9/11 Mastermind...At Guantanamo Trial

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a man who called himself a “jackal” and who explained away the nearly 3,000 victims of that day by saying, “The language of war is victims.” At least that is what he has told American interrogators, and what he said at a closed hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

On May 5, 2012, Mr. Mohammed and four other detainees accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks are scheduled to be arraigned on war crimes charges before a military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay. The five men had been arraigned at Guantánamo Bay before, in 2008, but the Obama administration shut that case down upon taking office, then tried to move it to federal court in New York, before surrendering to a political uproar.

As the United States restarts its effort to prosecute — and ultimately execute — the five defendants, it has fallen to Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins both to prove them guilty and to show the world that the tribunal system is now legitimate. General Martins is trying to rebrand the system by emphasizing changes that Congress made in 2009 — notably, a higher bar to “hearsay” evidence and a prohibition against using statements made during cruel or degrading treatment. Obama administration officials echo those arguments, saying that the current tribunals are fair, unlike those during the Bush administration. Military lawyers for the Sept. 11 defendants say that the improvements are exaggerated and that they intend to test the claims of fairness.

Just as Mr. Mohammed is at the center of the 9/11 plot, he has also been at the center of a long-running debate over the use of harsh interrogation techniques by the Central Intelligence Agency, a debate that flared anew in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden
Documents have shown that the C.I.A. used waterboarding — a controlled drowning technique — against Mr. Mohammed 183 times in March 2003. After that became known, members of the Bush administration argued that the technique was justified by the cooperation it brought from Mr. Mohammed and other “high-value detainees.’'


Verbatim from the New York Times