Justice delayed: 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed appears in Guantanamo courtroom as trial approaches

[Valin]

Washington Examiner

Jerry Dunleavy

January 21, 2020

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will appear in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom this week, more than 18 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks he is alleged to have masterminded and a year before he will finally face a jury.

In the nearly two decades since 19 al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center buildings, the side of the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people, the five men believed to be responsible have yet to face a trial.

(Snip)

A judge must rule on whether confessions made to the FBI will be admissible, with defense teams seeking to suppress it. James Mitchell, an Air Force psychologist who helped design the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program and personally waterboarded Mohammed, is due to be grilled by the defense this week. Bruce Jessen, who also helped design the interrogation program, is expected to testify as well.

(Snip)

All five defendants are due to appear in court on Tuesday. If the trial ends with convictions, it will likely be years before any sentence is carried out. A military commissions appeals court would review the verdict. Then, the defendants have the right to appeal their case all the way to the Supreme Court.

_______________________________________________________________________________

 

I'm thinking he may die of Old Age before he is finally convicted!

I seem to recall something in the Constitution about a Speedy Trial.

[Geee]

'A dirty word': After tense exchange, Guantanamo judge says he’ll rule on whether 9/11 plotters were tortured

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — The presiding judge in the Guantanamo Bay military commissions case against the alleged plotters of the 9/11 terrorist attacks said he’d have to decide whether U.S. interrogators tortured the accused men. 

 

“I guess I’ll have to rule on that,” said Col. W. Shane Cohen, who is on the bench for the proceedings at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. The judge made the comment amid a contentious back-and-forth on Friday, as the lawyer for al Qaeda money man Mustafa al Hawsawi repeatedly called the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogations program “torture.” The lawyer used the term while he grilled Dr. James Mitchell, the psychologist widely seen as the architect of the agency’s harsh interrogation techniques in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“I know torture is a dirty word,” Walter Ruiz, the dark-bearded defense attorney, dressed in all black, said. 

Ruiz listed allegations of what his client faced while in CIA custody, when he says interrogators bounced him off a wall, hung him from the ceiling nude, slapped him in the face, hit his head against a wall, doused him in an ice bath, and anally injured him through an unnamed means. Mitchell was not directly involved in those interrogations, and they may have been carried out under the supervision of the CIA’s former chief of interrogations, known in court only as “NX2,” but believed to be the now-deceased Charlie Wise. 

“Did you have any sense of how those tortures effected Mr. Hawsawi?” Ruiz said. “Did it matter?”