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

  1. #21
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    FBI leak probe shuts down 9/11 case at Guantanamo

    An apparent FBI investigation has at least temporarily shut down the effort to try five Guantanamo Bay prisoners by military commission for the Sept. 11 terror attack.

    The U.S. government brought about 200 people to the U.S. base in Cuba for a hearing into whether one defendant is mentally competent to stand trial in the death penalty case.

    But that plan has been dashed by the revelation that the FBI is investigating how the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attack was able to send two letters and an essay out of the prison without passing through a security review.

    The judge began an inquiry Tuesday into the FBI investigation and how it may affect the case over despite a prosecution request to go ahead with the mental competency hearing.

    http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/...at-guantanamo/
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  2. #22
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    Judge cancels this month’s 9/11 hearing at Guantánamo

    Military judges have canceled three war court hearings in a row, effectively leaving Guantánamo’s Camp Justice dark for two months and signaling how much the war crimes cases are still a work in progress.

    On Friday, according to attorneys who have seen the order, the Sept. 11 trial judge canceled hearings planned for April 20-24 at the war-court compound in Cuba. Army Col. James L. Pohl, the judge, cited a secret filing that day by a Justice Department team reporting to him about the circumstances of a supposedly since-closed FBI probe of defense attorneys.

    Pohl also cited the case prosecutor’s continuing opposition to his judicial order separating defendant Ramzi bin al Shibh from the case to make progress toward the trials of the other four men.

    Accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his alleged accomplices were last in court February when hearings were disrupted by Bin al Shibh’s disclosure that a Pentagon-paid, defense interpreter had earlier worked for the CIA in their secret prison network, where the men were tortured.

    Their next hearing in the death-penalty case is scheduled for June 1-5.

    Progress has also been slowed while attorneys and the judge waited for release of a portion of the so-called Senate Torture Report that described in part what agents did to the five men in the CIA prison network between 2002 or 2003 and 2006.

    Defense attorneys now want the rest of the report, which is classified. Prosecutors say they are studying it to decide which portions the defense lawyers should see.

    Earlier, another judge, Air Force Col. Vance H. Spath, canceled this week’s pretrial hearing in the USS Cole case after prosecutors appealed his rejection of a prosecution theory in the case alleging “wanton disregard” for the safety of Yemeni port workers in Aden at the time of al-Qaida’s Oct. 12, 2000 suicide bombing. Seventeen U.S. sailors died in the attack and prosecutors want to bring witnesses that widen the victim pool beyond the American service members.

    Prosecutors filed their appeal to a Pentagon panel whose makeup the Nashiri defense attorneys are challenging as illegitimate at a federal appeals court.

    Spath last held court the first week in March in the case of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, focusing on a since revoked order to force judges to move to Guantánamo permanently until they wrap up their trials. Spath ruled the order created an appearance of unlawful influence by suggesting the judges could be rushed to justice.

    Nashiri is next due back at the court May 4-15 for more pretrial hearings.

    Separately, the judge in the war court’s third case had earlier canceled pretrial hearings for an alleged al-Qaida commander, Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, that were scheduled for March 23-25.

    That judge, Navy Capt. J.K. Waits, had been expected to hear defense lawyers argue that the government committed unlawful influence with the rescinded relocation order. But he canceled the hearings a day before the architect of the move-in order resigned, without explanation.

    Waits is based in Italy and hears U.S. Marine Corps and Navy cases as a European and Middle East circuit judge when not at Guantánamo. Hadi’s case is still in the pretrial phase as lawyers haggle over what aspects of the law apply, what evidence an eventual jury will see, and Hadi’s circumstances of confinement. The Iraqi won, and then lost, a court order forbidding women guards to handle him, claiming a religious accommodation.

    Hadi and Waits are due back at Camp Justice May 25-29.

    http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nati...#storylink=cpy
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  3. #23
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Lawyers For Sept. 11 Plotters Try To Save Defendants From Death Penalty

    Defense attorneys in the military commissions of the alleged 9/11 plotters are throwing up roadblock after roadblock to increase the chances of saving their clients from the death penalty. The government could make the case go a lot quicker, they say, if prosecutors took that danger off the table.

    RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

    The trial of Guantanamo Bay detainees has been roiled by a dispute over destruction of evidence, not evidence related to the death of Americans in the 9/11 attack, but rather evidence related to the torture of the men accused of orchestrating that attack. From the war court at Guantanamo, NPR's Arun Rath reports.

    ARUN RATH, BYLINE: Defense lawyers in the 9/11 trial want to talk about torture for a simple reason, it could save their clients' lives. Assuming the men are convicted, their abuse in custody could constitute outrageous conduct by the government, a solid legal argument against execution. So when it comes to the CIA's rendition, detention and interrogation program, the defense wants as much detail as they can get.

    MARK MARTINS: You're entitled to the information. If you have a legally cognizable defense, you want to rebut the prosecution's case or do you want to make a sentencing argument?

    RATH: That's Brigadier General Mark Martins, lead prosecutor in the 9/11 trial. By the rules of military commission, the prosecution is actually in charge of providing that information to the defense. It gets complicated, though, because many of the details of the CIA program are still classified. So the defense can't get everything they want.

    MARTINS: We can delete withhold. We can make a recommendation to the judge, accept a - substitute in a statement admitting relevant facts. And this enables us to protect a lot of information that really does continue to protect sources and methods.

    RATH: James Connell is a lawyer for defendant Ammar al-Baluchi.

    JAMES CONNELL: From the beginning, the government has claimed that actual interrogation methods, the so-called enhanced interrogation methods, are sources and methods.

    RATH: In 2013, the judge in the case approved a defense motion to preserve evidence from remaining detention facilities including the CIA black sites where detainees, including the accused, were tortured. But earlier this year, Connell and the other defense attorneys discovered that the government had destroyed one of the sites.

    CONNELL: I mean, the defense had every reason to believe that the judge's public order was being complied with when, in fact, the government secretly sought destruction without notice to the defense.

    RATH: The prosecution claims the failure to notify the defense was simply an oversight. They have offered a substitution for the evidence, photographs and written descriptions. But defense attorneys say that's not enough. Walter Ruiz, lawyer for defendant Mustafa al-Hawsawi, offered one example to illustrate why.

    WALTER RUIZ: Mr. Mustafa al-Hawsawi had, at one point, been the victim of walling where they're thrown up against the wall with a horse collar. And what the document says is that the wall was a flexible wall that he was thrown into. So there's no way you can really corroborate that by looking at a photograph or a picture.

    RATH: The defense team for admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed filed a motion asking the prosecution and judge to step down over the destruction of evidence, accusing them of shocking indifference to Mr. Mohammed's rights. The prosecution, in turn, accuses the defense of pursuing a cynical, scorched-earth strategy, attacking and litigating every possible thing imaginable in an effort to prevent the case from ever being tried.

    What is clear after more than four years of pre-trial hearings is that the defense teams will do whatever they can to keep their clients alive. James Harrington is the lead attorney for defendant Ramzi Binalshibh.

    JAMES HARRINGTON: The easiest way to move this case along would be to take the death penalty off the table. And you would stop it from being a capital case with everything that's associated with capital litigation. And this case would move very, very quickly.

    RATH: There has been no indication that the prosecution is considering taking the death penalty off the table for the biggest mass murder trial in United States history. Arun Rath, NPR News, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

    http://n.pr/2awWGt1

  4. #24
    Senior Member CnCP Legend CharlesMartel's Avatar
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    Most Of The 9/11 Plotters Haven’t Been Convicted Or Executed. Blame Gitmo.

    The military commission system is uniquely bad at bringing alleged terrorists to justice.

    Fifteen years after the worst terrorist attacks in American history, five of the men accused of planning the assault still haven’t faced trial, conviction or execution. They’re supposed to be judged by a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But four years after they were arraigned, that trial hasn’t even begun.

    Many of the soldiers who now guard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Abd al Aziz Ali, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi at Gitmo are too young to remember when the planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

    If the accused 9/11 plotters had been tried in federal court, they “would be on death row as we speak,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in 2013.

    We decided to test that theory. HuffPost analyzed the length of time between crime and capture, capture and trial, trial and sentencing, and, where applicable, sentencing and execution for more than two dozen prominent alleged terrorists captured by the U.S. government over the past two decades. We didn’t aim to be comprehensive, but we gathered a significant sample of major cases.

    In every one of those cases, the regular court system took less time to convict the captured terrorists than the military commission system at Guantanamo has taken to even start trying the accused 9/11 plotters. (They’re still going through pretrial motions in that case.)

    At least two prominent terrorists who committed their crimes after 9/11 — “underwear bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — have already been tried and convicted. The trial of accused Benghazi plotter Ahmed Abu Khattala is scheduled to begin next year.

    Here’s a look at what we found:


    As you can see, in the years since 9/11, the U.S. government has regularly tried and convicted terrorists in federal courts. Juries have handed down life sentences for many of them. Some were sentenced to death.

    But the nearly 800 prisoners who have spent time in Guantanamo since Sept. 11 are far more likely to have been released than tried or convicted. Around 90 percent of them were transferred to other countries ― where they were often set free. Just eight men have been convicted by the military commissions. Four of the eight were subsequently cleared on appeal. Five of the eight have been turned over to other countries. Seven other detainees are facing charges in cases that have not yet gone to trial. None of the Gitmo detainees has been sentenced to death or executed.

    The men still locked up in Guantanamo may never stand trial. Hawkish defenders of the current system claim that federal courts would let alleged terrorists off easy. But there’s no evidence that’s true. If hawks want to sentence terrorists to the death penalty or life in prison, Guantanamo is a uniquely bad place to pursue that goal.

    “That’s the worst thing you could do to [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] ― put him in the supermax in Colorado for the rest of his life, where you’d never hear from him again,” said Col. Morris Davis, who was the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo before he resigned in 2007. “The day he becomes totally irrelevant is the worst day of his life.”

    Taxpayers paid around $4 million per prisoner last year to keep suspected terrorists at Guantanamo — far more than the $75,000 per prisoner per year average for a supermax prison in the U.S.

    The Pentagon still defends the system at Gitmo.

    “By law, military commissions are the only available forum for U.S. criminal trials of Guantanamo detainees,” Defense Department spokeswoman Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson said in an email. “And while federal courts will and should objectively be the appropriate trial forum in many instances, certain procedural differences also make military commissions the better forum for certain cases.”

    “Justice doesn’t have a time limit,” Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the current chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo military commissions, told reporters at the base last week.

    Why has the military commission system been so inefficient in prosecuting those who allegedly planned the worst terror attack in U.S. history? The answer is complicated:

    The military commission system is rarely used so there’s not much established precedent.

    The U.S. government last used military commissions shortly after World War II, when it prosecuted Nazi officials and a Japanese general for war crimes and violations of the laws of war. Because the system had been rarely used, the current cases raise an endless stream of issues of “first impression” — meaning those for which there are no established precedents.

    “There have been endless situations in which logistical or legal novelties had to be dealt with, slowing things down in ways that almost certainly would not have dragged on so long in a regular federal trial,” said Robert Chesney, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law who served on Obama’s detention policy task force.

    “An issue came up on what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could wear to court. In federal court that’s not an issue ― it was two or three days of debate at Guantanamo,” recalled Davis, the former chief prosecutor. “All these little things, these little hiccups that keep coming up ― can they fire their attorney? Can they skip the proceedings? What can they wear? What can they say? All those issues aren’t issues in federal court because you’ve got a lot of precedent.”

    Death penalty cases often take a long time.

    It’s not unusual for a capital case to drag out — whether the defendant is tried in a military commission or a regular court. Cheryl Bormann, who now represents bin Attash, headed the Capital Trial Assistance Unit in Illinois from 2008 to 2011. During that time, she said, capital cases typically took between three and five years to resolve.

    “The defense’s job [in a capital case] is to investigate and leave no stone unturned in determining what may have caused the person to do the acts they’re charged with. You have to prepare for sentencing, just like you lost the trial, even though you haven’t even tried the case yet,” Bormann said.

    “That’s of course exacerbated by this situation because the investigation we have to do takes place in a different continent,” she added. In capital cases, defense attorneys need to probe their clients’ childhood, the circumstances in which they allegedly committed the crime and the conditions under which they were detained.

    “The real reason this is taking so long is because it’s a death penalty case,” echoed Michael Schwartz, who also represents bin Attash. Schwartz estimates that the Sept. 11 case could be concluded in two to three years if the death penalty were taken off the table.

    The U.S. government is committed to keeping details of the CIA torture program a secret.

    The CIA imprisoned the five Sept. 11 defendants for three years at secret facilities, where the men were waterboarded, beaten, locked in coffin-sized boxes, subjected to extreme temperatures, kept awake for days at a time ― and, in some cases, anally penetrated with foreign objects. Hawsawi suffers from rectal prolapse as a result of his time in CIA custody, a condition his lawyers say has gone untreated.

    The Senate torture report released December 2014 confirmed some details of the covert program, many of which had already been reported in the press over the previous decade. But the Obama administration has decided against holding anyone accountable for the torture, and the CIA is determined to keep details of the program — especially the names of the torturers — secret. For years, defense attorneys allege, the government has kept crucial information from their teams. (The prosecution plans to “comply with its affirmative discovery obligations” by the end of September, according to Henderson, the Pentagon spokeswoman.)

    “What you’re seeing here is the obsession with secrecy that’s related to the torture,” said David Nevin, who represents Mohammed. “It’s designed to protect these people who committed these serious war crime and domestic law felonies and are subject to being prosecuted in places all over the world if the prosecutors could make a case.”

    The law requires military commission trials to be “free of outside influence,” Henderson said in an email.

    But although the tribunals at Guantanamo are ostensibly independent from the CIA, the intelligence agency’s influence there became clear in 2013 when the Gitmo courtroom’s audiovisual feed was suddenly cut off after Nevin mentioned a request to preserve the secret CIA facilities where his client was tortured. Documents later obtained by The Intercept revealed that the CIA had remotely cut the feed.

    At one point, the government went beyond keeping relevant information from the defense and actually attempted to infiltrate one of the legal defense teams. In 2014, the FBI sought to turn a member of bin al-Shibh’s defense team into a confidential informant. The potential conflict of interest created by that action stalled movement on the Sept. 11 case for over a year.

    Walter Ruiz, who represents Hawsawi, is skeptical that things would be different if the case were tried in federal court. “There was a time when I did think that the form itself maybe could deliver a different process, but what I’ve learned since that time is that there are forces at play here that are exerted on this case that are beyond any judicial process,” Ruiz said. “Those entities would continue to exert their influence in either form.”

    But Bormann is confident that, at the very least, a federal judge would have less patience with government interference in a trial. The CIA’s censorship of the audiovisual feed, Bormann said, might have resulted in dismissal of charges rather than a stern order against a repeat episode.

    “We know that in federal court, prosecutors tend to behave better because federal judges don’t stand for nonsense,” she said. “When the government does something stupid, the government has to pay the price.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b06a74c9f49858

  5. #25
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    Letter from alleged 9/11 mastermind reaches White House

    As his time in the White House winds down, President Barack Obama received an unusual piece of mail: a letter from accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

    Officials confirmed that the letter arrived at the White House to CBS News, but are declining to provide further details.

    Mohammed is awaiting his death-penalty trial at Guantanamo Bay, accused of planning and orchestrating the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.

    The Miami Herald, which first reported on the letter, says it was written in 2014, and was only delivered after a judge ordered reluctant Guantanamo Bay prison officials to put it in the mail.

    The Herald reports that because it was delivered before Donald Trump takes office on Friday, Mr. Obama should be able to take it with him into private life.

    The Herald reports Mohammed “wrote to Obama in 2014 about ‘Muslim oppression at the hands of the West in general and the United States in particular,’ his lawyer David Nevin said then. He also shares his views on what happened in Iraq during the period of U.S. sanctions and ‘events in Palestine and Gaza over the years.’”

    The Pentagon’s chief war crimes prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, reportedly did not want the letter delivered, saying it amounted to propaganda.

    Mohammed has been described previously by observers as something of an attention junkie. He has asked to wear military camouflage in court, saved berries from his meals to dye his beard orange, and flipped through magazines while being spoken to by a judge.

    Before being taken to Guantanamo Bay following his 2003 capture in his pajamas in a suburban Pakistan home, Mohammed was subjected to the most brutal of the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods, and he reportedly confessed to a host of atrocities.

    http://www.wdef.com/2017/01/17/lette...s-white-house/
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  6. #26
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Would have Ramzi bin al-Shibh also be subject to the harsh interrogations because he couldn't get a US Visa whilst in Germany? Yet he travelled back and forth to Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden at his personal residence in Tora Bora. This will be a big story when more details are revealed.

  7. #27
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    Guantánamo hearings to go forward minus one death-penalty defender

    WASHINGTON - The 9/11 trial judge decided Sunday to go forward with the case’s first pretrial hearing of the year at Guantánamo despite the absence of a death-penalty defense attorney who called in sick due to a medical emergency.

    Chicago attorney Cheryl Bormann, the so-called learned counsel for alleged Sept. 11 plot deputy Walid bin Attash, broke her arm in two places in a fall in Washington, D.C., over the weekend and returned home to consult a surgeon about reconstructive surgery, said co-counsel Michael Schwartz.

    At issue is whether the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, can hold a hearing at the remote base in Cuba with one of the death-penalty defenders missing. Each of the five men accused of the plot that killed nearly 3,000 people has a criminal defense lawyer with expertise in capital defense, a learned counsel, and Pohl has in the past postponed court when one was too ill to attend.

    The Pentagon was mounting a war court shuttle to the base on Monday for the first session of the Trump administration — eight days of pretrial arguments in preparation for the mass-murder trial that has no start date. On Saturday, after the accident, the Bin Attash team asked for a delay, known as a continuance, which the judge rejected Sunday afternoon.

    At least one closed court session may occur as prosecutors create a video record of testimony from a man whose son, daughter-in-law and 2-year-old granddaughter were killed when terrorists crashed United Flight 175 into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Pohl has agreed to a prosecution request that the accused plotters and their lawyers attend the deposition from Lee Hanson, but has rejected a bid by the media to open the court to the public.

    Defense lawyers openly questioned whether the court could conduct any business because, under the law Congress created for the post- 9/11 military tribunals, each of the accused is entitled to his own capital defender. In the event one chose to represent himself, Pohl has indicated that he would keep a learned counsel on standby in case the defendant proves unable to adequately defend himself.

    Pohl’s conundrum put in sharp relief a 13-month-old request by the chief defense counsel, Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, for additional Pentagon funding to hire four extra learned counsel to double-up on the teams of some of the Guantánamo death-penalty defendants.

    “Death penalty cases have a different standard for criminal defense attorneys to meet to ensure their clients have effective assistance of counsel,” Baker told a national security conference in September. “Accused facing the death penalty are required to be represented by counsel learned in the field of capital litigation with significant experience trying death penalty cases. Each accused in the military commissions currently has once such attorney, but cases of this size, scope, and complexity require more than that.”

    The issue is particularly complicated in the case of Bin Attash, who is accused of being a deputy in the plot allegedly hatched by lead defendant Khalid Sheik Mohammed. The former CIA captive has been trying for more than a year to fire Bormann and Schwartz, a civilian who started on the case as a U.S. Air Force officer.

    Bin Attash wants them replaced with other unspecified Pentagon-paid attorneys — something that Pohl has rejected.

    This summer Bin Attash wrote the judge, “My defense team works for their personal benefit not mine,” and that “I distrust them.”




    http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nati...128130324.html
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  8. #28
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    9/11 Terrorists Begin Facing Trial At Guantanamo

    By Carol Rosenberg
    The Miami Herald

    While the actual trials for the 5 men are still some time away, hearings and depositions of family members of victims have begun.

    All five accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks chose not to attend a session of court Friday to capture testimony from an elderly man who lost his family in the worst terror attack in history on U.S. soil.

    In the first such testimony of the case, Lee Hanson, 84, of Connecticut, was set to describe what he learned that day in a phone call from his son Peter, who was aboard the hijacked United 175, and then saw on television as the aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center.

    Lee Hanson’s daughter-in-law, Sue, and 2-year-old granddaughter were also on board. Christine Hanson is the youngest victim of the attacks that claimed 2,976 lives.

    Five men accused of directing, helping finance, and doing training for the attack are in pretrial hearings. No start date has been set. Their judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, gave the accused the prerogative of voluntarily waiving attendance at the testimony.

    Multiple sources at the war court compound said none chose to attend.

    At the earliest, lawyers could start selecting a U.S. military jury to hear the case in March 2018. Meantime, the military judge is essentially creating time-capsule testimony — in words and video — that could be screened or recited at the death-penalty trial and, if any man is convicted, during a sentencing phase.

    Prosecutors have sought the depositions in case some of their elderly or sick witnesses pass away before trial.

    It was to be the first Sept. 11 pretrial session in which the accused could attend but the public could not watch. A consortium of news organizations, including the Miami Herald and parent company McClatchy, asked Pohl to open the deposition to the public and lost.

    Typically, a military attorney from the secret Camp 7 prison that houses former CIA captives testifies in court on whether the five men voluntarily waived attendance. But that portion of Friday’s hearing was closed to the public, too.

    Hanson’s testimony is clouded by the absence this week of one of the defendants’ death-penalty defenders, Cheryl Bormann. She fell and broke her arm virtually on the eve of travel to the hearing, requiring surgery. Each of the accused is entitled by law to a learned counsel, a lawyer who specializes in defending a client in capital punishment cases.

    The judge made clear in court Wednesday that, by going forward without Bormann, prosecutors were taking “a risk” that Hanson’s testimony might be disqualified from use at the trial against one or all five accused terrorists under what he called a “Bruton analysis.”

    http://taskandpurpose.com/911-terror...al-guantanamo/
    "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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  9. #29
    Member Member dawnymarieeee's Avatar
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    Thank you for posting this information - this is an outrage - these terrorists have learned how to work our system - how much intel could they possibly have fifteen years down the road - the Federal lawyers made a mint out of these cases - the United States executed their native son, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber within six years of the deed.

    It was the deadliest act of terrorism within the United States prior to the September 11 attacks, and remains the most significant act of domestic terrorism in United States history. Unreal.
    Last edited by dawnymarieeee; 01-29-2017 at 09:25 PM.

  10. #30
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    US judge lifts order that halted 9-11 case at Guantanamo

    By National Post

    MIAMI — A U.S. military judge ruled Wednesday that pretrial hearings may resume for five men accused in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack after a delay over travel logistics at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre was resolved.

    Army Col. James Pohl lifted his own stay on proceedings issued in July, the latest in a series of procedural delays in the prosecution of the five suspects before a military commission for alleged roles planning and adding the attacks.

    For years Pohl and other judges presiding over terrorism cases at Guantanamo had travelled across the bay from an airstrip to the courthouse in a small Coast Guard speedboat instead of a ferry used by most other visitors to the isolated base. But in June the detention centre commander abruptly said they could no longer use the vessel, for reasons that were never made public.

    In response, Pohl and the judge presiding over a separate case put future proceedings on indefinite hold. They said the change interfered with their attempts to avoid mixing with witnesses and other case participants and could jeopardize their effort to ensure a fair trial. They said they should have been consulted beforehand.

    Pohl said in his ruling Wednesday that the military agreed to provide a small boat to transport the judges and their staff, resolving the issue in time for a pretrial hearing scheduled to last up to five days later this month.

    The five men charged in the Sept. 11 case have been held at Guantanamo since September 2006 and were arranged in May 2012 on charges including terrorism and nearly 3,000 counts of murder in violation of the law of war.

    They could get the death penalty if convicted. No trial date has been set.

    http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn...1-38c41e77a9db
    "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

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