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Posted on Friday 13 November 2009


Accused 9/11 defendants to be tried in N.Y. court
Washington Post
By Peter Finn, Carrie Johnson and Debbi Wilgoren
November 13, 2009

Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks – and four co-defendants will be tried in federal court in New York instead of a military commission, with prosecutors likely to seek the death penalty, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Friday. The long-awaited decision, part of President Obama’s quest to close the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, sparked immediate outrage from Republican lawmakers, who said military commissions are a more secure and appropriate place to try suspected terrorists. But the announcement drew praise from civil rights advocates, who argue that the detainees’ civil rights have been violated by years of detention without trial and the use of military commissions. "Our nation has had no higher priority than bringing those who planned and carried out the attack to justice," Holder said.

He said the detainees will be transferred to the United States after all legal requirements, including a 45-day notice and report to Congress are fulfilled, and after state and local authorities have been consulted. They will be housed in maximum-security units in New York that have held other terrorism suspects. Once federal charges are filed against the five men, military charges now pending against them will be withdrawn.

"They’ll be charged for what we believe they did, and that is to mastermind and carry out the 9/11 attacks," Holder said of the five defendants. "For over 200 years, our nation has relied on a faithful adherence to the rule of law to bring criminals to justice and provide accountability to victims," Holder said. "Once again we will ask our legal system to rise to that challenge, and I am confident it will answer the call with fairness and justice"…
We seem to be creeping back to functioning like the United States of America, a nation under the rule of the law. For eight years, we were something else, something made up on the spur of the moment. We are not at war with either Iraq or Afghanistan. We are fighting in their countries, though we could not be considered their allies either. We’re there under the guise of a war against an emotion – terror. I still can’t figure out what that means. The crime here is the attack on New York by a group of people who died in their attack. Now we have a number of their co-conspirators in custody. By any logic I know, they should be tried in our legal system, just like any other criminals. All of this Gitmo, Military Tribunals, endless incarceration without habeus corpus or trial, legal mumbo-jumbo from John Yoo and friends, was made up on the spot – had little to do with our system of jurisprudence. Eric Holder is finally beginning to act like a real Attorney General.

I’m skipping all the editorializing and blogging that is flying back and forth on this topic because it doesn’t matter. The only reason it’s a debate topic is that we’ve gotten so used to making up our government on the fly in these last eight years that we’re having trouble stopping. We seemed to have all but forgotten that the law has a long history, and that the reason we have a historical precedent system is to keep us from getting all caught up in the moment and making up what we do to fit the case in front of us. The dangers in doing that are obvious.

Federal Court: New York City 

The Bush Administration wanted us to hold military tribunals that limited what the accused could access in their defense, but then they didn’t convene the tribunals. They didn’t even follow their own made-up quaisi-legal system. Put the defendants on trial in a court of law. That’s what it’s there for…

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