Legal News

Alleged 9/11 Mastermind Declaims on Due Process and Carrier Pigeons

By Dan Slater

At his June arraignment, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged 9/11 mastermind, expressed some serious disdain for the U.S. Constitution. “I consider all American constitution” evil, he told a military judge, because it permits “same-sexual marriage and many other things that are very bad. Do you understand?”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, center, and co-defendant Walid Bin Attash, left, attending a pre-trial session, Dec. 8, 2008, at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba . (AP/ Janet Hamlin)

Now Mohammed and four co-defendants are voicing similar displeasure over the pace of due process. Today, they said they wanted to confess to the 9/11 conspiracy and asked a military judge to take their guilty pleas. The move came as the court was scheduled to hear a host of defense motions challenging the military charges against the defendants. Here are stories from the WSJ and the NYT.

“We don’t want to waste time,” Mohammed told the judge, Col. Stephen Henley. “We want to enter a plea” to capital charges stemming from the hijack attacks.

Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mohammed’s nephew and alleged assistant, said, “I wanted to enter a plea from the first arraignment day.”

Col. Henley ruled that Mohammed, Ali and Walid bin Attash, who’s accused of running an al Qaeda training camp, could drop the motions and enter pleas. They are acting as their own lawyers because of their stated distrust of Americans. (For KSM’s opinions on that, click here.) But defense lawyers claimed that two defendants, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al Hawsawi, were mentally incompetent to take such a serious step, and the judge deferred a decision until psychological evaluations could be considered.

Interestingly, Mohammed said the defendants had met to discuss their case and after a Nov. 4 meeting signed a letter to the judge seeking to withdraw the defense motions and seeking a hearing “in order to announce our confessions.” They were annoyed today, reports the WSJ, when the judge said he had only read their letter Sunday. “Is the commission using a carrier pigeon?” Mohammed scoffed. Henley said he had lacked a secure facility in which to read the letter before arriving at the base.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).