FT Chronicle

By Sara Hussein, Lucile Malandain
Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON – The alleged 9/11 mastermind and four co-accused will be tried in a civilian court in New York just blocks from where Al-Qaeda hijackers crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center, the government announced Friday.

Attorney General Eric Holder, in announcing the decision, said the government would seek the death penalty against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four others, all currently detained at Guantanamo Bay.

Holder gave no date for the start of their trial in a court of the Southern District of New York, located in lower Manhattan near “ground zero” where the worst of the 9/11 attacks occurred.

“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11 will finally face justice,” Holder said.

“They will be brought to New York to answer to their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”

Five others Guantanamo detainees whose alleged crimes were committed overseas, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen at the cost of 17 US sailors, will be tried before controversial military commissions, he said.

Holder assured that a New York jury could still be impartial and said all legal requirements would be met before the suspects are brought back to US soil with Congress being given a 45-day warning.

“Just over eight years ago on a morning that our nation will never forget, 19 hijackers working with a network of Al-Qaeda conspirators around the world launched the deadliest terrorist attacks our country has ever seen,” he said.

“Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in those attacks and in the years since our nation has had no higher priority than bringing those who planned and plotted the attacks to justice,” he said.

Friday’s move is key to President Barack Obama’s plans to close the controversial detention center at Guantanamo Bay, but is not expected to affect the vast majority of the 215 detainees who remain at the US military base in southern Cuba.

It also signals a major shift in the treatment of “war on terror” suspects and raises serious legal questions about evidence potentially tainted by harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding.

Holder, citing information he said had not yet been made public, asserted that the harsh techniques used against the defendants would not prevent a “successful” outcome of the trials.

Obama had pledged to inform a military judge by Monday whether to try the men before US federal courts or military tribunals launched under the previous administration of George W. Bush.

The military tribunals have been mired in controversy since they were established by Bush in late 2001 to deal with “war on terror” suspects.

In 2006, the US Supreme Court ruled they were illegal, but Congress adopted a new law to re-establish them and allowed indirect witness statements or testimony won under duress to be submitted as evidence.

Families of the September 11 victims branded Friday’s decision “a terrible mistake.”

“To allow a terrorist and a war criminal the opportunity of having US constitutional protections is a wrong thing to do and it’s never been done before,” said Ed Kowalski of the 9/11 Families for a Secure America Foundation.

Senior officials have acknowledged the Obama administration is unlikely to meet the January 22 deadline to close the prison that the president set just two days after taking office.

Hours before Holder’s dramatic announcement, Greg Craig, the man charged by the White House with shutting Guantanamo, resigned.

Obama said in a statement he was “indebted” to Craig, who is returning to private practice and will be replaced as White House counsel by Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer.
Sheikh Mohammed and co-defendants Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Walid bin Attash and Mustapha al-Hawsawi are expected to have new charges drawn up for their civilian trials.

The five men have already been charged with murder by a military commission at Guantanamo. The hearings were suspended when Obama launched a huge policy review at the start of his presidency.

Sheikh Mohammed has claimed to have been behind not just the September 11 attacks, blamed on the Al-Qaeda network, but also some 30 operations against the West in the decade before his arrest.

He also said he killed US journalist Daniel Pearl, abducted in Karachi, Pakistan in early 2002, “with my blessed right hand.”

“I’m looking to be a martyr for long time,” Mohammed, a Kuwaiti of Pakistani origin, told a hearing at Guantanamo in June last year, the first time he had been seen in public since his capture on March 1, 2003 in Pakistan.

Dubbed “KSM” by counter-terrorism officials, he was handed over to US agents who held him in secret prisons for over three years before sending him to the Guantanamo in September 2006.

He is known to have been “waterboarded” or subjected to simulated drowning 183 times during his years in US custody.