Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001, is set to face a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on nearly 3,000 counts of murder. Mohammed and four other detainees will be arraigned for the first time on Thursday inside a high-security courthouse at the US naval base.
The United States claims Mohammed confessed to masterminding the September 11 attacks but his lawyers say the confession was extracted by torture. Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003, will be given the chance to address the tribunal, officials said.
Death penalty
All five suspects could face the death penalty if convicted. They were transferred to Guantanamo in Cuba in September 2006 after spending about three years in secret CIA prisons. Thursday's arraignment poses the highest-profile test yet of a US military tribunal system that faces an uncertain future. The US 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. With less than eight months remaining in office for George Bush, the US president, presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both say they want to close the military's offshore detention centre.
Via Al Jazeera.
Comment:
Nobody tortured him into starring as himself in an Al Jazeera documentary on the attacks.
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3 comments:
They should give him the death penalty but cover him in pigs blood so that he may never enter the gates of heaven!
I don't think that that's something anybody really needs to worry about. Under Shariah law, KSM is guilty of committing war crimes. Even going by the most favorable interpretation for him possible, KSM is still guilty of 59 counts of murder, even one of which is enough to cause him to be "cast into hell."
Incidentally, the thing about the pigs blood is an urban myth.
As much as I think the world would better off with the guy dead ASAP he did ask for death so he could become a martyr. While I think having a trial and being found guilty doesn't make you a martyr he does and so will some of his friends. They should just lock him up in a cell with nothing but a bed and not let him see daylight for 40 years. He can have 40 years of talking to himself and he isn't a martyr just a sad man in a little room.
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