"These charges allege a long-term, highly sophisticated, organised plan by al-Qaeda to attack the US," said Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann. In a transcript released by the Pentagon last year, Mohammed was quoted as saying he planned the attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 and others.
Last week the US admitted it had used the controversial waterboarding interrogation method to extract Mohammed's confession. The procedure is widely considered to be torture and human rights groups have strongly condemned it. The military judge hearing the cases would decide on the admissability of evidence obtained under duress, Hartmann said. The full charges against the six are conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property, terrorism, and material support for terrorism.
Military tribunals
Apart from Mohammed, the other men include Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002. The rest are Mohammed al-Qahtani, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi and a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Baluchi's assistant Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, from Saudi Arabia, and Waleed bin Attash, reportedly from Yemen. The tribunals at the US military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are the first US war tribunals since World War Two. They were established after the attacks to try non-US captives whom the Bush administration considers "enemy combatants" not entitled to the legal protections granted to soldiers and civilians. However, if convicted and sentenced to death, any execution could take years to carry out as the sentence would have to be examined by civilian appeals courts, the New York Times reported. Hartmann said the trials would be "as completely open as possible" and that the defendants and their legal teams would even see the classified evidence against them. "There will be no secret trials. Every piece of evidence, every stitch of evidence, every whiff of evidence that goes to the finder of fact, to the jury, to the military tribunal, will be reviewed by the accused," he said. About 275 detainees remain at the facility, about 80 of whom the US hopes to try. Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer who has represented Guantanamo detainees, told Al Jazeera that neither military tribunals nor the death penalty should be considered in these cases. "Mohammed has announced he wants to be a martyr and to execute him merely makes him a martyr and fulfills his wishes," he said. "I think the United States is going to loose an awful lot of support from its allies in the West who are very strongly opposed to the death penalty."
'Confession'
Mohammed, a Pakistani national of Kuwaiti descent, was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003 and handed over to the United States. He is alleged to have been the "Number Three" in the al-Qaeda network after Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.
Mohammed is reported to have also confessed to the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Centre, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, and an attempt to down two American aeroplanes using shoe bombs. The alleged al-Qaeda operations chief is also said to have confessed to the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in February 2002. "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," he was quoted in the Pentagon transcript as saying. However, Mohammed's reported confessions remain controversial after the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said that he, along with two other al-Qaeda suspects, had been waterboarded, an interrogation "technique" which simulates drowning. The other two suspects were were Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Almost 3,000 people died in the September 11 attacks, in which 19 hijackers crashed four planes into the World Trader Center in New York City, the Pentagon building in Washington DC and a field in the state of Pennsylvania.
Via Al Jazeera.
Comment:
Finally. The timing of this probably has something to do with the coming election, but I don't care. It's high time justice is done.
The list of defendants is interesting. I would expect Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, as well as the other "twentieth hijacker", Muhammad al-Qahtani, but I was not familiar with the other three. And where is Abu Zubaydah? I somehow suspect he's being saved for later on in the campaign, but it could be they just don't want to give him up yet.
In the coming days I plan on posting profiles on each of these men.
Also, my replacement laptop should be arriving sometime today.
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