Five Al-Qaeda suspects offer to plead guilty for 9/11 attacks
Güncelleme Tarihi:
Five al-Qaeda members accused of planning the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington offered to plead guilty to charges that may lead to execution.
The Guantanamo detainees said they decided on Nov. 4 — the day Barack Obama was elected — to abandon their defenses in their death-penalty trials.
Obama opposes the military war-crimes trials and has pledged to close Guantanamo's detention center, which holds some 250 men.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said Monday he will confess to masterminding the attacks that killed 2,975 people, the news agencies reported.
The four other defendants did the same, in effect daring the Pentagon to give them death sentences.
The judge ordered lawyers to advise him by Jan. 4 whether the Pentagon can apply the death penalty — which military prosecutors are seeking — without a jury trial.
Mohammed, who has already told a military panel he was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, said he has no faith in the judge, his Pentagon-appointed lawyers or President George W. Bush.
Sporting a chest-length gray beard, Mohammed told the judge in English: "I don't trust you."
FORMAL CONFESSIONS DELAYED
The defendants' announcement shocked victims' relatives who watched from behind a glass partition, the first time family members have been allowed to observe the war-crimes trials.
The formal confessions were delayed, however, when the judge said two of the defendants could not enter pleas until the court determines their mental competency. The other three said they would wait as well.
"Our plea request was based on joint strategy," said defendant Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali.
The judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, noted that the law specifies that only defendants unanimously convicted by a jury can be sentenced to death in the tribunals. No jury has been seated.
Army Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo tribunals, said he expects a jury would be created to hear evidence in a sentencing phase of the trial and would decide on what punishment to mete out to the defendants.
Human rights observers said the judge's uncertainty about sentencing highlights problems with America's first war-crimes trials since World War II, and is further evidence that they should be shut down.
"The fact that the judge doesn't know whether they can be sentenced to death in one of the most important trials in U.S. history shows the circus-like atmosphere of the military commissions," said Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch. "These cases belong in federal court."