US gears up for kangaroo courts for 9/11 baddies

[Izzy]

www.bbc.co.uk

The Pentagon has announced charges against six Guantanamo Bay prisoners over their alleged involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US.
Prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the six, who include alleged plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The charges, the first for Guantanamo inmates directly related to 9/11, are expected to be heard by a controversial military tribunal system.

About 3,000 people died in the hijacked plane attacks.

The Guantanamo Bay detention centre, in south-east Cuba, began to receive US military prisoners in January 2002. Hundreds have been released without charge but about 275 remain and the US hopes to try about 80.

Tribunal process

Brig Gen Thomas Hartmann, a legal adviser to the head of the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, said the charges alleged a "long-term, highly sophisticated plan by al-Qaeda to attack the US".

He said there would be "no secret trials" and that they would be "as completely open as possible".

"Relatively little amounts of evidence will be classified," Gen Hartmann said.

The other five defendants are Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, Walid Bin Attash, also from Yemen, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, who was born in Balochistan, Pakistan, and raised in Kuwait, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a Saudi, and Mohammed al-Qahtani.

Gen Hartmann said the charges included conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, attacking civilians, destruction of property and terrorism.

All but Mr Qahtani and Mr Hawsawi are also charged with hijacking or hazarding an aircraft.
The charges listed "169 overt acts allegedly committed by the defendants in furtherance of the September 11 events".

Gen Hartmann said: "The accused will have his opportunity to have his day in court.

"It's our obligation to move the process forward, to give these people their rights."

In listing more details of the charges against the defendants, Gen Hartmann alleged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had proposed the attacks to al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in 1996, had obtained funding and overseen the operation and the training of hijackers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti of Pakistani extraction, was said to have been al-Qaeda's third in command when he was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.

He has reportedly admitted to decapitating kidnapped US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 but these charges do not relate to that.

The BBC's Vincent Dowd in Washington says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has said he planned every part of the 9/11 attacks but that his confession may prove problematic as the CIA admitted using controversial "waterboarding" techniques.

Human rights groups regard the procedure as torture.

Legal challenge

The charges will now be sent to Susan Crawford, the convening authority for the military commissions, to determine whether they will be referred to trial.

Any trials would be held by military tribunal under the terms of the Military Commissions Act, passed by the US Congress in 2006.

The Act set up tribunals to try terror suspects who were not US citizens.

The law is being challenged by two prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who say they are being deprived of their rights to have their cases heard by a US civilian court.

Responding to the new charges, a representative of Mohammed al-Qahtani said they would create "show trials".

Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York executive director Vincent Warren said: "These trials will be using evidence obtained by torture as a means to convict someone and execute them and that is absolutely abhorrent to what we believe in here in America.''

Nineteen men hijacked four planes in the 9/11 attacks. Two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York, another the Pentagon in Washington and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.



Remind me again - the US is fighting for...justice? Democracy?

How the hell you can put on trial people u have illegally detained and tortured is beyond me....

[Layne Staley's Sunglasses]

^I was wondering where you've been!

[Perfect Criminal]

To original poster:

Because they are terrorists.  Regardless of our means, they are still terrorists that are responsible for attacks on our people on our soil.  How could you possible wonder "how"?  You can be against water boarding, but certainly you must be against the people that attacked us even more?  Where do your allegiance lie?  With known terrorists?

[Axl4Prez2004]

My question for you Izzy:  What would you like us to do with these men?  Sure, mistakes have been made (I'm frequently a vocal critic of the policies of George W. Bush) but what is it you'd like done with these men?  Would you like us to apologize to them and let them go on their merry way?  Seriously.  I do want to hear your solution.

[Dr. Blutarsky]

Yes, I would also like to hear Izzy's solution on what we should do with the men behind 9-11.

Was there anything legal  or humane about hijacking a plane full of civilians and crashing it into the twin towers?

[freedom78]

Remind me again - the US is fighting for...justice? Democracy?

How the hell you can put on trial people u have illegally detained and tortured is beyond me....

I agree with you about the torture, and would also agree about the detention of some, but how the detention of these individuals is illegal is beyond me.   

Let me put it this way.  Had they been put in a normal prison, they would have been long since murdered.  Would that serve their rights?

[freedom78]

Here's a much more thorough story:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23120362/
************************************
FBI ?Clean Team? re-interrogated 9/11 suspects
Agency tried non-coercive techniques to protect case against six detainees

The Bush administration announced yesterday that it intends to bring capital murder charges against half a dozen men allegedly linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, based partly on information the men disclosed to FBI and military questioners without the use of coercive interrogation tactics.

The admissions made by the men -- who were given food whenever they were hungry as well as Starbucks coffee at the Defense Department's Guantanamo Bay prison -- played a key role in the government's decision to proceed with the prosecutions, military and law enforcement officials said.

FBI and military interrogators who began work with the suspects in late 2006 called themselves the "Clean Team," and set as their goal collecting of virtually the same information the CIA had obtained from five of the six through duress at secret prisons.

To ensure that the data would not be tainted by allegations of torture or illegal coercion, the FBI and military team won the suspects' trust over the past 16 months by using time-tested rapport-building techniques, the officials said.

Though long expected, the Pentagon's announcement means that the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- and five others accused of taking part in the associated training, financing and logistical preparations could face a military jury before the end of President Bush's term, something the administration has made a priority.

U.S. will seek death penalty
Prosecutors recommended to senior officials that the men be tried jointly and have asked Susan Crawford, the convening authority for military commissions, to approve the death penalty. Preliminary hearings could begin within a month.

Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, Crawford's legal adviser, said yesterday that the charges "allege a long-term, highly sophisticated, organized plan by al-Qaeda to attack the United States of America."

Mohammed is alleged to have masterminded the plot in consultation with Osama bin Laden. The five others -- Walid bin Attash (also known as Tawfiq bin Attash), Ramzi Binalshibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Mohammed al-Qahtani -- are accused of helping to finance and facilitate the attack. Hartmann said there have not been discussions about charging bin Laden, who is still at large.

Was coercive interrogation needed?
An unanswered question is whether the FBI and military interrogators could have extracted the same information without a road map from the CIA indicating what they might say. It also remains unknowable whether the detainees would have responded to a friendly approach without first receiving more aggressive treatment.

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents one of the detainees charged and many more at Guantanamo, said the cases are "essentially show trials, as President Bush is leaving his tarnished legacy to the next president." He added: "They are being used to justify six years of lawlessness and barbarity this government has been doing."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush played no role in deciding which detainees would be prosecuted, or in deciding to pursue the death penalty. "The White House was not involved," Perino said. "They made the decision to bring the charges today because, as they said, they were ready to do so."

Officials said most of the detainees talked to FBI and military interrogators, some for days, others for months, while one or two rebuffed them. The men were read rights similar to a standard U.S. Miranda warning, and officials designed the program to get to the information the CIA already had gleaned by waterboarding and other techniques such as sleep deprivation, forced standing and temperature extremes.

"They went in and said that they'd love to talk to them, that they knew what the men had been through, and that none of that stuff was going to be done to them," said one official familiar with the program who spoke anonymously because of its secrecy. "It was made very clear to them that they were in a very different environment, that they were not with the CIA anymore. There was an extensive period of making sure they understood it had to be voluntary on their part."

?Cleansing? the case
Prosecutors and top administration officials essentially wanted to cleanse the information so that it could be used in court, a process that federal prosecutors typically follow in U.S. criminal cases with investigative problems or botched interrogations. Officials wanted to go into court without any doubts about the viability of their evidence, and they had serious reservations about the reliability of what the CIA had obtained for intelligence purposes.

"It was the product of a lot of debate at really high levels," one official familiar with the program said. "A lot of people were involved in concluding that it may not be the saving grace, but it would put us on the best footing we could possibly be in. You can't erase what happened in the past, but this was the best alternative."

The existence of an FBI effort to reconstruct CIA evidence was previously reported in the Los Angeles Times, but officials provided new details and described its success in interviews over the past week.

At CIA headquarters, yesterday's announcement of the prosecutions was applauded. The agency previously interrogated five of the six in secret prisons. CIA Director Michael V. Hayden sent a congratulatory message to employees, saying the trials would be a "crucial milestone on the road to justice" for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

?Obvious necessity for justice to be fulfilled?
Hamilton Peterson of Bethesda, whose father and stepmother were on hijacked United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, said yesterday that he supports the trials and the prosecutors' push for the death penalty. "I do not see how someone could view the death penalty as inappropriate for the murder of approximately 3,000 people," Peterson said. "There is an obvious necessity for justice to be fulfilled."

Notably absent from the Pentagon's list are Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein, commonly known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the detainees who, in addition to Mohammed, are known to have been subjected to waterboarding. Lawyers for the detainees have predicted that courts will throw out as illegal the evidence the CIA obtained in such sessions.

"There's strong consensus that the 'big' case should be brought first -- that is, the prosecution of those who played a direct role in the 9/11 attacks," a law enforcement official said. U.S. officials think Abu Zubaida and Nashiri were not directly involved in the Sept. 11 plot.

Good-cop approach
The plan to obtain voluntary disclosures emerged from a small group of senior officials from several agencies who took the defense secretary's Gulfstream jet to Guantanamo shortly after the high-value detainees were transferred there. They quickly decided to distance themselves from the CIA's interrogation approach and try to talk to the men as near-equals. Officials said that instead of being forced to endure endless grilling, the detainees were allowed to decide when interviews would start or end.

Observers watched the interrogations remotely so they could verify that the questioning complied with the Army's updated field manual on interrogations, which includes strict prohibitions against aggressive techniques.

Robert M. Chesney, a Wake Forest University law professor who closely follows the tribunals process, said it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to use much of the information derived from CIA interrogations in military trials, in part because the Military Commissions Act of 2006 forbids evidence obtained through torture.

At the same time, Chesney said, "it obviously would have been even easier if they had done it this way from the beginning. There is the question of lingering taint."

?It is hard to un-torture?
Chesney and other legal experts said defense attorneys could argue that the government would never have had a case without the CIA's coercion. It is unclear whether that will matter in the military commissions system, which gives prosecutors more leeway than they have in regular criminal courts.

"There's something in American jurisprudence called 'fruit of the poisonous tree': You can clean up the tree a little but it's hard to do," said John D. Hutson, a retired Navy rear admiral and former judge advocate general. "Once you torture someone, it is hard to un-torture them. The general public is going to be concerned about the validity of the testimony."

Another U.S. law enforcement official said the effort was in part a reflection of the FBI's standard approach to interrogations. FBI agents emphasize building "rapport" -- flattering egos, attending to small requests and casting themselves as a friendly force in an otherwise adversarial climate. Such tactics have been used with success in many high-profile cases over the years, including the interrogation of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

"We do not use coercive techniques of any sort in the course of our interrogations," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III testified last week before the Senate intelligence committee, saying that the FBI's approach is "sufficient and appropriate to the mission that we have to accomplish."

[polluxlm]

A criminal will never admit a crime voluntarily. You can in most cases make him admit it with proper torture. However, you can't trust that confession since an innocent person would admit to the same thing during that type of process.

That is why we, supposedly, have these things called 'innocent until proven guilty' 'evidence' 'lawyers' 'human rights' 'liberty' and so forth.

I don't trust the testimony of torture, and I certainly don't trust someone that knows this using it just for the hell of it.

[Dr. Blutarsky]

My opinion is that torture is not a way to get a truthful answer, but instead you get what you want to hear.

There are things that can be done that is not torture to make things pretty uncomfortable to a subject and if you do it for long enough periods, the person will mentally break and volunteer information.

Tourture, such as waterboarding even to these piece of shit scumbags is something we should not be doing. That's my 2 cents. 

[Axl4Prez2004]

My opinion is that torture is not a way to get a truthful answer, but instead you get what you want to hear.

There are things that can be done that is not torture to make things pretty uncomfortable to a subject and if you do it for long enough periods, the person will mentally break and volunteer information.

Tourture, such as waterboarding even to these piece of shit scumbags is something we should not be doing. That's my 2 cents. 

I agree with The Shaman 100%. 

May I also add that capital punishment is a waste.  Making a martyr of your enemy does nothing for your cause. 

[Perfect Criminal]

A criminal will never admit a crime voluntarily. You can in most cases make him admit it with proper torture. However, you can't trust that confession since an innocent person would admit to the same thing during that type of process.

That is why we, supposedly, have these things called 'innocent until proven guilty' 'evidence' 'lawyers' 'human rights' 'liberty' and so forth.

I don't trust the testimony of torture, and I certainly don't trust someone that knows this using it just for the hell of it.

To be clear, you do however support trial and punishment for these idiots, right?  Even if you don't support the death penalty, you still think they should be punished, right?

And also to be clear, no one used waterboarding "just for the hell of it".  It obviously was done to coerce information. 

[Axl4Prez2004]

Oh my, do I support punishment for these scumbags!     In my justice system, those jailed for life with no parole would gladly try to kill themselves instead of having to endure the sentence I would set out for them...but suicide would be impossible.  By not receiving death, you might think you're granting life, but in my plan you wouldn't.   

Waterboarding is torture in my eyes though.  There are better ways to get to to the truth without virtually drowning the suspects. 

[SLCPUNK]

Stick 'em away in one of those super max prisons and they can rot away in there.

[freedom78]

Stick 'em away in one of those super max prisons and they can rot away in there.

While prison violence is a concern for me, I do get some glee out of the thought of those who would stone women who have been raped being, in turn, someone else's cumbag. 

I can only imagine that one of these guys in the general prison population would be the greatest means of securing guard/prisoner cooperation. 

[SLCPUNK]

I think the seclusion of one of these super max prisons would drive most men insane. Let them live the remainder of their lives like that.

[polluxlm]

To be clear, you do however support trial and punishment for these idiots, right?  Even if you don't support the death penalty, you still think they should be punished, right?

And also to be clear, no one used waterboarding "just for the hell of it".  It obviously was done to coerce information. 

If the testimonies had been detracted as evidence.

And it was done to get confessions, but not necessarily true confessions. If I know torture doesn't work, the CIA sure does too.

[russkwtx]

There actually is no reason to bring them to trial at all. One wonders if this is part of an election strategy by Republicans who try to make terrorism THE electoral issue in the run up to every election. The fact is, according to the rules adopted by the Bush administration, those people could be held indefinitely in military prisons until they die or until everyone forgets. There is no reason based on law or the courts that requires that they be brought to trial, ever. So one assumes that the motivation is political and is intended to help McCain by showing that Republicans are "tough" on terrorism. The context, for those in Europe or who don't know, is that the US economy has supplanted terrorism as the number one issue that concerns US voters, so this would be a way to force terrorism back onto the front pages. Terrorism/homeland defense is also the one issue that Republicans are much stronger than Democrats, as perceived by the voting population. Thus, the political strategy reveals itself.

[SLCPUNK]

The fact is, according to the rules adopted by the Bush administration, those people could be held indefinitely in military prisons until they die or until everyone forgets. There is no reason based on law or the courts that requires that they be brought to trial, ever.

They could, but America should hold itself to a higher standard than Bush has set. Regardless of how despicable these people are, they should be allowed a fair trial.

[Bandita]

Mistakes made or not, last time I checked, these guys WERE actual terrorists.  I would also like Izzy to explain exactly what we are to do with them?

I also agree with russkwtx, doing this now is just shining light on the Republicans.  Should just have let them rot there, putting them on trial and putting them to death is just too humane.

[Dr. Blutarsky]

Putting them in a room and throwing away the key is probably the biggest punishment you can inflict. Why execute them? That would be way too merciful. These guys think they get 72 virgins when they die, so death does not scare them.