Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged man behind 9/11, said he might help the victims’ lawsuit if the federal government does not seek the death penalty. From The Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Mohammed’s offer was disclosed in a Friday filing in the victims’ federal lawsuit in New York, which accuses the Saudi government of helping coordinate the 2001 suicide attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives when terrorists crashed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and, after passengers resisted, a Pennsylvania field. Riyadh has denied complicity in the attacks.Separately, President Trump signed legislation on Monday that funds medical claims from victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks for the rest of their lives.In the lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, plaintiffs’ lawyers had contacted three of the five Guantanamo detainees accused in the Sept. 11 conspiracy to request depositions. In the Friday filing, a status letter to U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn, the lawyers wrote that earlier Friday Mr. Mohammed’s counsel told them their client wouldn’t consent to a deposition “at the present time.”But the lawyer said that “the primary driver” of this decision is the “capital nature of the prosecution” and that “[i]n the absence of a potential death sentence much broader cooperation would be possible.”
Mohammed sang a different tune nine years ago during a hearing in Guantanamo Bay. When the judge called Mohammed’s case “a death-penalty case,” Mohammed declared it as a “martyr case.”
Mohammed wanted the United States to make him a martyr.
A person close to the happenings in Guantanamo Bay said that the people involved in 9/11 have changed a lot in the past ten years. These men no longer have any interest in becoming martyrs:
In 2017, the Defense Department official overseeing the proceedings, Harvey Rishikof, began exploring a potential plea bargain with the Sept. 11 defendants that would exchange guilty pleas for life sentences.Mr. Rishikof is said to have been concerned that the prosecution had been undermined by the torture inflicted upon Mr. Mohammed and other defendants at secret Central Intelligence Agency facilities overseas—an issue that has mired the case in years of pretrial hearings and raised the possibility that a military or federal court could sanction government misconduct by barring the death penalty.After word spread of plea discussions, Mr. Rishikof was fired by then Defense Secretary Jim Mattis for what Mr. Mattis said were unrelated reasons.
However, lawyers who represent Mohammed and others allegedly involved in 9/11 claim the court cannot use the statements from the suspects:
The attorneys, according to the New York Times, argue the FBI and CIA intermingled their work while extracting statements from the suspects at secret prisons and later at Guantanamo Bay.The newspaper reports none of the statements CIA agents got out of Mohammed from 2002 to 2006, following alleged torture such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation, could be used in court. During that time, the lawyers say, the FBI was feeding questions to the CIA.
One lawyer, Cheryl Bormann, claimed that while the FBI conducted the interviews, “the CIA continued to influence or control the detention of the suspects.” She said, “There was no separation. It’s all one big team.”
Prosecutors insist the FBI agents worked independently.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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