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Death Penalty Sought In Sept. 11 Attack Case

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By WILLIAM GLABERSON, The New York Times

Published: February 11, 2008

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantanamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday.

The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as today and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, former al-Qaida operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because, "if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale." The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.

A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial.

"The system hasn't been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date," said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "It certainly seems impossible to get this done by the end of the Bush administration."

One official who had been briefed on the war-crimes case identified the others to be charged as Mohamed al-Kahtani, the man officials have labeled the 20th hijacker; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, said to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and leaders of al-Qaida; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mohamed, who has been identified as Mohamed's lieutenant for the 2001 operation; al-Baluchi's assistant, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi; and Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers.

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment Sunday.

But some of those briefed on the case have said prosecutors view their task in seeking convictions for the Sept. 11 attacks as a historic challenge. A special group of military and Justice Department lawyers has been working on the case for several years.

Even if the detainees are convicted on capital charges, any execution would be many months, perhaps years, from being carried out, lawyers said, in part because a death sentence would have to be scrutinized by civilian appeals courts.

Federal officials have said in recent months that there is no death chamber at the detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and they knew of no plans for how a death sentence would be carried out.

The military justice system provides for execution by lethal injection in death sentence convictions. But the U.S. military has rarely executed a prisoner in recent times.

Tom Fleener, an Army Reserve major who was until recently a military defense lawyer at Guantanamo, said that bringing death penalty cases in the military commission system would bog down the untested system.

"Neither the system is ready, nor are the defense attorneys ready to do a death penalty case in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," Fleener said.

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