Terry McDermott, a co-author of the book The Hunt for KSM, attended Mohammed’s 24th pre-trial hearing last month.

    “KSM already looks like he’s 83, he’s like a little old man,” he said. “He still has black eyebrows and he dyes his beard with henna but his hair is completely white. It’s that vision of the banality of evil.”

    A small group of relatives of those who died on 9/11 also attended the August hearing. The case, handled by a military tribunal, seemed as far from conclusion as ever. The defense is campaigning to have the judge and prosecutors disqualified, accusing them of secretly allowing the dismantling of one of America’s overseas covert “black sites” where Mohammed is believed to have been persistently tortured, thus destroying vital evidence. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty, which the defense bitterly opposes.

    Ellen Judd, 66, a Canadian anthropology professor at the University of Manitoba, attended the hearing and watched Mohammed and his four co-defendants through a triple-layered glass partition.

    “It took a lot to steel myself for that,” she told the Guardian.

    When hijackers flew passenger jets into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, killing more than 2,700 people, Judd lost her partner of 15 years, Christine Egan.

    Egan’s brother worked in one of the towers. She had chosen to visit him that morning. Egan, 55, and her brother, originally from Hull in England, were both killed. Egan had worked in healthcare and research among Inuit communities in northern Canada.

    “The sense of loss is never over,” said Judd, adding that the presence of relatives at the court hearings was important. “It’s part of the grieving process, part of remembrance but it’s also to witness,” she said.

    She wants the court to do its job and bring the case to conclusion, she said, but thinks the whole process of justice via a military commission falls short.

    “I would have preferred something much more expansive,” she said, “a framework to arrive at how this all happened and routes to do something to resolve conflict in the world not perpetuate it. Something more like an international criminal tribunal.”

    Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University school of law in New York, argues that Mohammed’s case should be brought back into the US civilian court system, where it was on the verge of being tried in 2009, until the government decided it was altogether too risky to do so.

    Despite a later change in the law to prevent Guantánamo detainees from being brought to the US proper, she believes KSM and the other defendants should be tried in a New York or Washington federal court by video link.

    “We have to try them,” she said. “This delay is shameful. It’s destructive and it casts a shadow over the American justice system. As a nation, you cannot bring closure to the events of 9/11 while you have people in custody awaiting trial on this. The American people are being deprived of justice.”

    Nevin would not comment on what could push the legal process forward. The defense team’s adamant opposition to the death penalty in the case, however, could could offer leverage.

    McDermott said he could imagine a deal being struck where the defense gives up its campaign to remove the judge and prosecutors, in return for the government dropping its insistence on trying a capital case.

    In a 26-page transcript released by the Pentagon in 2007, Mohammed is cited as confessing to having decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl and claiming responsibility for dozens of terrorist attacks and plots.

    “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he is quoted as saying.

    However, he has not yet formally entered a plea and it is unclear how much evidence there will be that is not tainted by allegations of torture. That and the problem of huge amounts of classified material are two issues slowing the case and hampering its chances of ever being brought back to a civilian court, Nevin said.

    Michael Bachrach, an attorney who represented Ahmed Ghailani, the Tanzanian al-Qaida terrorist convicted in New York in 2010 for his part in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, disagreed.

    “Mohammed should have been brought to trial years ago,” he said. “I believe he could get a fair trial in federal court – the Ghailani case proved that. We had classified and unclassified material involved, torture involved, and the jury saw what was necessary for them to see.

    “Can Mohammed get a fair trail by military commission? I’m not as confident about that.”

    Ghailani was acquitted on 284 of 285 charges but convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

    “I think it’s a true example of justice being done,” said Bachrach.

    What did he think about the seeming endlessness of the KSM case?

    “Truly awful.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...l-9-11-attacks
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  2. #32
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    With the upcoming Military Death Penalty Trial set for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) due to begin in January 2019 held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the trial is expected to last several weeks due to the amount of 9/11 victims. 2,987 people were killed on September 11, 2001. Unsure what goes for Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Walid bin-Attash...

  3. #33
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    Why these 911 monsters still haven't faced a trial

    By Max Jaeger
    New York Post

    They say the wheels of justice turn slowly — but now they’ve ground to a virtual halt.

    Seventeen years after they helped murder 2,977 innocents in the worst terrorist attack on US soil, five 9/11 suspects — including self-avowed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — have not faced trial.

    Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for all five men and have attempted for years to try the case, but a constantly shifting venue, questions over coerced evidence and the limitations of holding trials at Guantanamo Bay have slowed the case to a crawl.

    Victims’ families say the legal limbo puts them through hell.

    “It’s outrageous the length of time this has taken,” Debby Jenkins, who lost her brother Joseph Jenkins in the World Trade Center attacks, told The Post on Monday.

    “Thousands and thousands of people have been affected. Families have been destroyed. There will never be closure, but we would just love to see justice served. That’s what we’re waiting for.”

    Alice Hoagland, whose son Mark Bingham led the attempt to retake hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, said she respects due process but wants the suspects executed — the sooner the better.

    “These people were instrumental in torturing and killing almost 3,000 people — one of whom was my son,” she told The Post on Monday. “They’re creepy people, and they murdered a lot of us, and they deserve to suffer and die.”

    The US had captured Mohammed and the four accomplices by 2003. They were shuffled among CIA “black sites” for interrogation before being arraigned in 2008.

    But President Barack Obama suspended the case when he entered office, and in 2010, the Pentagon dismissed the charges without prejudice, meaning the men could be charged again later.

    Then-Attorney General Eric Holder tried to move the case to Manhattan federal court, but the plan was nixed, and the administration refiled charges at the military court at Guantanamo.

    The men were arraigned in 2012, and what has followed has been an endless procession of pretrial hearings over their treatment in captivity and whether evidence gleaned using “enhanced interrogation” tactics was usable.

    “The fact that we can’t try these individuals is such an incalculable disservice to the citizens of this country,” said Karen Greenberg, director of The Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.

    "The system is just flawed in every way.”

    In the latest setback, the military judge who had overseen the case since its inception stepped down. Now his replacement, Marine Col. Keith Parrella, 44, has to read up on 20,000 pages of transcripts, plus an unknown number of classified records, according to the Miami Herald.

    With more pretrial hearings scheduled for 2019, a trial is not expected to begin before 2020, the Herald reported.

    “If you look at it historically, how long its taking, I’m not confident it would be 2020,” Jenkins said. “I’d like to see that happen.”

    Just two people have been sentenced in connection with 9/11 — Zacarias Moussaoui and Mounir el-Motassadeq.

    Moussaoui pleaded guilty in 2005 to six terrorism-related conspiracy charges tied to 9/11 and is serving life in prison without parole.

    In 2006, German courts convicted el-Motassadeq on 246 counts of accessory to murder for providing financial assistance to the 9/11 hijackers. He got 15 years in prison.

    The five suspects faced yet another hearing Monday.

    Mohammed’s lawyer, David Nevin, did not return a request for comment. But Greenberg said even the defense attorneys want to get the trial over with.

    “They’re the only defense attorneys asking for their clients to be tried,” Greenberg said.

    https://nypost.com/2018/09/10/why-th...faced-a-trial/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #34
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    Guantanamo Hearing in Sept. 11 Case Abruptly Ends

    The Associated Press

    GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — A pretrial hearing in the Sept. 11 terrorism case at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ended abruptly ahead of schedule Tuesday because of what an official says is a medical issue involving the military judge.

    The judge, Marine Col. Keith Parrella, would be leaving the base, said Ronald Flesvig, a spokesman for the Guantanamo military commission. He did not disclose details of the medical issue that ended what had been planned as a weeklong hearing.

    Parrella had been scheduled to hold a hearing behind closed doors Wednesday to take testimony from a former CIA interpreter at a clandestine detention facility where at least two of the five defendants had been held under what the government called its "enhanced" interrogation and detention program. Defense lawyers argued unsuccessfully Tuesday to have the hearing remain open.

    The judge's departure was the latest of many delays in long-stalled proceedings against Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, and four co-defendants.

    The five were arraigned in May 2012 before a military commission on charges that include terrorism and nearly 3,000 counts of murder in violation of the laws of war for their alleged roles helping to plan and providing logistical support to the plot. They could get the death penalty if convicted.

    A trial date has not been set. The next pretrial hearing will be in March at the base in Cuba.

    https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...-11-trial.html

  5. #35
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Death-penalty trial for accused 9/11 mastermind Sheikh Mohammed in 2021

    The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks will face a death penalty trial in 2021

    By Web Desk
    The Week

    Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was first picked up by the CIA in the city of Rawalpindi, Pakistan, after a joint operation by the US agency and Pakistan’s ISI in 2003. He was then moved to overseas prison ‘black sites’ in Afghanistan, Poland and finally, Guantanamo Bay.

    In 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report named him “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks”. But, at Guantanamo in 2007, he also confessed to having masterminded the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing that killed six, the failed 2001 shoe bombing attempt, the 2002 Bali night club bombings that killed 202 and the murder of Daniel Pearl in the same year.

    In addition, he confessed to having plotted to assassinate a list of figures including Pope John Paul II, former US Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.

    The next year, Sheikh Mohammed was charged with war crimes, terrorism, and 2,973 counts of murder (all the deaths from the 9/11 attacks). For him and the four others accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, the US government has sought the death penalty.

    Now, 12 years after his infamous confession — which drew criticism for the alleged use of torture in getting it out of him — a military judge has set Jan 11, 2021, as the start date for his joint death-penalty trial with the four others accused of plotting the 9/11 attack. The trial will take place at Guantanamo Bay itself. This is the first time that a start-date has been set for the death penalty trial since Sheikh Mohammad was arraigned by a military court in 2012.

    The long-wound trial of Sheikh Mohammed has taken place amidst several changes to and scrutiny over the US legal system. Prisoners like Sheikh Mohammed and the others who end up in Guantanamo Bay were at once treated as aliens and as enemy combatants, lacking the rights of Americans, but also lacking the legal ability to do anything about it.

    In 2008, Boumediene v. Bush established that such prisoners would also be entitled to habeas corpus rights, and put to question the legalities of processes that were used on many prisoners in the early days of the War on Terror.

    In 2009, a government memo was released that showed that Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times in a single month in 2003. The Obama administration stopped their prosecution under a military court with plans to move it to civilian court.

    However, this decision was overturned two years later, with their trial fixed for a military court with several more protections.

    In 2012, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA Torture was released, revealing troves of details about the CIA's use of torture and its 'Rendition, Detention and Interrogation' network of secret prisons — one of whose prisoners was Sheikh Mohammed.

    That same year, a special national security military courtroom arraigned Sheikh Mohammed and four others.

    While the study and capture of Sheikh Mohammed has led to many questions being raised over the extra-legal use of torture by the CIA, Sheikh Mohammed himself has confessed numerous times since 2002, and he was linked to every other person involved in the attacks. As recently as 2012, he has expressed no remorse for his actions.

    Nonetheless, on August 20, a military judge in the case of United States of America vs Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih, Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ail, Mustafa Ahmed Adam and Al Hawsawi ruled that the statements given by Sheikh Mohammed to the FBI following his detention and under torture would be thrown out.

    In July of 2019, Sheikh Khalid expressed his willingness to assist a civil lawsuit against Saudi Arabia by the families of 9/11 victims, on condition that the death penalty against him be dropped.

    His death penalty trial, along with that of the four others convicted in the case, was part of a 10-page trial scheduling order according to the New York Times. The order includes several deadlines to be met towards the trial date, with a timetable including a list of materials that prosecuters must provide the legal defence team with by October 1.

    https://www.theweek.in/news/world/20...d-in-2021.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  6. #36
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Being in custody for 18 years before ever being convicted of a crime is one of hell of a good appeal to get a court to throw out whatever sentence you receive. They should've just chucked him out of a heli over the ocean like they did with Bin Laden.
    Last edited by Mike; 07-22-2021 at 03:31 PM.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #37
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    Second CIA contractor testifies in 9/11 case at Guantanamo

    A former CIA contractor who helped design the agency’s harsh interrogation program following the Sept. 11 attacks pushed back Friday on the notion that the survival training for U.S. service members, which became the basis for the “enhanced” techniques used on American captives, amounted to torture.

    John Bruce Jessen, a former Air Force psychologist, said the survival training provided to American pilots and other members of the military was intended to help them recover more quickly if they were subjected to brutal treatment when captured.

    “The U.S. government wouldn’t torture their own people,” he said. The techniques “were designed to teach students they could handle tough times.“

    Jessen was called as a witness by lawyers for the Guantanamo prisoners facing war crimes charges for their alleged roles in the Sept. 11 plot. His early testimony focused on the roots of what Bush administration officials called “enhanced interrogation“ and many critics call torture.

    I t’s an important issue now as lawyers for the five men charged in the attacks seek to exclude a key piece of evidence against them: statements they gave voluntarily to FBI agents after they were moved from CIA custody to Guantanamo in September 2006. Their death penalty trial is scheduled to start at the base next January.

    Jessen took the stand after his partner, fellow former contractor James Mitchell, testified over eight days, providing the first public details about a CIA interrogation program that has long been shrouded in secrecy.

    As he took the stand Friday morning, Jessen made it clear that his participation was limited. “My position is that I’ll come for two weeks and that is all and then I’m done,” he said soon after taking the stand. “I hope you’ll remember that.”

    A retired psychologist who lives in Washington state, Jessen created the interrogation program with Mitchell based on the experience both men had training Air Force pilots to put up resistance to the enemy if captured. Their company received $81 million from the CIA, according to a 2014 Senate report on the program.

    Mitchell earlier defended the interrogation program, though he conceded that some interrogators used unapproved methods or that some techniques were used even when not necessary because detainees were cooperating.

    The methods they developed included sleep deprivation for days at a time, confinement in small spaces, painful shackling, forced standing in the nude, being plunged into icy water and the simulated drowning known as waterboarding,

    Mitchell insisted the overall goal of the program was to prevent another terrorist attack. “I felt my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us,” he said.

    Air Force Col. Shane Cohen, the judge, said he will ultimately decide how to characterize the treatment the men were subjected to in various clandestine CIA detention facilities before they were taken to Guantanamo in September 2006. They are now among the 40 prisoners still held at the base.

    “The opinion of the Department of Justice, the attorney general, or even the president of the United States is not binding on me,“ Cohen said during Mitchell’s testimony.

    His decision could have a significant effect on what evidence the government can present in a case that has stalled in pretrial hearings since the May 2012 arraignment of the defendants, who include Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

    The proceedings at Guantanamo were being transmitted to several government installations in the U.S., including Fort Meade, Maryland, where they were viewed by The Associated Press.

    https://www.spokesman.com/stories/20...1-case-at-gua/
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  8. #38
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    With a Year Until Guantánamo’s 9/11 Trial, the Military Has a Long To-Do List

    The judge has set next January to begin jury selection in the long-awaited trial of 5 men accused of plotting the terrorist attacks. But big logistical challenges remain.

    This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

    After a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck in the Caribbean, the Navy captain in charge of this remote Pentagon outpost declared a tsunami warning. Word reached the base school and boats on the bay but never got to the war court, where pretrial hearings were underway in the case of the 5 men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

    “It was a significant logistical problem that nobody in the court knew,” James G. Connell III, a defense lawyer who had ducked under his courtroom table when the first temblor rolled through, protested to the judge the next day.

    Col. W. Shane Cohen, the military judge, has scheduled jury selection for the death-penalty trial to begin early next year. It will be by far the most prominent and complex legal proceeding in the nearly 2 decades since the first prisoners arrived at the base. And Guantánamo is not yet ready.

    Extending the emergency early-warning system to the courtroom is among the more straightforward tasks on the base’s to-do list. Dealing with a substantial influx of people to the base — potential jurors, legal teams, journalists and relatives of victims, among others — is among the biggest. Flights and housing have to be sorted out, including where to stage hundreds of would-be jurors and then, once chosen, where to sequester the jury of 12 military officers plus alternates for what is projected to be a 9-month trial.

    One idea under consideration is to lease a “berthing barge” for the jurors. It could be tied up in the port and use base power, water and sewage — and then sail away if Guantánamo is in the path of a hurricane, an annual seasonal concern. Negotiations are still underway between the Pentagon headquarters of the war court and the base commander on what facilities and services the Navy will make available for the trial. For past trials, the court kept jurors in a hotel on the remote, underdeveloped Leeward side of the base and shuttled them each day across the bay in a utility boat provided by the base. But the site is now designated as a potential shelter for people from around the Caribbean in the event of a humanitarian disaster, leaving uncertain whether that part of the base will be available.

    The legal teams of the five defendants are expanding, and the new staff members will require security clearances, a monthslong process. Some proposed witnesses and consultants will require security checks and clearances too. Given the risk of hurricanes and other natural disasters, evacuation plans have to be devised, and the judge has asked prosecutors to ensure that military service members who wind up on duty here for the duration of the trial continue to draw their stateside housing allowances.

    Managing health issues is a particular concern. The prosecution is planning for frail and elderly family members of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to be among the people it shuttles to the base weekly to watch the proceedings.

    But Guantánamo is remote and its small, community-style hospital evacuates most complicated cases to the United States. A year ago, Colonel Cohen’s predecessor, Col. Keith A. Parrella, waited 16 hours for a medevac flight to emergency eye surgery in Miami after the base hospital said he had a detaching retina.

    Although the court has been functioning since 2004 in the same place — a cracked, damaged obsolete air field behind an Army checkpoint — the weather periodically overwhelms operations, even when relatively few people are present.

    Latrine trailers flood in summer tropical storms. Last summer, people at the court waded through excrement until some Air Force engineers on temporary duty at Guantánamo hammered together wooden pallets for people to walk on. Driving rain on the court’s corrugated metal roof drowns out the proceedings, forcing a recess. Unusually strong January winds shredded netting fastened to razor-wire-topped fencing around the court.

    There is still doubt about when the trial will begin. There are complex legal issues being litigated, and the calendar of hearings for the rest of 2020 is already tight. Appeals of fundamental issues to the war court review panel or federal courts could cause delays.

    But if the schedule sticks, the proceedings should begin early next year against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, and four men accused of being his accomplices.

    Some notable court participants, including the judge, some lawyers, witnesses and relatives of the Sept. 11 victims are currently housed in a former four-story barracks for enlisted sailors, essentially one-room, motel-style accommodations. The building is a two-minute walk to the Officers Club, a small bar where, recently, both the psychologists who waterboarded a Guantánamo prisoner for the C.I.A. and the prisoner’s lawyer visited at the same time.

    So the judge has ordered a plan for how to minimize interaction among certain participants of the trial during the long months on the cramped base, which has one McDonald’s, 2 bars, 3 Navy cafeterias and a fine-dining restaurant where court participants often rub elbows at the all-you-can-eat $16 Sunday brunch buffet.

    Other people attending the trial, including interpreters, military paralegals, court stenographers, journalists and legal observers, are housed in a crude trailer park and tent city behind the courthouse, which may have to be expanded.

    More construction is under consideration, including shipping modular construction to the base by barge and adding closed-circuit feeds of the proceedings to defense and prosecution offices in Virginia, so some legal staff members can work remotely.

    Court spokesmen said no plans were final, and no cost estimates were available.

    Even the plan for handling journalists is in flux. The judge has ordered prosecutors to tell him how the Pentagon will handle interest by the news media, which is expected to swell with the start of a trial.

    For years, reporters worked out of several wooden sheds that the Navy built inside an old hangar near the courthouse, including a $49,000 staging site for news conferences that transmitted briefings to the United States for journalists not present at Guantánamo. But the roof has been declared unstable and the hangar off-limits to reporters, leaving safe work space for perhaps 20 journalists, down from 60 when the defendants were arraigned in 2012.

    Also yet to be decided is how to handle the family members of the 2,976 people who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, and a recent expansion of the victim-witness program to include the relatives of rescue workers who subsequently died of diseases related to working at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center.

    Last year, trial planners kicked around the idea of, for the trial, eliminating the current system that permits the prosecution to host up to 10 family members and companions at Guantánamo during hearing weeks. Instead, the Office of Military Commissions would pay for transportation, rooms and meals at a viewing location in the United States.

    That idea is no longer under consideration, people involved in the process say, but the military is considering adding more closed-circuit viewing sites for family members.

    Currently, family members of victims can watch the proceedings at military bases in New York, Maryland, Massachusetts and Virginia. Expansion is under consideration to the West Coast, where all four of the planes that were hijacked on Sept. 11 were bound, and to Florida, where some family members have retired.

    (source: New York Times)
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  9. #39
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    Prosecutors Struggle to Resume Guantánamo Trials

    The coronavirus pandemic is forcing the military to consider creating a quarantine zone at the court compound to allow proceedings to continue in the case of the alleged 9/11 plotters.

    This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

    Military prosecutors struggling to restart war crimes tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the midst of the pandemic are proposing to transform the crude court compound of tents and trailers into a quarantine zone.

    The plan would airlift about 100 people from across the United States to Guantánamo on Sept. 5 — everyone bound for the courtroom, except the defendants — and then isolate them for two weeks at the makeshift site called Camp Justice. Then the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would be brought from the prison to the courtroom to begin 6 weeks of hearings in the case, from Sept. 21 to Nov. 3, the height of hurricane season.

    Efforts to get the hearings going again face several obstacles. Guantánamo has no capacity for widespread coronavirus testing and must send any samples to labs in the United States to get results. The naval base that houses the courtroom and the prison has limited health care facilities. And the case currently lacks a full-time judge.

    A prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett, notified defense lawyers last week of the planning, which he said would consolidate court hearings and personnel to prevent “posing unnecessary risk to the resident base population of 6,000 people.”

    Earlier proposals called for key participants to be quarantined individually around the base in motel-style guest quarters and barracks, rather than in 50 2-person trailers that require renovation.

    Left unclear is how, during their 2 weeks of quarantine, the legal teams would prepare for pretrial hearings in the death-penalty case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 4 other men on charges they conspired in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

    Even in the best of times it is not easy to hold war court hearings at Guantánamo Bay. The coronavirus crisis has magnified the challenge.

    The 45-square-mile U.S. base at Guantánamo, behind a Cuban minefield, functions like a small American town, with a 12-bed hospital, a school system, bars, a seaport and scattered trailer parks because of a shortage of permanent housing. Participants in the court proceedings except the defendants fly in regularly from the mainland.

    For the pandemic, the military stopped most flights, instituted a quarantine for new arrivals and imposed a blackout on information after disclosing two cases in the spring. It is more isolated than ever.

    A boiler broke at the base’s top-secret Camp 7 prison in June and it took the military nearly 2 months to get a spare part to the island, leaving high-value prisoners and their guards without hot water at a time of strict hygiene guidelines to cope with the coronavirus.

    Now, the military is soliciting bids from private contractors to prefabricate, ship and install a second national security courtroom at the compound. Interested contractors must reach the base by early August to quarantine for 2 weeks before a site visit the week of Aug. 17.

    The bid will be awarded Nov. 30, to complete work within 6 months, a timetable that would be hard to meet without quarantines and the virus. The new courtroom would accommodate a 2nd military judge to hold hearings in Guantánamo’s other death-penalty case — against a Saudi man accused of orchestrating the Qaeda bombing of the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole off Yemen in 2000.

    But hearings in that case are also on hold. Lawyers for the defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, notified the military judge recently that the prisoner’s 67-year-old capital lawyer is unable to travel from his home in South Florida, a coronavirus hot zone, and younger defense team members near the Pentagon are working from home because their work is not deemed essential enough to merit access to military child care.

    Morris D. Davis, a retired colonel and a former chief prosecutor who quit the job in a dispute in 2007 — while Camp Justice, which was intended to last 5 years, was under construction — said hurricane season was always a concern in “trying to do a terrorism trial on a military base in Cuba.”

    “That was a novel and herculean task in and of itself without adding Covid-19 on top of it,” he said.

    Prosecutors disclosed the Camp Justice quarantine plan days after a key capital defense lawyer who is new to the Sept. 11 case filed notice at the court that, after work and travel eventually return to normal, he would need 30 months to prepare for trial.

    Complications had already cast doubt on whether the Sept. 11 trial, predicted to last more than a year, would begin by the 20th anniversary of the attacks, in 2021. Most classified defense work has been on hold since virus-related restrictions paralyzed travel for many of the lawyers, who are spread across the country.

    The lawyer, David I. Bruck, 70, one of the nation’s leading capital defense lawyers, joined the case in April to replace a 75-year-old defense lawyer who left the team representing one of the defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, for health reasons. But Mr. Bruck, who is based in Virginia, has not yet received a security clearance and has not been able to travel to Guantánamo to meet Mr. bin al-Shibh, who is accused of being a deputy to Mr. Mohammed in the Sept. 11 hijacking plot.

    None of the defense lawyers have met personally with any of the 40 wartime detainees at Guantánamo since the start of the outbreak because they are considered particularly vulnerable if they are infected. All the detainees are in their second decade of custody and many have conditions that put them at high risk, including obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.

    A New York City criminal defense lawyer who this year shared a 6-man tent at Camp Justice to observe a session of the case for the American Bar Association likened the prosecution plan to a modification of the way professional sports leagues are resuming games — but on a naval base in Cuba without the testing and medical care, and with greater risk and lawyers in their 60s and 70s.

    “In basketball, a guy gets sick they take him out and test everybody twice in 48 hours,” said Joshua L. Dratel, who defended a case at the Guantánamo war court in 2006 and 2007, when lawyers were put up in officers’ quarters. “What if 20 people got sick at Camp Justice? Could the hospital even handle it?”

    The proposal for a quarantine starting in September is part of a flurry of efforts by the prosecutors to resume hearings in all four active war crimes cases after a series of setbacks and obstacles — including an adverse court ruling against the prosecution in a rare case of a prisoner who has cooperated with the prosecution.

    The last hearing at the court compound was held in late February in the case of Majid Khan, a confessed Qaeda courier who turned government witness in 2012 but who has yet to testify in a single case. The judge in that case, Col. Douglas K. Watkins, recently rebuked prosecutors for withholding evidence and awarded Mr. Khan a year off his ultimate sentence.

    Colonel Watkins accused the government of “gamesmanship” in the ruling on July 13, a month after another upset to the prosecution that concluded that tribunal judges could award sentencing credit for torture or other abuse in U.S. military custody.

    “Being accused of playing hide the ball is pretty toxic,” said David C. Iglesias, a retired Navy captain who has worked as both the U.S. attorney in New Mexico and a supervising prosecutor at Guantánamo.

    (source: New York Times)
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  10. #40
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    The delay for the trial was indefinitely extended on December 18 2020.

    https://www.mc.mil/Portals/0/pdfs/KS...th%20Sup)).pdf
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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