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Legal drama hasn't been played out yet

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The New York Times

Published: November 14, 2009

WASHINGTON - How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?

One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's attorneys will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric Holder noted, in a Manhattan courthouse "just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood."

Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged water-boarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.

The Obama administration's decision to try Mohammed and four other terrorist suspects in a civilian court provoked sharp debate among politicians and lawyers about whether American courtrooms are the proper place for so-called enemy combatants, whose suspected crimes were hatched overseas and who viewed themselves as participants in a war against the United States.

It promises to be a trial involving the morality of torture, due process rights of foreign terrorist operatives, and the ability of civilian courts to handle sensitive national security cases.

Once the Justice Department brings formal terrorism charges against him, Mohammed could seek to enter a guilty plea, just as he has tried to do in military custody.

But legal analysts said he might seek to martyr himself in the eyes of Muslim extremists through a grand trial.

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