Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
June 6, 2008
Pg. 1
By William Glaberson
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — When at last he got the chance to speak, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, on Thursday called President Bush a crusader and ridiculed the trial system here as an inquisition.
Mr. Mohammed, the former senior operations chief for Al Qaeda, said he would represent himself and dared the Guantánamo tribunal to put him to death.
“This is what I want,” he told a military judge here, in his first appearance to answer war crimes charges for the terrorism attacks that killed 2,973 people and set America on a path to war.
“I’m looking to be martyr for long time,” he said in serviceable English, improved, perhaps, by five years of custody, including three in secret C.I.A. prisons.
The arraignment on Thursday of Mr. Mohammed and four other detainees the government says were high-level coordinators of the Sept. 11 attacks was the start of hearings in the case, which is the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s war crimes system here.
But it was also the first public appearance by Mr. Mohammed, who has long cast himself in the role of superterrorist, claiming responsibility in the past not only for the 2001 plot, but for some 30 others, including the murder of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
A bushy gray beard all but covered Mr. Mohammed’s face, so familiar from the well-known photograph of him in a baggy undershirt that was taken the day of his capture in Pakistan in 2003. On Thursday, he worked to get as much control as possible over the proceedings.
Peering through big black-rimmed glasses, he rejected American lawyers as agents of the Bush administration’s “crusade war against Islamic world.” He said the lawyers could stay to help him as advisers.
He quickly staked out his position as the leader of the accused men. He gestured to them, shared animated conversations while the proceedings droned on and, at one point, turned his chair toward the back of the courtroom to face his co-defendants, lined up in a row behind him.
His strategy seemed to work. One of the detainees, a military lawyer said, decided to reject his lawyers on Thursday, after a few minutes in the courtroom. Another, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, was intimidated by Mr. Mohammed, said his designated lawyer, Maj. Jon Jackson.
By day’s end, each of Mr. Mohammed’s four co-defendants had said he wanted to represent himself. That could turn a trial into a jumble of rhetoric and a new opportunity for critics to attack the Guantánamo system as designed to get easy convictions.
Each of the five men remained seated when the judge asked that they rise for the formal arraignment.
“I reject this session,” said Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was to have been one of the hijackers, said that he too, like Mr. Mohammed, was ready for martyrdom.
He recalled that he had “tried for 9/11” but was denied an American visa so had missed his chance.
The judge, Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann, agreed to permit three of the men to represent themselves. He said he wanted more information on Major Jackson’s assertion. In Mr. Shibh’s case, he said he wanted to investigate a new report on Thursday from a military lawyer that Mr. Shibh has been on psychotropic medication.
When Judge Kohlmann asked Mr. Shibh why he was taking the medication, security officials cut the sound fed to reporters in a glassed-in gallery and a satellite press center. It was one of half a dozen times in a long court day when a private national-security consultant to the court cut the sound when detainees appeared to be discussing what several of them said had been years of torture.
Mr. Mohammed managed to get the reference through the censor twice.
“After torturing,” he said, warming to his subject, “they transfer us to Inquisitionland in Guantánamo.”
Central Intelligence Agency officials have said that Mr. Mohammed was one of three detainees subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The sound was cut twice when Mr. Mohammed seemed to be discussing his claim.
He was far from shy, and he looked lean compared with the photograph taken of him after his 2003 capture. He chanted verses in Arabic and then translated them into English. He vied with Judge Kohlmann for control of the courtroom.
“Go ahead,” he told the judge from time to time when there was a pause, as if he, at the shiny new defense table in a specially built courtroom here, and not the man in the black robe on the bench, were in charge.
He was, Mr. Mohammed said cheerfully, unable to accept lawyers who knew little of Islamic law. He asked that the five men facing terrorism, conspiracy and other charges for the Sept. 11 attacks be permitted to meet. They needed, he said, to plan “one front.”
The request for a meeting, like most requests from the defense on Thursday, was rejected by Judge Kohlmann.
All five accused men were held in the secret C.I.A. program and transferred to Guantánamo to face charges in the military commission system.
“Sit down,” the judge barked out a few times as defense lawyers assigned to the cases by the military and by the American Civil Liberties Union tried to slow the proceedings.
The lawyers said that Mr. Mohammed and the other men had not had enough opportunity to meet with them. As a result, they said, the detainees could not understand the implications of representing themselves with their lives potentially on the line. No one would prevail with the argument that the arraignment could not proceed as scheduled, Judge Kohlmann announced.
The Pentagon has been pressing to move its war crimes cases quickly after years of delays and legal setbacks. Critics, including a former chief military prosecutor, have said there is intense political pressure to start the trials by the end of the Bush administration.
The Pentagon general who has become the most visible advocate of the commission system, Thomas W. Hartmann, has repeatedly said that accelerating the filing and prosecution of charges is not motivated by politics.
Whatever the motivation, it was clear inside the wire of the new court complex in the bright sun here that the Guantánamo trial system had begun its most important test. Reporters from Italy, Pakistan, Britain and Canada mixed with Americans crowded into a press center for the first glimpse of Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants.
The expansive new courtroom, built specifically for the Sept. 11 case, provided an austere setting. It is a big, windowless white room, decorated only with a large American flag and the seals of each of the American military branches.
The reporters and a handful of observers from human rights, military and legal groups sat in an observation room at the rear. Sound to the room was delayed 20 seconds, so people in the proceedings rose and sat on occasion before their voices could be heard.
In the courtroom, the prosecutors sat to the right at three long tables. On the left, there were six long tables, the final one unused. At the end of each table, a detainee sat, in a white prison uniform. Only one, Mr. Shibh, was shackled to the floor.
Mr. Mohammed, who is sometimes known as K.S.M., was at the first table. He could not, he explained, work easily with lawyers trained in the American legal system, which he described as evil. “They allow same sexual marriage,” he said, “and many things are very bad.”
He held his own in rapid fire back-and-forth with the judge dealing with the particulars of the proceedings, but then would retreat into another world. When Judge Kohlmann explained the risks of going through a death penalty case without a lawyer, Mr. Mohammed answered: “Nothing shall befall us, save what Allah has ordained for us.”
June 6, 2008
Pg. 1
By William Glaberson
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — When at last he got the chance to speak, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, on Thursday called President Bush a crusader and ridiculed the trial system here as an inquisition.
Mr. Mohammed, the former senior operations chief for Al Qaeda, said he would represent himself and dared the Guantánamo tribunal to put him to death.
“This is what I want,” he told a military judge here, in his first appearance to answer war crimes charges for the terrorism attacks that killed 2,973 people and set America on a path to war.
“I’m looking to be martyr for long time,” he said in serviceable English, improved, perhaps, by five years of custody, including three in secret C.I.A. prisons.
The arraignment on Thursday of Mr. Mohammed and four other detainees the government says were high-level coordinators of the Sept. 11 attacks was the start of hearings in the case, which is the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s war crimes system here.
But it was also the first public appearance by Mr. Mohammed, who has long cast himself in the role of superterrorist, claiming responsibility in the past not only for the 2001 plot, but for some 30 others, including the murder of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
A bushy gray beard all but covered Mr. Mohammed’s face, so familiar from the well-known photograph of him in a baggy undershirt that was taken the day of his capture in Pakistan in 2003. On Thursday, he worked to get as much control as possible over the proceedings.
Peering through big black-rimmed glasses, he rejected American lawyers as agents of the Bush administration’s “crusade war against Islamic world.” He said the lawyers could stay to help him as advisers.
He quickly staked out his position as the leader of the accused men. He gestured to them, shared animated conversations while the proceedings droned on and, at one point, turned his chair toward the back of the courtroom to face his co-defendants, lined up in a row behind him.
His strategy seemed to work. One of the detainees, a military lawyer said, decided to reject his lawyers on Thursday, after a few minutes in the courtroom. Another, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, was intimidated by Mr. Mohammed, said his designated lawyer, Maj. Jon Jackson.
By day’s end, each of Mr. Mohammed’s four co-defendants had said he wanted to represent himself. That could turn a trial into a jumble of rhetoric and a new opportunity for critics to attack the Guantánamo system as designed to get easy convictions.
Each of the five men remained seated when the judge asked that they rise for the formal arraignment.
“I reject this session,” said Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was to have been one of the hijackers, said that he too, like Mr. Mohammed, was ready for martyrdom.
He recalled that he had “tried for 9/11” but was denied an American visa so had missed his chance.
The judge, Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann, agreed to permit three of the men to represent themselves. He said he wanted more information on Major Jackson’s assertion. In Mr. Shibh’s case, he said he wanted to investigate a new report on Thursday from a military lawyer that Mr. Shibh has been on psychotropic medication.
When Judge Kohlmann asked Mr. Shibh why he was taking the medication, security officials cut the sound fed to reporters in a glassed-in gallery and a satellite press center. It was one of half a dozen times in a long court day when a private national-security consultant to the court cut the sound when detainees appeared to be discussing what several of them said had been years of torture.
Mr. Mohammed managed to get the reference through the censor twice.
“After torturing,” he said, warming to his subject, “they transfer us to Inquisitionland in Guantánamo.”
Central Intelligence Agency officials have said that Mr. Mohammed was one of three detainees subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The sound was cut twice when Mr. Mohammed seemed to be discussing his claim.
He was far from shy, and he looked lean compared with the photograph taken of him after his 2003 capture. He chanted verses in Arabic and then translated them into English. He vied with Judge Kohlmann for control of the courtroom.
“Go ahead,” he told the judge from time to time when there was a pause, as if he, at the shiny new defense table in a specially built courtroom here, and not the man in the black robe on the bench, were in charge.
He was, Mr. Mohammed said cheerfully, unable to accept lawyers who knew little of Islamic law. He asked that the five men facing terrorism, conspiracy and other charges for the Sept. 11 attacks be permitted to meet. They needed, he said, to plan “one front.”
The request for a meeting, like most requests from the defense on Thursday, was rejected by Judge Kohlmann.
All five accused men were held in the secret C.I.A. program and transferred to Guantánamo to face charges in the military commission system.
“Sit down,” the judge barked out a few times as defense lawyers assigned to the cases by the military and by the American Civil Liberties Union tried to slow the proceedings.
The lawyers said that Mr. Mohammed and the other men had not had enough opportunity to meet with them. As a result, they said, the detainees could not understand the implications of representing themselves with their lives potentially on the line. No one would prevail with the argument that the arraignment could not proceed as scheduled, Judge Kohlmann announced.
The Pentagon has been pressing to move its war crimes cases quickly after years of delays and legal setbacks. Critics, including a former chief military prosecutor, have said there is intense political pressure to start the trials by the end of the Bush administration.
The Pentagon general who has become the most visible advocate of the commission system, Thomas W. Hartmann, has repeatedly said that accelerating the filing and prosecution of charges is not motivated by politics.
Whatever the motivation, it was clear inside the wire of the new court complex in the bright sun here that the Guantánamo trial system had begun its most important test. Reporters from Italy, Pakistan, Britain and Canada mixed with Americans crowded into a press center for the first glimpse of Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants.
The expansive new courtroom, built specifically for the Sept. 11 case, provided an austere setting. It is a big, windowless white room, decorated only with a large American flag and the seals of each of the American military branches.
The reporters and a handful of observers from human rights, military and legal groups sat in an observation room at the rear. Sound to the room was delayed 20 seconds, so people in the proceedings rose and sat on occasion before their voices could be heard.
In the courtroom, the prosecutors sat to the right at three long tables. On the left, there were six long tables, the final one unused. At the end of each table, a detainee sat, in a white prison uniform. Only one, Mr. Shibh, was shackled to the floor.
Mr. Mohammed, who is sometimes known as K.S.M., was at the first table. He could not, he explained, work easily with lawyers trained in the American legal system, which he described as evil. “They allow same sexual marriage,” he said, “and many things are very bad.”
He held his own in rapid fire back-and-forth with the judge dealing with the particulars of the proceedings, but then would retreat into another world. When Judge Kohlmann explained the risks of going through a death penalty case without a lawyer, Mr. Mohammed answered: “Nothing shall befall us, save what Allah has ordained for us.”