Nine-year-old trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh resumes in Guantanamo Bay

Accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 4 others appeared in court docket for the primary time in additional than 18 months on Tuesday, as US navy prosecutors search justice twenty years after the world-shaking terror assaults.

Mohammed — with a dense, graying pink beard — strode simply into the courtroom within the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, because the nine-year-old trial resumed after a protracted halt for the Covid-19 pandemic.The navy tribunal courtroom was filled with prosecutors, interpreters, and 5 protection groups for Mohammed and alleged co-conspirators Ammar al-Baluchi, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.In the viewers, behind thick glass, have been members of the households of the two,976 individuals the defendants are accused of murdering virtually precisely 20 years in the past.The accused face attainable execution if discovered responsible.But, with the pretrial section now in its ninth yr and slowed down over what’s now the central situation, that the 5 have been repeatedly tortured by the CIA after their seize, there isn’t a instant finish in sight to the proceedings.Without political intervention — President Joe Biden had pledged throughout his marketing campaign to shut down the navy jail at Guantanamo Bay — it may very well be greater than a yr earlier than a full trial begins, a lot much less a verdict is reached.ALSO READ: 9/11: 19 years on, trial is but to beginTORTURE ISSUEThe trial resumed Tuesday within the extremely safe “Camp Justice” courtroom on a hilltop within the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.The final time the court docket met was February 2019, simply because the coronavirus started sweeping throughout the United States.The website for the trial sits about 10 kilometers (six miles) from the shoreline jail camps the place the 5 defendants and 34 different “War on Terror” detainees have been held for 15 years or extra.The listening to opened beneath a model new choose, Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall, who’s the eighth to be named to preside.McCall opened by asking every of the defendants in the event that they understood the rules for the listening to.Each answered sure, some in English and a few in their very own languages.There is little doubt that Mohammed, or KSM as he’s identified, was intimately concerned within the preparations for the September 11 assaults.He instructed interrogators he proposed it to Osama bin Laden in 1996, and oversaw the execution of the assault, by which 19 Al-Qaeda members hijacked 4 American passenger jets and crashed two into New York’s World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, whereas a counterattack by passengers on the fourth led the jet to crash right into a discipline in Pennsylvania.ALSO READ: Why the autumn of Afghanistan is dangerous information for India’s conflict on terrorThe different 4 defendants allegedly helped put together for the assault, coaching the hijackers, transferring cash to them, and coordinating actions.The 5 have been all captured between 2002 and 2003 and held in CIA black websites around the globe for greater than two years the place they have been subjected to waterboarding, bodily beatings and stress, and psychological stress — now all banned as torture.They have been all dropped at Guantanamo virtually precisely 15 years in the past.The protection attorneys preserve that the torture tainted the entire trial, eliminating any customary of due course of, and that if the proceedings have been held in federal court docket contained in the United States, your entire case may have been thrown out.Not solely is the proof from the CIA interrogations inadmissible, however so is the proof from so-called “clean team” interrogations carried out by the FBI in 2007, as a result of the FBI additionally took half within the CIA operation, the protection argues.WATCH NOW: Konkona Sensharma Interview: Mumbai Diaries 26/11, faith, caste, OTT censorship