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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 at 6:02 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

obama did the right thing and obama the first black president

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By omniadeo, January 20 at 6:04 pm #

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 at 8:19 pm #

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

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By PSmith, January 19 at 8:14 pm #

THE 27,000 MUSLIMS DISAPPEARED BY THE US

The MOST important thing is the 27,000 muslims ‘disappeared’ by the Bush administration. And that BushCheneyCo are not allowed to just have them killed.

Mentioned in a mainstream press article by Robert Fisk, which may yet save their lives.

“There is just one little problem, though, and that’s the “missing” prisoners. Not the victimswho have been (still are being?) tortured in Guantanamo, but the thousands who have simply disappeared into US custody abroad or – with American help – into the prisons of US allies. Some reports speak of 20,000 missing men, most of them Arabs, all of them Muslims. Where are they? Can they be freed now? Or are they dead? If Obama finds that he is inheriting mass graves from George W Bush, there will be a lot of apologising to do.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-obama-has-to-pay-for-eight-years-of-bushs-delusions-1001092.html

It reminds us of the Nixon/Kissinger Operation Condor and the tens of thousands of Argentinian disappeared, many inhumanly dumped out of aeroplanes into the Atlantic ocean whilst drugged but still alive. Sister Stella Calloni - Operation Condor.

http://www.elhabanero.cubaweb.cu/2008/noviembre/nro2396_nov08/nac_08nov826ingles.html

The same Nixon/Kissinger White House - where Cheney/Rumsfeld learned their skuldduggery.

It serves notice on the Bush/Cheney U.S. administration that the world is watching and that they and any person obeying a Neocon Nutcase order to ‘eliminate’ this monumentally embarrassing ‘problem,’ may well face a Nuremberg-style hangman’s noose. “Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of their lives.”

Fisk, the same incensed honourable man who fearlessly reported the Sabra and Shatila genocide of Arial Sharon who, after the Israeli inquiry, was fired as Israeli Defense minister. Would that there be such an inquiry again, in the U.S.

Clive Stafford Smith: “US Holding 27,000 in Secret Overseas Prisons; Transporting Prisoners to Iraqi Jails to Avoid Media & Legal Scrutiny,” on Democracy Now.

Clive Stafford Smith, British born lawyer for over fifty detainees in Guantanamo Bay. He is the legal director of the UK charity Reprieve and has defended prisoners on death row for over twenty years. He is the author of Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/19/clive_stafford_smith

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By PSmith, January 19 at 8:08 pm #

BUT 99% ARE GUILTY OF NOTHING

Let us not forget that 99% of these men were BOUGHT by the US. Sold by Afghans for up to $5,000 each. Nearly all were guilty of NOTHING.

They were goat-herders, foreigners, strangers and the enemies of those doing the selling. And the one taxi-driver whose ‘crime’ was to ask about his arrested friend and colleague.

They were kept in internment by the US, as a PR device. They were ALL tortured. Some were tortured to death. All were victims of a crime against humanity and of a crime against the laws of war.

Sami al-Hajj was guilty of “being a cameraman while Arab.” He was tortured for 478 straight days by force feeding while on hunger strike, but still he refused to return and be a spy for the US against his colleagues at his TV news station.

THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO

What’s it like to be innocent and sent to Guantanamo? Three British men visiting Pakistan for a wedding found out. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqQ9ZdgkKKo

WE WERE SUNK IN EVIL, AND KNEW IT

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

- Pastor Martin Niemöller. Concentation Camp victim.

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By Muscleboy, January 19 at 6:26 pm #

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 at 6:20 pm #

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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