Six Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture?
By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog
As the Bush administration announces it will seek the death penalty
against
six detainees, concerns about GuantĂ¡namo seem to be swept aside.
Finally, then, nearly six and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the US
administration has charged six Guantánamo detainees with, amongst other
charges, terrorism, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking
civilians, and conspiracy -- adding, for good measure, that it will seek
the
death penalty in the case of any convictions.
The six men are: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who confessed in his
tribunal
at Guantánamo last March that he was "responsible for the 9/11 operation,
from A to Z"; Ramzi bin al-****bh, re****tedly a friend of the 9/11
hijackers,
who helped coordinate the plan with KSM after he was unable to enter the
United States to train as a pilot for the 9/11 operation, as he originally
planned; Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi),
who are accused of helping to provide the hijackers with money and other
items; Walid bin Attash, who is accused of selecting and training some of
the hijackers; and, rather less spectacularly, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who is
accused of trying and failing to enter the United States in August 2001 to
become the 20th hijacker on 9/11.
The announcement of the charges is immensely significant. In one fell
swoop,
many of the complaints about Guantánamo appear to have been swept aside.
These, chiefly, have centered on well-founded claims that the prison has
mostly held innocent men or low-level Taliban foot soldiers. Of the 749
detainees who were held at the prison during its first two and half years
of
existence, none, according to dozens of high-level military and
intelligence
sources interviewed by the New York Times in June 2004, "ranked as leaders
or senior operatives of al-Qaeda," and "only a relative handful -- some
put
the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen -- were sworn
Qaeda
members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner
workings."
Ten more reputedly significant detainees arrived at Guantánamo from secret
CIA prisons in September 2004, and another 14 "high-value" detainees,
including five of the men mentioned above, arrived in September 2006, but
these arrivals -- which, in themselves, revealed the existence of secret
prisons that were even less accountable than Guantánamo -- were hardly
enough to convince any except the administration's most fervent and
unquestioning sup****ters that the whole extra-legal experiment was
worthwhile.
In charging detainees for their alleged connections with the 9/11 attacks,
the administration has also managed to divert attention away from the
stumbling progress of the trial system which will be used to prosecute the
six men. The Military Commissions, dreamt up by Vice President Dick Cheney
and his advisors in November 2001, judged illegal by the Supreme Court in
June 2006 and reinstated later that year in the Military Commissions Act
(MCA), have struggled repeatedly to establish their legitimacy.
Described by former military defense lawyer Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift as
fatally flawed because they included "no right to habeas corpus, no
attorney-client privilege, forced guilty pleas for charges never made
public, secret and coerced evidence, juries and presiding officers picked
by
executive fiat, [and] clients represented even if they declined legal
counsel," the Commission process was supposedly cleaned up during the
passage of the MCA, so that prosecutors are prevented from using secret
evidence or evidence obtained through torture (although the use of
information obtained through "controversial forms of coercion" -- torture,
perhaps, by any other name -- remains at the discretion of the
government-appointed military judge), but they have failed, to date, to
secure a single significant victory.
Their only alleged success -- in the case of David Hicks, who accepted a
plea bargain in March last year, admitting that he provided "material
sup****t for terrorism" and dropping well-do***ented claims that he was
tortured by US forces in exchange for a nine-month sentence served in
Australia -- was undermined last fall by Col. Morris Davis, the
Commissions'
former chief prosecutor, who resigned his post and then complained that
the
entire system was compromised by political interference. Currently, the
Commissions are bogged down in pre-trial hearings for two detainees --
alleged "child soldier" Omar Khadr, and Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama
bin
Laden -- whose cases have done nothing to assuage widespread concerns that
the whole process remains both unjust and futile.
Read more » http://www.alternet.org/rights/76971/?page=2
Bush's bloodlust is worse than Ivan the Terrible. Over a million dead
Iraqis, more executions in Texas than any Governor in history.
Plain and simple; Bush is sick!
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