Did anybody seriously think that at the Guantanamo trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others the merciless Al Qaeda terrorists who planned an executed the quintessential “high concept” bloody publicity stunt would go quietly into the judicial night — and their own likely executions? If so, they are not seriously thinking that anymore. The trial got off to a rocky start — even sparking a live press conference by prosecutors (GOING ON AT THIS WRITING):
The Christian Science Monitor:
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, CUBA
The alleged mastermind of the 911 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was brought before a military judge on Saturday and refused not only to answer routine questions in open court, but also refused to listen to a simultaneous Arabic translation of the proceeding.
Instead, Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants, accused of plotting the most lethal terrorist attack in US history, sought to use the proceeding to stage a protest.
Like Mohammed, several of the defendants took their earphones off as the arraignment was getting underway.
You could have predicted years ago that the trial would be marked by a dramatic act. In fact, the possibility for court room drama was one of the arguments foes of top terrorists being tried in American cities made.
On full display before a packed courtroom on the USNavy base here, Mohammed seemed almost disinterested as he was confronted with charges that he conceived, planned, and directed a 19-man suicide mission that left nearly 3,000 dead on September 11, 2001.
Mohammed appeared in a white robe with a long and bushy red henna-stained beard. On his head, he wore the white turban of a mullah and his forehead showed a prayer bruise common among devout Muslims. It was the first time in three years he’d been seen in public.
The appearance came amid security so tight that reporters were not permitted to bring their own pens into a press viewing area separated from the courtroom by thick glass.
Mohammed’s four codefendants adopted the same posture of passive defiance, repeatedly refusing to acknowledge the presence of the military judge or the gravity of the capital charges filed against them.
“I believe Mr. Mohammed will decline to address the court. I believe he is deeply concerned about the fairness of the proceeding,” Defense Attorney David Nevin told the judge.
He added: “The world is watching.”
And so are the 9/11 families. As NBC’s Michael Isakoff notes here, it was a painful day for prosecutors — and 9/11 families:
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And, as Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan notes, what the world is seeing is the face of human depravity. Some of her column:
I wish we could see it on TV: the eyes and expressions of a man so depraved that he could brag about masterminding 9/11 and about decapitating, personally, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Maybe then we’d see some clue as to how a human being becomes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the so-called Gitmo 5 who appeared in a military tribunal yesterday at Guantanamo. He is accused of murdering 2,976 innocents on 9/11 and, among other things, of teaching hijackers to slit throats by practicing on sheep, goats and camels.
Instead we have only artists’ drawings, media behind audio-proof glass, six family members in Cuba and others watching closed-circuit feeds at military sites.
And what they saw yesterday was beyond frustrating.In an apparently planned protest against their treatment, all five accused terrorists refused to cooperate. They removed headphones providing translations into Arabic. Then they refused to acknowledge hearing an interpreter over a loudspeaker. They wouldn’t answer the judge, as if oblivious to all around them.
Mohammed slumped in his chair and looked bored. One defendant flipped through a magazine. Two others knelt in prayer. One had to be carried into court restrained in a chair. Another — who knows if this was planned — blurted out in English, “Maybe you aren’t going to see me anymore. … You want to kill us.”
“C’mon, are you kidding me?” Such was the disgusted reaction of some family members watching at a New York military base, said retired firefighter Jim Riches, whose son was killed.
Read the column in its entirety.
As the defendants repeatedly and persistently disrupted the courtroom, some of the relatives said they had to keep their emotions in check.
Debra Burlingame, 58, a sister of Charles Burlingame, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, said that she and other relatives were disgusted by the seeming arrogance shown by Mr. Mohammed and his fellow defendants.
“They are engaging in jihad in the courtroom,” said Ms. Burlingame, who wore a button with a picture of her brother sitting in his cockpit.
Robert Reeg, 59, who on Sept. 11 raced from the Upper East Side to the World Trade Center with Engine Company 44, said of the proceedings, “This is a theater for the defendants.”
Marc Nell, a New York police detective who lost 14 members of the unit he was in on Sept. 11, said the defendants’ actions did not faze him.
“It was good seeing those guys brought to justice,” he said.
Despite the theatrics and the painfully slow pace of the arraignment, the relatives and the emergency workers said they would continue to diligently observe the proceedings.
In the United States, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero criticized the military trial:
“It was déjà vu all over again at the substandard Guantanamo commissions, where the failures and challenges of the original 9/11 cases now plagued their latest incarnation. Once again, the impact of the defendants’ torture and confinement conditions was the elephant in the room, even as the court did not permit it to be discussed.
“Predictably, the government’s interference with the attorney-client relationship and its failure to provide adequate resources to the defense team undermined the system. The American public deserves to see the most important terrorism trials of our time prosecuted in legitimate federal courts capable of providing open, adequately resourced, and fair trials, instead of a commission system deliberately created to provide second-tier justice.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.