Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:
Start spreading the news
I'm leaving today
I want to be a part of it
New York, New York
These vagabond shoes
Are longing to stray
Right through the very heart of it
New York, New York
I want to wake up in a city,
That doesn't sleep,
And find I'm king of the hill
Top of the heap
These little town blues
Are melting away
I'm gonna make a brand new start of it
In old New York
If I can make it there
I'd make it anywhere
It's up to you
New York, New York
Let's see. Obama made good on a promise he made during his campaign when he took wife Michelle to New York for dinner and a Broadway show.
It was a costly date night. The taxpayers, of course, picked up the tab.
A White House press spokesperson tells us the President had explained the visit, "I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished."
The couple did not take the large 747 to New York, but flew a much smaller C-20 (G3). The press pool flew in a separate plane, identified by the military as a G5, followed by a staff in a third plane (G3). White House staff said the smaller planes were more fuel efficient.
AF-1 landed at Kennedy Airport. Marine One flew them over the Brooklyn Bridge to Lower Manhattan.
Once in New York, the Secret Service barricaded streets for the presidential motorcade to make its way around the city. Extra security at the theater, lines at the metal detectors, delayed the play for 45 minutes.
The scene was described as "pandemonium" by the New York Times.
Read more: "Politics Can Wait: The President Has a Date."
Today, Obama is making good on another campaign promise. It also involves New York City.
However, this promise doesn't involve the Obamas going on a date. This one isn't about taking Michelle to New York, as he said he would.
It involves bringing 9/11 terror detainees, the men who waged war against the United States and were responsible for the slaughter of thousands of innocents, to New York for trial in CIVILIAN court.
As a candidate, Obama rejected the military tribunals to be held off U.S. soil proposed by the Bush administration. Instead, Obama pledged to bring these monsters to the U.S. for trials in our civilian courts.
During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a "sad chapter in American history" and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.
Under plans being put together in Obama's camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.
A third group of detainees _ the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information _ might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren't final.
The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States. Obama's Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration's tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.
That was a year ago.
Today, Eric Holder will announce that the Obama administration will, in fact, give 9/11 detainees their day in U.S. civilian federal court.
From the Associated Press:
Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, an Obama administration official said Friday.
The official said Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning.
The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in President Barack Obama's plan to close the terror suspect detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the detention center by Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.
The New York case may also force the court system to confront a host of difficult legal issues surrounding counter-terrorism programs 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.
Holder will also announce that a major suspect in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will face justice before a military commission, as will a handful of other detainees to be identified at the same announcement, the official said.
It was not immediately clear where commission-bound detainees like al-Nashiri might be sent, but a military brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of considered sites.
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 Sept. 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 Center towers once stood.
...In the military system, the five Sept. 11 suspects had faced the death penalty, but the official would not say if the Justice Department would also seek capital punishment against the men once they are in the federal system.
...Some members of Congress have fought any effort to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial in the United States, saying it would be too dangerous for nearby civilians. The Obama administration has defended the planned trials, saying many terrorists have been safely tried, convicted, and imprisoned in the United States, including the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef.
Mohammed and the four others—Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali—are accused of orchestrating the attacks that killed 2,973 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Obama has weighed in on the coming announcement that he will be giving these monsters their day in U.S. court.
Commenting from Tokyo:
President Barack Obama says he will insist that the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks will be subject to "the most exacting demands of justice."
Speaking at a news conference in Tokyo with Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Obama would not comment directly on the decision to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees to federal court in New York for trial, saying he did not want to pre-empt Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement, expected later Friday morning.
But when asked whether he could assure the American public that it would be safe to try the suspects on U.S. soil, Obama said the move was both a prosecutorial and a national security decision.
So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be getting the opportunity to receive justice under the U.S. Constitution, like an American citizen, rather than via a military tribunal.
It's times like these that I wish President George W. Bush was still in office.
Here are some of Mohammed's "accomplishments":
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confessed to that attack and a chilling string of other terror plots during a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a transcript released Wednesday by the Pentagon.
"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," Mohammed said in a statement read during the session, which was held last Saturday.
The transcripts also refer to a claim by Mohammed that he was tortured by the CIA, although he said he was not under duress at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo when he confessed to his role in the attacks.
In a section of the statement that was blacked out, he confessed to the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, The Associated Press has learned. Pearl was abducted in January 2002 in Pakistan while researching a story on Islamic militancy. Mohammed has long been a suspect in the killing.
Using his own words, the extraordinary transcript connects Mohammed to dozens of the worst terror plots attempted or carried out in the last 15 years — and to others that have not occurred. All told, thousands have died in operations he directed.
...In all, Mohammed said he was responsible for planning 28 attacks and assisting in three others.
Some 9/11 families are outraged over Obama's decision to bring Mohammed and his cohorts to New York for a trial in civilian court rather than face a military tribunal.
They've written a letter to Obama, expressing their strong disapproval of his decision. So far, thousands of Americans have signed the letter opposing Obama's plan. Citizens across the country are standing with the 9/11 families in their opposition to granting these terrorists the rights of American citizens and granting them Constitutional protections.
Read the 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?
Read the names of the signatories.
You'll probably recognize some, such as the parents of Todd Beamer, a passenger on United Flight 93.
There's Alice Hoagland, mother of Mark Bingham, another passenger on United Flight 93.
There's Debra Burlingame, sister of Captain Charles F. Burlingame, III, the pilot of American Flight 77, the plane that hit the Pentagon.
Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, widows and widowers of the pilots of the hijacked planes, the victims on the planes and those at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the firefighters, police, and emergency responders have signed the appeal to Obama.
The list of names is a reminder of all the heartache of 9/11 and the enormity of the loss.
Will Obama listen to these family members and colleagues of the dead? Will he listen to concerned American citizens?
I doubt it.
In fact, I'm certain he won't. It would be completely out of character for Obama to take a hard stand against our enemies.
With these terrorists on American soil for their trials in our civilian courts, maybe Obama will have the opportunity to apologize to them. If he's on another date night with Michelle he could swing by and at least say hello.
You can stand with the 9/11 families and oppose Obama's decision to give the terrorists the protections of the U.S. Constitution.
Sign the letter here.
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