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U.S. seeks death penalty for 9/11 detenus

New York: Military prosecutors on Monday issued the first charges relating to the September 11 attacks, saying they would seek the death penalty against six detenus held at Guantanamo Bay, including the alleged mastermind of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The Defence Department, which is leading the prosecution through a much-criticised process of military commissions, issued 169 charges against the men, including conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, destruction of property, and terrorism. Appended to the full list of the charges published on the Pentagon’s website were the names of all 2,973 victims of the outrage.

Prosecutors accused the men of collectively organising a “long-term, highly sophisticated plan to attack the United States.” Mohammed, the highest profile of the six, has confessed to being responsible “from A to Z” for 9/11, according to the Pentagon.

The announcement of charges brings to a head the simmering conflict over the legal treatment of the 275 detenus remaining in Guantanamo, and particularly the 15 so-called “high-value” suspected terrorists held there since September 2006. Lawyers working on behalf of detenus have long criticised the commissions process — in which even the judges are military personnel — as unfair, unduly secret and against the U.S. constitutional right to habeas corpus.

There is also the question of interrogation techniques used to extract confessions from the six. Last week the Director of the CIA Michael Hayden admitted for the first time that Mohammed had been waterboarded — subjected to simulated drowning in a technique widely seen as torture.

Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, legal adviser to the system of military tribunals who announced the charges, said the six Al-Qaeda suspects would be tried together and efforts would be made to keep the proceedings as open as possible. “There will be no secret trials. We are gong to give them rights that are virtually identical to our military members,” he said.

But doubts remain over how the prosecution would work within the military system set up for Guantanamo’s so-called “enemy combatants” — a rubric devised by the Bush administration to strip the detenus of rights normally extended under the Geneva conventions.

Though Brig. Hartmann said the trial would be largely open, it is not known how much of the evidence against them will be shown to the six defendants or their lawyers.

According to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who works with Guantanamo detenus, only one of the six men charged on Monday has had access to a lawyer in recent months.

Brig. Hartmann said on Monday it would be up to the military judge in charge of the trial to decide whether any of the information derived from waterboarding would be admissible. At least two more of the six have been put through “enhanced interrogation” techniques that include sleep deprivation and questioning for up to 20 hours at a time.

All these concerns will be amplified by the decision to press for capital punishment, which is certain to arouse European opposition on those grounds alone. It also presents the Pentagon with logistical problems, as there is only one lawyer qualified to prosecute a death penalty case within its military commissions team.

Stafford Smith said the move played into the terrorists’ hands. “They want to be martyrs. If we execute them, we fulfil their greatest wish. This is a long process of them getting what they want, and that makes us all less safe.”

The six include the alleged would-be 20th hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, as well as men alleged to be coordinators between the 19 hijackers and Al-Qaeda operatives, and funders of the plot.

The next stage in the process will be for the charges to be reviewed by a supervising judge, Susan Crawford. She will have to decide whether to allow the prosecution to seek the death penalty.

The charges come at a sensitive time in the long-standing tussle over the military commissions.

The Supreme Court heard arguments about the legality of the system last December when opponents argued that the removal of habeas corpus from detenus was unconstitutional. The court, which is expected to give its ruling in a few weeks, struck down the military tribunals in 2006. But the Bush administration replied by passing legislation to legitimise the system. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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