Five 9/11 terror suspects face death penalty

Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four others have been charged by a Pentagon official with conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

In a file photo Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, is seen shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan Saturday March 1, 2003, in this photo obtained by the Associated Press.

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A Pentagon official has formally approved death penalty charges against reputed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other men for allegedly conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the charge sheet obtained Monday night by The Miami Herald.

Military Commissions officials e-mailed the approved charge sheets to defense lawyers in Washington, D.C., after the close of business Monday -- confirming plans for the first war court prosecution seeking execution as the ultimate penalty.

That means that, absent defense requests for delay, the men could make their first appearance at the war court in June.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, declined to release the charges publicly. ''When we have something to announce, we will,'' he said in an e-mail Monday evening.

But according to the document obtained by The Herald, a Bush appointee named Susan Crawford approved the charges on Friday, authorizing a common, complex capital trial for the five men. She deleted from the charge sheet the prosecution of a Saudi captive at Guantánamo, Mohammed al Qahtani, who had been initially included in the group.

Now, the five are accused of conspiring to kill 2,973 people by financing, directing and organizing the 9/11 suicide missions. In all, 19 suicide bombers hijacked four airliners nearly seven years ago and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Crawford's signature, and the delivery of translated versions of the 93-page charge sheet to the accused, triggers a statutory speedy trial clock that requires the men be brought before a military judge within 30 days.

''It's still a death case -- that is correct,'' said Navy Capt. Prescott Prince, the appointed defense counsel for Mohammed, or KSM.

He scorned the stealthy, after-hours delivery as ``arrogant.''

All five men had never seen an attorney before this year, and are held in top-secret isolation at Guantánamo in a special prison camp for former CIA-held detainees.

They had been interrogated for years in secret CIA custody. Then, in September 2006, President Bush ordered their transfer to the U.S. Navy base for trial.

They are Mohammed, who allegedly organized the 9/11 attacks for Osama bin Laden; Mohammed's nephew, Ammar al Baluchi; Ramzi bin al Shibh, who allegedly organized the Sept. 11 suicide squads; and alleged co-conspirators Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi.

No full-blown trial is expected before the end of the Bush administration, in part because legal experts expect protracted pre-trial challenges in this case in particular because it may rely on classified evidence. The CIA has confirmed that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding -- simulated drowning -- during his secret interrogations.

Moreover, Baluchi's attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, said Monday night he was filing a motion to dismiss the charges on grounds of ``unlawful command influence.''

Last week, a Navy judge disqualified the legal adviser for military commissions, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, from oversight of the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver in a similar motion that argued the general has not been neutral in the process.

''These charges are dead on arrival,'' Mizer said.

Qahtani, the Saudi detainee whom Crawford struck from an earlier, proposed charge sheet, had at one point been thought by U.S. intelligence to be the so-called 20th Hijacker -- the man who didn't get to the United States in time to join the other 19 terrorists in the suicide attacks.

U.S. immigration officers at Orlando airport had refused Qahtani entry into the country in the summer of 2001. After his capture in the war-on-terror and transfer to Cuba, then--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a special military interrogation regime for Qahtani.

According to a leaked copy of his November-December 2002 interrogation log, U.S. interrogators used sleep deprivation, left him naked or strapped to an intravenous drip without bathroom breaks to get him to confess. They also told him to bark like a dog.

Later, he got a lawyer, Gitanjali Gutierrez of the New York Center for Constitutional Rights, who said he recanted his confession.

Monday night, Gutierrez said the Crawford's decision to strike her client's name from the charge sheet was a vindication.

''The dismissal of Qahtani's charges affirm that everything he said at Guantánamo was extracted through torture -- or the threat of torture,'' she said.

His treatment at the Pentagon's war on terror detention center was "so well documented and unconscionable,'' she said, "that he is unprosecutable and should be return to the custody of Saudi Arabia.''