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Ear to the Ground

Guantanamo Hearings Begin for 9/11 Defendants

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Posted on Jan 19, 2009
Guantanamo
AP photo / Brennan Linsley, pool

Sundown on Guantanamo?: The U.S. military detention camp will soon be closed if President-elect Barack Obama carries out his promise.

The fate of the Guantanamo Bay prison remained unclear on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, but all the same, pretrial hearings began Monday for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners implicated in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.


AFP via Google News:

Self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed appeared in the court amid tight security alongside Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Wallid bin Attash, Mustapha al-Hawsawi, and Ramzi bin al-Shaiba.

Judge Stephen Henley questioned the five men who appeared without the help of civilian or military lawyers.

In December, the Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants said they would submit guilty pleas to terror charges pending mental competency evaluations.

Judge Stephen Henley also announced then that the defendants wanted to dismiss their tribunal-appointed attorneys.

Should the guilty pleas go forward, the men could be sentenced to death.

Evidentiary motions are also planned for Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen arrested in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old for allegedly killing a US soldier with a hand grenade. His trial has been set to begin on January 26.

But experts predict the trial may never take place.

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By blue, January 23, 2009 at 1:02 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

obama did the right thing and obama the first black president

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By omniadeo, January 20, 2009 at 1:04 pm Link to this comment

Here is the way it will go down:

Obama will delay the closing of Guantanamo just long enough to let the phony “trials” go on and to convict the “self-confessed” (by way of drugs, torture, and mind control techniques) terrorists.

As soon as those are done, Guantanamo will be closed amidst general accaim that P. Obama did the right thing. The “liberal” press will play its part, celebrating P.O. while the “confessions” become part of the offical story.

Little attention will be brought to them, because no one really wants to talk about KSM in detail,

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&other;_al-qaeda_operatives=khalidShaikMohammed

But the confessions will be trotted out when answering critics by saying, “but they confessed…”

Been here before. Just watch.

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By troublesum, January 19, 2009 at 3:19 pm Link to this comment

“The fate of Guantanimo remained unclear on the eve of Obama’s inaguration.”  He’s rethinking his position.

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By Muscleboy, January 19, 2009 at 1:26 pm Link to this comment

Regarding Eric Holder’s statements before the US Congress, on the 15th of January, I was overall quite pleased.  It was a rather emphatic pronouncement in favor of the fundamental Human Rights recited in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which all humans are born with and hence cannot be taken away or reduced even by the Defense Industrial Complex or the Neocon Bush cabal.  I felt that Holder sung these words he spoke, they came from his heart not just some pre-prepared response.  I went from being concerned that Holder was not the best choice to being certain that he was the very best choice.

However he ended his song with a statement that seemed to worry me that he cared not for the welfare of these human beings in Guantanamo.  He actually said we may have to delay the closing of Guantanamo.  There is no conceivable reason for such a statement other than to perhaps appease the devil Bush. 

There is no reason to stall anything Guantanamo can be closed down on the 21st and the residents moved to the mainland of the USA and brought into full legal protections and exposed to a full array of support services including treatment for physical and psychological problems.  The government MUST be purged of all Bush trolls across the board.

The fact is these dear human beings in Guantanamo are our brothers in Christ.  We have sat back and allowed this horrendous crime to go on before our eyes and gone to sleep every night.  Bush did 9/11 along with his Neocon criminal cohorts.  9/11 was an orchestrated event designed to give Bush vast powers and to open the treasury to multi-trillion dollar theft.  The type of torture used in Guantanamo was used by the Chinese with the express purpose of producing false confessions.  These confessions were intended to be used in the overall cover up of the horrendous crime of 9/11.  These people are guilty of nothing whatsoever and a massive investigation of the entire affair of Guantanamo should begin on the 20th.

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By cyrena, January 19, 2009 at 1:20 pm Link to this comment

I’m confused. Why are these pre-trail ‘hearings’ in this bogus system even taking place, if Obama is (Thank God, and that means a lot from an agnostic) planning to use an Executive Order to overturn the Military Commissions Act?

Seems to me that if Obama is going to overturn that horrendous MCA, which is what ‘allows’ for this farce to begin with, they’ll have to try these alleged 9/11 suspects in a legitimate US Court System..the same one the Constitution set up back in the day. The one we’d been using before Dick Bush set up their own as one of the many shadow government props in the ‘war on terror.’

That will be problematic, because of the torture. No evidence will be admissible, including outright confessions…BECAUSE OF THE TORTURE!!

So, I don’t know how this is gonna work. Guess I’ll have to be patient a while longer.

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