Five men are currently being held in Guantanamo prison, waiting to be tried for the massacre that marked a century
The tragedy that changed the history of the West forever leaves behind almost three thousand deaths, an incalculable number of indirect victims and no real culprits in the dock. Twenty-one years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, the trial of the terrorists considered the minds of the attack is still blocked.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men members of the Islamic fundamentalist organization Al-Quaida are still being held today in the maximum security prison in Guantanamo, territory owned by the United States on the island of Cuba, awaiting trial, whose hearings however they are canceled or continuously postponed. The latest setback came last month, when the preliminary hearings scheduled for early autumn were canceled.
For the families of the thousands who died in the crash of four airliners into the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon headquarters in Arlington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a trial could be the moment of truth, to give answer to the last unsolved questions.
In the event of a definitive sentence, the Kuwaiti Mohammed, who in 2007 declared himself “responsible for the operation from A to Z”, risks the death penalty. James Connell, lawyer for Ammar al-Baluchi, another terrorist involved in the operation, said the parties are still trying to reach a preliminary agreement. The lawyer called the effort to try Mohammed before a military court, rather than in the normal US judicial system, “a tremendous failure” that is “offensive to our constitution and our rule of law.”
In 2009, at the beginning of his first term, then President Barack Obama announced that Mohammed would be transferred to New York for trial in a federal court in Manhattan. However, the Big Apple shrank from the exorbitant costs that security would require: Trying Mohammed in the city where the disaster he is accused of took place could provoke unpredictable reactions. The New Yorker criticized Obama’s proposal to move the trial to a federal court: the Kuwaiti is accused of “a military act” and should be tried by the military.
David Kelley, a former New York state attorney who chaired the Justice Department’s national investigation into the attacks, called the delays “failure to pursue a horrific tragedy for the families of the victims.”
Shortly before dawn on March 1, 2003, the United States achieved the most emotional victory over the accomplices of the 9/11 attacks: the capture of Mohammed, taken away by intelligence agents from a hideout in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. . An international manhunt that lasted over a year and a half. In addition to him, the Yemeni Walid bin Attash, head of the paramilitary camps of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (who had provided flight simulators and news on airlines) were also captured; the Yemeni Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an Al-Qaida cell in Hamburg (which had enrolled the hijackers in American flight schools); Pakistani Ammar al-Baluchi, accused of bringing nine terrorists to the United States and sending them US $ 120,000; the Saudi Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who provided for the procurement of cash, credit cards and Western clothing.
Mohammed and his co-defendants were initially held in secret prisons overseas. The five were too valuable a source of information and the American secret services tried to use them to dismantle Al-Qaeda. According to Human Right Watch, CIA agents subjected them to enhanced interrogation techniques that amounted to torture. Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding (i.e. the controlled drowning technique) 183 times. His own confessions, if extracted under torture, could be completely invalidated.
The source, however, quickly became annoyed: a Senate investigation later concluded that the interrogations did not lead to any valuable information. In return, it has sparked an endless series of preliminary disputes over whether or not the FBI reports on their statements can be used against them. Meanwhile, the fight against terrorism continued: in 2011 Osama bin Landen was killed in a laugh in Pakistan and his deputy (later successor) Ayman al-Zawahiri died in a drone attack in Kabul on 31 July.
To suffer in particular are all relatives of the victims who, extraneous to the geopolitical logic and of intelligence, they could have had justice and answers on what happened over two decades ago. Now, Kelley said, over time it will be much more difficult to prosecute Mohammed in a courtroom: “The evidence becomes stale, the memory of the witnesses fails.”
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