9/11: The Trial of Obama

A few days ago, the Obama administration officially announced that the five detainees in Guantanamo who were accused of orchestrating the 9/11 massacre will be tried in a special military tribunal at the U.S. base on the island of Cuba. The alleged chief planner of the attacks on the Twin Towers, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the other four defendants will face charges that carry the death penalty in a legal proceeding that denies them a great part of the basic rights guaranteed to defendants in a normal civil trial.

Besides the Kuwaiti Mohammed, the Yemeni Walid bin Attash will also appear before the military commission. He is accused of training and recruiting some of the hijackers. Also, there is Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the architects of 9/11 and a member of the so-called “Hamburg cell,” who did not obtain a visa to enter the United States in 2001. The Pakistani Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (Ammar al-Baluchi), the grandson of Mohammed, and the Saudi Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi are both responsible for the transfer of money from the United Arab Emerates to the hijackers.

All five of the accused were arrested in Pakistan between 2002 and 2003, detained and tortured in the CIA’s secret prisons and then transferred to Guantanamo’s prison camp in September 2006. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in particular, seems to have been subjected at least 183 times to waterboarding, or simulated drowning, as well as other forms of torture at the hands of U.S. intelligence before confessing his responsibility for the deeds of 9/11 and various other crimes, real or alleged.

The decision reached this week by the Pentagon was the result of a reversal of the route of President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, who had previously made efforts to prosecute the supporters of the attacks in a civil trial in New York. The choice of a military tribunal in Guantanamo will enable the U.S. government not only to evade any public controversy over the illegal detention and methods of torture regularly employed in waging the war on terror, but also to suppress the emergence of uncomfortable revelations about the possible responsibility of U.S. intelligence.

The trial will run its course in the next month and will be subjected to the rigid control of the military authorities. As a recent article in The Miami Herald revealed, the proceedings of the trial, which will be broadcast to the families of the victims of 9/11, will have a delay of 40 seconds, so that there is the ability to block the spread of classified information.

The five accused, moreover, will be subjected to one collective trial, and all of them risk the death penalty, even though the crimes of which they are accused are very different. Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, as his lawyer said, is accused only of the transfer of money, a charge obviously not subject to capital punishment in a U.S. federal trial.

The special military commissions were instituted by the Bush administration with the Military Commissions Act of 2006, only to be suspended temporarily after the election of Obama, who had promised the elimination of this sort of double standard in justice and to close the prison at Guantanamo.

In February 2008, the five defendants in question were formally accused of having planned and executed the attacks of 9/11 in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, Pa., resulting in the slaying of 2,976 people, and of having committed other crimes of terrorism, hijacking, conspiracy and murder in violation of the rules of war.

The proceedings were successively frozen by the White House’s newest occupant, according to whom all the those detained in Guantanamo must be freed or processed in civilian courts on American territory. This change, however, was met with firm resistance by Republicans, and a good part of the Democrats in Congress quickly approved various measures to block the transfer of detainees from the military justice system to the civil one. In March 2011, Obama at last gave in, admitting the impossibility of closing quickly the infamous prison at Guantanamo and resurrecting the military tribunals, as well as making a few weak guarantees for the accused.

At this time, the Democrat president, elected in 2008 thanks to the mobilization of a great part of the U.S. population which desired turning a very black page in the history of their country, has signed a decree that allows the indefinite detention of presumed terrorists in Guantanamo without formal charges or due process. Exactly one year ago, Attorney General Holder officially renounced, albeit in a “reluctant” manner, bringing Mohammed and the other four defendants before a federal court in New York City, recognizing the inevitability of trying them in a military tribunal in accordance with the Military Commissions Act.

In June 2011, after the about-face of the Obama administration, the same allegations regarding the events of 9/11 were made again against the five suspects. Last Wednesday, retired Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald of the Defense Department, the official charged with overseeing the military commission, finally authorized the beginning of the trial at Guantanamo.

The decision of the Obama administration has raised hard protests from civil rights groups. The American Civil Liberties Union, in an official statement, affirmed that the president “is making a terrible mistake by prosecuting the most important terrorism trials of our time in a second-tier system of justice.”

The military commissions, according to the ACLU, “were set up to achieve easy convictions and hide the reality of torture, not to provide a fair trial.” Moreover, any verdict will be “tainted,” while the use of military tribunals, “means that justice will never truly be achieved, in the eyes of our nation or the rest of the world.”

More than a “mistake,” the decision actually represents the logical consequence of a policy followed by Obama in anti-terrorism matters that often goes beyond the legal aberrations which stained his predecessor.

Some of the fundamental stages in the process of dismantling democratic rights in the United States have come in these last few months. Last year, on Dec. 31, the president put his signature on the provision that legalized indefinite detention by military authority, without proof or due process, of anyone who might be suspected of having links to terrorist groups. And in early March, Holder put forth a pseudo-legal justification, given to the president, for ordering the assassination of alleged suspects of terrorism, even U.S. citizens, on any corner of the planet.

Far from rendering justice for a horrendous crime that cost the lives of almost 3,000 people, the trial that is being prepared at Guantanamo against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices is an act that undermines the rights and tramples on the constitutional guarantees of the accused; it was created for the purpose of obtaining a verdict that was already written out and to bury once and for all the shadows that still surround the events of Sept. 11, 2001.