Posted on 11/14/2009 4:02:44 AM PST by kellynla
Let's get it on!
Admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four al Qaeda co-conspirators are headed to Manhattan to face a civilian trial in federal court -- and a possible death sentence -- just blocks from hallowed Ground Zero.
Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday said the five terror thugs will be shipped from the American base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they had been facing a military commission for the evil plot that slaughtered nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in western Pennsylvania.
Holder's decision immediately was met with praise by supporters of civilian trials for terrorists. But it also drew howls from others who argue that military commissions are the right place to deal with fiends engaged in attacks on America -- and that trying them in a civilian court in lower Manhattan will put the city at great risk.
"After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice," said Holder. "I am confident in the ability of our courts to provide these defendants a fair trial, just as they have for over 200 years. I also want to assure the American people that we will prosecute these cases vigorously, and we will pursue the maximum punishment available.
"I fully expect to direct prosecutors to seek the death penalty against each of the alleged 9/11 conspirators."
At the same time, Holder said that five other detainees at Guantanamo, among them a main suspect in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, will be tried before a military commission.
Speaking before Holder's announcement, President Obama said, "I'm absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheik Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice."
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Evil deeds: * Mastermind of 9/11 attacks, proposed idea to Osama bin Laden as early as 1996 * Planned aborted “Operation Bojinka” with his nephew Ramzi Yousef to blow up 12 planes flying between US and Asia during one day * Sent al Qaeda operative Richard Reid on failed mission to explode a trans-Atlantic jet with a shoe bomb * Decapitated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan * Provided funding for 1993 World Trade Center bombing
WALEED BIN ATTASH Yemen
Evil deeds: * Ran al Qaeda training camp in Logar, Afghanistan, where two 9/11 hijackers were trained * Believed to have been bin Laden’s bodyguard
ALI ABD AL-AZIZ ALI Baluchistan province, Pakistan
Evil deeds: * Helped nine 9/11 hijackers travel to US and sent them $120,000 for expenses and flight training * Believed to have been Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s lieutenant in Pakistan
MUSTAFA AHMAD AL-HAWSAWI Saudi Arabia
Evil deeds: * Helped the hijackers with money, Western clothing, traveler’s checks and credit cards
RAMZI BINALSHIBH Yemen
Evil deeds: * Helped find flight schools for the hijackers, aided their entering US and assisted with financing the operation * Believed to be a lead operative for foiled plot to crash aircraft into London’s Heathrow Airport
Please go to
http://www.thebravest.com/neverforget
and sign this letter.
November 9, 2009
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Obama:
On September 11, 2001, the entire world watched as 19 men hijacked four commercial airliners, attacking passengers and killing crew members, and then turned the fully-fueled planes into missiles, flying them into the World Trade Center twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 3,000 of our fellow human beings died in two hours. The nation’s commercial aviation system ground to a halt. Lower Manhattan was turned into a war zone, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for days and causing tens of thousands of residents and workers to be displaced. In nine months, an estimated 50,000 rescue and recovery workers willingly exposed themselves to toxic conditions to dig out the ravaged remains of their fellow citizens buried in 1.8 million tons of twisted steel and concrete.
The American people were rightly outraged by this act of war. Whether the cause was retribution or simple recognition of our common humanity, the words “Never Forget” were invoked in tearful or angry rectitude, defiantly written in the dust of Ground Zero or humbly penned on makeshift memorials erected all across the land. The country was united in its determination that these acts should not go unmarked and unpunished.
Eight long years have passed since that dark and terrible day. Sadly, some have forgotten the promises we made to those whose lives were taken in such a cruel and vicious manner.
We have not forgotten. We are the husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and other family members of the victims of these depraved and barbaric attacks, and we feel a profound obligation to ensure that justice is done on their behalf. It is incomprehensible to us that members of the United States Congress would propose that the same men who today refer to the murder of our loved ones as a “blessed day” and who targeted the United States Capitol for the same kind of destruction that was wrought in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, should be the beneficiaries of a social compact of which they are not a part, do not recognize, and which they seek to destroy: the United States Constitution.
We adamantly oppose prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in Article III courts, which would provide them with the very rights that may make it possible for them to escape the justice which they so richly deserve. We believe that military commissions, which have a long and honorable history in this country dating back to the Revolutionary War, are the appropriate legal forum for the individuals who declared war on America. With utter disdain for all norms of decency and humanity, and in defiance of the laws of warfare accepted by all civilized nations, these individuals targeted tens of thousands of civilian non-combatants, brutally killing 3,000 men, women and children, injuring thousands more, and terrorizing millions.
It is morally offensive to offer Constitutional protections to individuals charged with murdering 3,000 individuals, in essence, to jeopardize justice for war crimes victims, in order to make an appeal to the Muslim world. The use of Article III courts after the 1993 World Trade Center attack didn’t stop any of the subsequent terrorist plots, including the attack on Khobar Towers, 19 Americans killed, the 1998 East African Embassy bombing, 212 killed, the USS Cole bombing, 17 sailors killed. The attacks of 9/11 were a resounding rebuke to the view that federal courts were an appropriate counterterrorism strategy. Afterward, we didn’t send law enforcement personnel to apprehend the perpetrators, we sent the United States military, who captured them and held them pursuant to the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF).
The American people do not support the use of our cherished federal courts as a stage by the “mastermind of 9/11” and his co-conspirators to condemn this nation and rally their fellow terrorists the world over. As one New York City police detective, who lost 60 fellow officers on 9/11, told members of the Department of Justice’s Detainee Policy Task Force at a meeting last June, “You people are out of touch. You need to hear the locker room conversations of the people who patrol your streets and fight your wars.”
On May 21, you stated that military commissions, promulgated by congressional legislation and recently reformed with even greater protections for defendants, are a legal and appropriate forum to try individuals captured pursuant the 2001 AUMF, passed by Congress in response to the attack on America. Nevertheless, you announced a new policy requiring that Al-Qaeda terrorists should be tried in Article III courts “whenever feasible.”
We strongly object to the creation of a two-tier system of justice for terrorists in which those responsible for the death of thousands on 9/11 will be treated as common criminals and afforded the kind of platinum due process accorded American citizens, yet members of Al Qaeda who aspire to kill Americans but who do not yet have blood on their hands, will be treated as war criminals. To date, you have offered no explanation or justification for this contradiction, even as you readily acknowledge that the 9/11 conspirators, now designated “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” are appropriately accused of war crimes. We believe that this two-tier system, in which war criminals receive more due process protections than would-be war criminals, will be mocked and rejected in the court of world opinion as an ill-conceived contrivance aimed, not at justice, but at the appearance moral authority.
The public has a right to know that prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in federal courts will result in a plethora of legal and procedural problems that will severely limit or even jeopardize the successful prosecution of their cases. Ordinary criminal trials do not allow for the exigencies associated with combatants captured in war, in which evidence is not collected with CSI-type chain-of-custody standards. None of the 9/11 conspirators were given the Miranda warnings mandated in Article III courts. Prosecutors contend that the lengthy, self-incriminating tutorials Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others gave to CIA interrogators about 9/11 and other terrorist operations—called “pivotal for the war against Al-Qaeda” in a recently released, declassified 2005 CIA report—may be excluded in federal trials. Further, unlike military commissions, all of the 9/11 cases will be vulnerable in federal court to defense motions that their prosecutions violate the Speedy Trial Act. Indeed, the judge presiding in the case of Ahmed Ghailani, accused of participating in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya, killing 212 people, has asked for that issue to be briefed by the defense. Ghailani was indicted in 1998, captured in Pakistan in 2004, and held at Guantanamo Bay until 2009.
Additionally, federal rules risk that classified evidence protected in military commissions would be exposed in criminal trials, revealing intelligence sources and methods and compromising foreign partners, who will be unwilling to join with the United States in future secret or covert operations if doing so will risk exposure in the dangerous and hostile communities where they operate. This poses a clear and present danger to the public. The safety and security of the American people is the President’s highest duty.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the challenges of terrorism trials are overwhelming.” Mr. Mukasey, formerly a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, presided over the multi-defendant terrorism prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abel Rahman, the cell that attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and conspired to attack other New York landmarks. In addition to the evidentiary problems cited above, he expressed concern about courthouse and jail facility security, the need for anonymous jurors to be escorted under armed guard, the enormous costs associated with the use of U.S. marshals necessarily deployed from other jurisdictions, and the danger to the community which, he says, will become a target for homegrown terrorist sympathizers—like the recent Fort Hood shooter—or embedded Al Qaeda cells.
Finally, there is the sickening prospect of men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being brought to the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, or the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few blocks away from the scene of carnage eight years ago, being given a Constitutionally mandated platform upon which he can mock his victims, exult in the suffering of their families, condemn the judge and his own lawyers, and rally his followers to continue jihad against the men and women of the U.S. military, fighting and dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan on behalf of us all.
There is no guarantee that Mr. Mohammed and his co-conspirators will plead guilty, as in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, whose prosecution nevertheless took four years, and who is currently attempting to recant that plea. Their attorneys will be given wide latitude to mount a defense that turns the trial into a shameful circus aimed at vilifying agents of the CIA for alleged acts of “torture,” casting the American government and our valiant military as a force of evil instead of a force for good in places of the Muslim world where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are waging a brutal war against them and the local populations. For the families of those who died on September 11, the most obscene aspect of giving Constitutional protections to those who planned the attacks with the intent of inflicting maximum terror on their victims in the last moments of their lives will be the opportunities this affords defense lawyers to cast their clients as victims.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators are asking to plead guilty, now, before a duly-constituted military commission. Mr. President, the families of their victims have a right to know, why don’t you let them?
This is Obama the Islamofascist rubbing 9/11 in the face of every New Yorker. Something like buzzing Manhattan with Air Force One, only this will cost millions instead of half a million, and will last years.
Obama, who was not perturbed or distressed by the 14 murders at Ft. Hood, is enjoying offering KSM and friends an international platform from which to spew their propaganda, and complain about “torture,” etc., etc.
Our illegal alien “President” hates the American people and the U.S. Constitution. Those who are unwilling to face this fact, or to say it aloud, are without courage or integrity. They cannot face the ugly truth.
We all know what this is all about...payoff to the Bush-haters.
Howdy kellynla,
I’ll bet ya the gubmint prosecutors screw up and these murderers get off.
I’ll also bet there will be blood in the streets if that happens.
He started off with Chrissie Mathews, then Herr Doberman and then added Ayers, his wife, the Rev. Wright, etc.
Just think of a simple process of selecting a jury. That alone is apt to take 6 months and you can imagine that the defense will try and get fellow Moozies on there and if smart, most prospects will want to opt out for any number of reasons; the length of the trial (YEARS); the fear of reprisals, etc.
Next the security aspect and the disruption of lives of New Yorkers over this dog and pony show
Then the cost--no doubt tens (maybe hundreds?) of millions
This is an O'Bamination; MADNESS, writ large!!!
The only possible good that might come out of this is that the 9/11 truthers heads might explode when faced with the facts.
I disagree. No “good” can and/or will “come out of this.”
These are war criminals and should be tried in a military tribunal. As Gen. McInerney stated yesterday, this is “An affront to every American killed.”
I can see at least one of them getting off on some technicality or by using the “torture” defense to have anything they have said that incriminated them, thrown out in court.
THAT ... would be a disaster and a massive embarrassment to zero.
OJ Jury swings the other way: But they don’t got no DNA to prove nothing...
All that’s needed for a hung jury is to include one or two Muslims.
Further, the inclusion of the signatories is a very somber and sobering testament to the heinous nature of the long and costly war we are engaged in.
A rational thinking person could not help but be persuaded by these trenchant arguments set forth in this missive.
However noble the argument is, we are not dealing with rational, caring people in this instance. The Obama Administration does not care what these people in the letter or the American people think about this subject.We have come to a point where the American values that we have cherished thoughout our lives are being systematically destroyed for a diametrically opposite political philosophy.
These people are the enemy of the America, set forth in our founding documents, who are referred to in the oath as:"enemies, both foreign and domestic".
Yep...when you’re right...you’re right...
Semper Fi,
Kelly
islam, the religion of piece{s}.
Yes it would be another black mark for the magic negro.
I just have no confidence in Federal anything.
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