Death penalty to be sought in New York 9/11 trial

ATTORNEY General Eric Holder says self-proclaimed September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York for trial in a civilian federal court and he expects to seek the death penalty.

At a news conference yesterday, Holder said five other suspects will be sent to military commissions.

He said the detainees in the New York case will be tried in a courthouse just blocks from where the twin towers were felled.

US President Barack Obama said it was both a prosecutorial decision and national security matter.

“I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice,” Obama said at a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Bringing such notorious suspects to US soil to face trial is a key step in Obama’s plan to close the terror suspect detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He initially planned to close the detention centre by January 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.

It is also a major legal and political test of Obama’s overall approach to terrorism. If the case suffers legal setbacks, the administration will face second-guessing from those who never wanted it in a civilian courtroom. And if lawmakers get upset about terrorists being brought to their home regions, they may fight back against other parts of Obama’s agenda.

“This is definitely a seismic shift in how we’re approaching the war on al-Qaida,” said Glenn Sulmasy, a law professor at the US Coast Guard Academy who has written a book on national security justice.

“It’s certainly surprising that the five masterminds, if you will, of the attacks on the United States will be tried in traditional, open federal courts.”

The New York case may force the court system to confront a host of difficult legal issues surrounding counter-terrorism programmes begun after the 2001 attacks, including the harsh interrogation techniques once used on some of the suspects while in CIA custody. The most severe method – waterboarding, or simulated drowning – was used on Mohammed 183 times in 2003, before the practice was banned.

Five other detainees, including a major suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will face justice before a military commission, the official said.

The five suspects are headed to New York together because they are all accused of conspiring in the 2001 attacks. The five headed to military commissions face a variety of charges but many of them include attacks specifically against the US military.

The actual transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York isn’t expected to happen for many more weeks because formal charges have not been filed against most of them.

The attorney general has decided the case of the five September 11 suspects should be handled by prosecutors working in the Southern District of New York, which has held a number of major terrorism trials in recent decades at a courthouse in lower Manhattan, just blocks from where the World Trade Centre towers tumbled.

Holder had been considering other possible trial locations, including Virginia, Washington DC, and a different courthouse in New York city. Those districts could end up conducting trials of other Guantanamo detainees sent to federal court later on.

The attorney general’s decision in these cases comes just before a Monday deadline for the government to decide how to proceed against 10 detainees facing military commissions.

In the military system, the five September 11 suspects had faced the death penalty.

The administration has already sent one Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to New York to face trial, but chose not to seek death because other conspirators involved in his case did not face capital punishment for similar offences.