Anthony S. Barkow is a volunteer consultant for Human Rights First. He is Executive Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University School of Law (www.prosecutioncenter.org), and was a federal prosecutor for 12 years, most recently serving as an Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney’s Office [...]
By MIKE MELIA
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed took center stage in a military court Tuesday as he questioned the judge’s impartiality and acted as the de facto spokesman for his four co-defendants.
Mohammed, the highest-profile al-Qaida figure in U.S. custody, boasted [under torture] at a 2007 [...]
By JOANNE MARINER
“We will continue to bring the world’s most dangerous terrorists to justice,” President George Bush said in 2006, explaining why Congress needed to pass a bill to allow detained terrorist suspects to be prosecuted in military commissions. That same month, the Republican-controlled Congress voted in favor of the legislation that the Administration wanted, [...]
The US military is set to press forward with the trials of at least 20 more detainees at Guantanamo Bay despite military jurors acquitting Osama bin Laden’s former driver of many of the charges he faced.
The Salim Hamdan trial was the first test of controversial military commissions created to try “war on terror” suspects captured [...]
The existence of a secret, CIA-run prison on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean has long been a leaky secret in the “War on Terror,” and today’s revelations in TIME — based on disclosures by a “senior American official” (now retired), who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” [...]
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks said Thursday that the U.S. military is making it difficult for him to serve as his own lawyer.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has rejected his Pentagon-appointed attorneys, says the military has not given him paper in his cell and failed to deliver [...]
“After torturing, they transferred us to inquisitionland in Guantanamo,” said Mohammed. “We don’t have a right to anything.”
The five defendants are charged with conspiring to finance, train and direct the 19 hijackers who seized four airliners used in the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon outside Washington. They are charged in the deaths of 2,973 people killed in the attacks and the crash of one airliner in Pennsylvania.
Alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed was granted — and wielded — the right to censor his own courtroom sketch Thursday.
The trial will take place in a brand-new courtroom that was built on the military base here at Guantanamo to handle these commissions. The court, which cost more than $10 million to construct, provides about 20 seats for the media. The occupants of these seats will be the first people, outside of officers of the military and intelligence agencies, to have seen these men since they were captured. Most of them have been in custody for more than five years, some of that spent in the custody of the CIA in secret prisons overseas. It has only been since September 2006 that these men, the highest ranking al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody, have been here at Guantanamo, awaiting the military system of justice that will start tomorrow.
Lawyers defending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and four other Guantanamo detainees have asked for the presiding military judge to dismiss their cases, saying the timing is politically motivated.
The men are to stand trial over the attacks on September 15, according to the court filing quoted by AP.
However the men’s lawyers say [...]
Guantanamo Bay News
