Questions and answers on the 9/11 war crimes trial - Green Bay Press Gazette

The U.S. is for a second time attempting to prosecute five prisoners held at the Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for planning and aiding the Sept. 11 attacks, charging them with war crimes in a special tribunal for wartime offenses known as a military commission. Heres an update.

Q. Who will be on trial? What are the charges?

A. The main defendant is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a self-described terrorist mastermind who came up with the idea of using commercial aircraft to attack the U.S. and set the plan in motion. Mohammed, a Pakistani citizen who grew up in Kuwait and attended college in Greensboro, N.C., has told the U.S. military he was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from A to Z, as well as about 30 other plots, and said he personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

The four other defendants are all accused of being Mohammeds underlings and playing more minor roles in the attacks, such as providing money and other assistance to the hijackers.

All five face the same charges, including conspiracy, attacking civilians, terrorism and 2,976 counts of murder in violation of the law of war, one for each official victim of the Sept. 11 attacks at the time the charges were filed. Each of the men could get the death penalty if convicted.

Q. What has happened so far?

A. The five were arraigned in May at the U.S. base in Cuba in a sometimes-unruly 13-hour hearing in which the men appeared to make a concerted effort to delay the proceeding by refusing to respond to questions from the military judge or use the courts translation system to follow the proceedings in Arabic. They didnt enter a plea, though Mohammed in the past has indicated he wanted to plead guilty.

Since then, prosecutors and defense lawyers have filed dozens of pretrial motions dealing with a wide range of legal issues, such as the rules for handling classified evidence or what clothing the defendants will be allowed to wear in court. The judge must hold pretrial hearings on many of the motions, but those have been delayed by the challenge of scheduling court appearances for all the attorneys and prosecutors involved in the case, a break for the Muslim holy period of Ramadan, and Tropical Storm Isaac, which forced the military to cancel several days of hearings in August. The government has scheduled another round of pretrial hearings to start Oct. 15.