Accused 9/11 mastermind prepares for arraignment

[Brother_Mujahid]

Accused 9/11 mastermind prepares for arraignment

By MICHAEL MELIA, Associated Press Writer

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who could face the death penalty for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks, has been peppering his lawyer with questions in advance of his arraignment Thursday before a military tribunal.

It will be the first public appearance for the No. 3 al-Qaida leader since his capture in 2003, and his lawyer, Navy Capt. Prescott Prince, told The Associated Press that he doesn't know what Mohammed will say when he addresses the judge Thursday with dozens of journalists in attendance.

"He does not present any anxiety, but it is my impression and belief that this has got to be producing a lot of anxiety for him," Prince said. "It is what could be the beginning of the endgame for him, or the beginning of some level of positive resolution."

Mohammed and four co-defendants are charged with organizing the attacks that crashed four jetliners into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a rural Pennsylvania field. He could face execution if found guilty of murdering 2,973 people.

But the al-Qaida kingpin hasn't shied away from taking responsibility for such crimes before, allegedly boasting to a military panel last year that he had planned 31 terrorist attacks around the world.

Prince, a courtly Virginian called up from the Navy reserves for the case, has spent more than 10 hours in face-to-face meetings with one of the world's most notorious terror suspects. Huddled together in a windowless room at the remote Guantanamo Bay Navy base in southeast Cuba, Prince said Mohammed quickly picked up on the case's legal intricacies.

Security rules prevent him from publicly revealing anything his client says or the conditions of his confinement. Prince isn't even allowed to say whether Mohammed still looks anything like the image the U.S. provided to the world after capturing him in a raid in Pakistan in March 2003, of an overweight, disheveled, unshaven man in a T-shirt.

But Prince's impressions provide rare insight into the thinking of a man he says is showing some trust in his American military attorney.

"He is polite. He is appropriate. There are two-way discussions between he and I," Prescott said. "He calls me Mr. Prescott. I call him Mr. Mohammed."

The trial will not only be a showcase, but a test case, for the military tribunal system the Bush administration has created and defended against repeated legal challenges, including one now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that could result in the tribunals being declared unconstitutional for a second time.

Prince and other critics say subjecting terror suspects to the offshore prosecutions beyond the reach of civilian courts is unfair because they allow hearsay evidence and confessions obtained through coercion.

Prince said he cannot even answer some of Mohammed's questions because the system has yet to be tested by a full trial.

"It is frustrating to me, and frustrating to him, that he's presented with an attorney who in essence says: 'I don't know, the rules are new. They were made up for you,'" said Prince, who believes his client should be tried in U.S. federal court or a traditional military court-martial.

Before and since his capture in March 2003 by Pakistani authorities and CIA officers, Mohammed has claimed credit for proposing to Osama bin Laden the idea of hijacking multiple jets to simultaneously attack U.S. landmarks.

The U.S. alleges that he personally trained some of the 19 hijackers, teaching them English phrases such as "get down,""stay in your seat," and "if anyone moves I'll kill you."

Prince said he is not troubled by defending a client of such notoriety.

"My job is to make sure everyone gets a fair trial," said Prince, a Virginia criminal defense lawyer in his civilian life.

Mohammed was born in Pakistan's Baluchistan province and raised in Kuwait, but has had much more exposure to American culture than many other detainees at Guantanamo. He graduated from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1986, and converses easily in English, stumbling over a word only occasionally, Prince said.

But he also shows flickers of confusion — a possible sign of damage from his imprisonment and harsh interrogations in the secret CIA prisons where he was held until 2006, Prince said.

"The things he says and the questions he asks suggested to me some level of cognitive impairment," Prince said.

Mohammed is one of three Guantanamo prisoners who the CIA says were subjected to particularly harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, which creates the sensation of drowning.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/03/international/i114538D05.DTL

[Mustafa al-Muhaajir]

Accused 9/11 plotters due in Guantanamo court

By ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press Writer

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Almost seven years after terrorists hijacked airliners and used them as missiles to kill 2,973 people, five men who allegedly plotted the attacks face a military tribunal Thursday

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, will be arraigned simultaneously with four other detainees inside a high-security courthouse at the remote U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammed boasted of numerous attacks and plots against the United States in a closed military hearing last year, and the al-Qaida kingpin and his confederates will be given the chance to speak out again in their war crimes trial, according to a top tribunal official, Air Force Brig. Gen. Tom Hartmann.

"In the course of trial they'll have opportunity to present their case, any way they want to present it subject to rules and procedures," Hartmann told The Associated Press. "That's a great freedom and a great protection we are providing to them. We think ... it is the American way."

The arraignment will launch the highest-profile test yet of a tribunal system that faces an uncertain future. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down an earlier system as unconstitutional in 2006, and is to rule this month on the rights of Guantanamo prisoners, potentially delaying or halting the proceedings.

And with less than eight months remaining in U.S. President George W. Bush's term, presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both say they want to close the military's offshore detention center.

Dozens of U.S. and international journalists arrived at Guantanamo on Wednesday on a military plane from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, joining prosecutors, defense attorneys and observers who arrived earlier at the Navy base.

Mohammed and the four alleged coconspirators all face possible death sentences. They are expected to be seated Thursday morning at separate defense tables aligned in a row inside the prefab courthouse. Many of the participants and observers will stay nearby in tents erected on an abandoned airport runway as part of the "expeditionary" legal complex.

Family members of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, wanted to attend, but the military said it was too difficult logistically to accommodate dozens more people. Instead, the military is planning to show the trial but not the arraignment on closed-circuit television to victims' families gathered on U.S. military bases.

"For transparency and to add legitimacy to the trial, they should have the loved ones there," said Dominic J. Puopolo, whose mother Sonia Morales Puopolo was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, the first jet that crashed into the World Trade Center.

Puopolo said he also wanted to see the defendants, especially Mohammed, who claimed he personally proposed the plot to Osama bin Laden.

"This is an architect of such pure evil," Puopolo told AP. "I want to see him eye to eye."

Hartmann told reporters Wednesday evening here that it was a "mistake" not to have invited a group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims for Thursday's hearing, and that an undetermined number would be allowed to come to future sessions.

Even without televised coverage of his arraignment — Mohammed's first public appearance since his capture in 2003 — the U.S. is taking a security risk by giving him an opportunity to spread al-Qaida propaganda, said Benedetta Berti, a research fellow at Tufts University's Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies.

"This is a very educated man," she said. "It is a risk because he could attack the U.S. in terms of international opinion and his audience is not just the international community, it is more specifically potential jihadists."

The tribunals, which Congress and the Bush administration resurrected after the 2006 Supreme Court ruling, have been mired in confusion over courtroom rules and dogged by delays. No detainee has been tried yet, although David Hicks was convicted through a plea bargain and allowed to serve a nine-month sentence in Australia.

Critics say men accused of such horrific crimes must be brought to justice, but in a way that shows the world that the U.S. has treated them fairly.

"While everyone seems to recognize that the time to bring those responsible for 9/11 to justice is long overdue, this needs to be done in a system that has credibility," said Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch.

Hartmann insisted the trials will be fair even though the evidence may include coerced statements. He said defendants are allowed to see any evidence, even if it is classified, that goes before the jury.

Hartmann also sought to draw a distinction between the tribunals and the sometimes brutal U.S. detention and interrogation practices that have been condemned around the world.

"We are not Guantanamo, we are not Camp X-Ray, we are not Abu Ghraib," he said, referring to notorious holding centers at Guantanamo and Iraq. "We are the military commissions, uniformed officers on the prosecution and the defense, with established court procedures."

Attorney General Michael Mukasey also said Wednesday that the tribunals will be "in the best traditions of the American legal system" even though the military judges can consider hearsay evidence and confessions obtained through coercion, which aren't admissible in civilian courts. "Different situations call for different solutions," he said.

The four defendants due to appear with Mohammed are: Ramzi Binalshibh, said to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and al-Qaida leaders; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew and lieutenant of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; al-Baluchi's assistant, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi; and Waleed bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who allegedly selected and trained some of the 19 hijackers.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080605/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/guantanamo_sept11_trial