Yahoo News Photo Illustration/AP
Fourteen
years since the Sept. 11 attacks transformed the nation and launched
two wars, the five men accused of masterminding the crime are still
waiting for their trial to begin in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed and his four associates have been in U.S. custody for
more than 10 years. But the latest in the military’s hapless effort to
try them — which began in 2012 — has ground to a halt, as the judge,
Col. James Pohl, addresses allegations that an FBI informant attempted
to infiltrate one of the defendants’ legal teams. The court hasn’t been
in session since last April when Pohl declared the proceedings suspended
again after 30 minutes. Even if he solves this particular problem when
the court reconvenes next month, dozens of other motions and complaints
that have been on hold for a year and a half await him.
The
handful of people who have been watching the excruciatingly slow case
closely — journalists, family members of those killed on Sept. 11,
attorneys — say they believe it will be years before a jury is selected
and the trial actually begins. Some have given up hope that the five
accused mass murderers will ever face justice.
“I
don’t know if it’s going to happen in my lifetime,” said Rita Lasar,
83, whose brother died in the 9/11 attacks. Lasar formed an organization
called Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which lobbied
unsuccessfully for the accused plotters to be tried in the federal court
system.
The
Obama administration attempted to move the five men from Guantánamo to
be tried in a federal court in Manhattan in 2009, before fierce
political blowback led by a vocal faction of 9/11 families killed the plan.
(The Bush administration had set the five on course to be tried in a
military tribunal before the Supreme Court knocked down that approach.)
Congress passed a law blocking all transfers of Guantánamo detainees to
U.S. soil. Obama reformed the military commissions, to be more palatable
to human rights critics, and restarted the proceedings there in May
2012.
Those
opposed to the move to federal court wanted swift military-style
justice for the accused plotters in a tribunal that made it easier to
get convictions and guard government secrets. But the result has been
very different. The untested system is a “defense lawyer’s absolute
dream,” according to David Remes, who represents several Guantánamo
detainees. Attorneys are able to file motion after motion, delaying the
start of the death penalty trial, in part because no one really knows
what the rules are. In the meantime, the federal court system has
successfully convicted terrorist after terrorist.
“There’s no question that if these cases were tried in federal court, they would have been over long, long ago,” Remes said.
But
Jason Wright, a former attorney on Mohammed’s defense team before
resigning last year, said that the ever-changing rules of the new court
were not a bonus for him or his team.
“I
think the biggest challenge is trying to litigate in an environment
where the rules change constantly, where Kafka controls the design,” he
said. “You’re told to follow rules that you’ve never been shown,
especially the classification rules, and it’s just extraordinarily
difficult.”