Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Military Commissions

U.S. Attorneys vie to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, national security be damned

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U.S. Attorneys are vying to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court, national security be damned:

The U.S. attorney’s offices in Alexandria and Manhattan are embroiled in intense competition over the opportunity to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and his co-conspirators, according to Justice Department and law enforcement sources.

At a time when many state officials are determined to keep suspected terrorists out of their jurisdictions, federal prosecutors are in a hidden struggle to have potentially history-making trials held in their districts. “There’s competition on all of these guys, and that’s to be expected — these are big cases,” said a Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Monday because of the sensitivity of the deliberations.

The two U.S. attorney’s offices have a history of competition, ever since Alexandria prosecutors were chosen to make the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person involved in the Sept. 11 conspiracy to be tried in the United States. The competition over Moussaoui grew so intense that it led to a compromise: The case was brought in Alexandria by a Justice Department team that included a New York-based prosecutor.

This is all about them, the U.S. Attorneys, not “swift and certain justice.” It would be the case of their lifetimes, pave the path to their fame and glory, guarantee them book deals and partnerships at white shoe law firms after government service, and only end up an enormous propaganda victory for al Qaeda.

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Keep Gitmo Open, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Military Commissions, Pentagon, September 11, World Trade Center

9-11 families pressure Obama to keep Guantanamo prison open

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Writing for the McClatchy Newspapers, Carol Rosenberg further reports on the reactions of 9/11 family members who this past week observed the Military Commission hearings of high-value al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo:

Heartbroken survivors of the 9-11 attacks have emerged as a key constituency in the campaign to stop Obama from making good on his Jan. 22 executive order to empty the prison camps and revise the controversial military trials within a year.

Obama argued that Guantanamo has become an anti-American recruiting tool in the arsenal of al-Qaida. Moreover, he said military commissions designed in the Bush years lacked fundamental U.S. guarantees of due process and were at odds with American values.

“There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world,” he said in a May 21 address to the nation on terrorism policy. “Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al-Qaida that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law.”

But, three times stretching back to the candidacies of Obama and Sen. John McCain, who each pledged to “close Guantanamo,” the Pentagon has brought parents, siblings and children of 9-11 victims to watch the attack’s alleged mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and co-conspirators defend themselves at a court designed by Bush administration officials to mete out military justice.

Three times, the court watchers described the antics of the confessed al-Qaida acolytes as making a mockery of American justice.

And three times, they held news conferences urging the White House to keep the prison camps open and war court here intact as the speediest, safest way to close the books on the former CIA-held captives accused of mass murder in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

“I did not come with a vengeful heart,” said Pompano Beach, Fla., mother Janet Roy, whose firefighter brother, William Burke, died saving others at the World Trade Center. “I came to see for myself … I know the right thing is being done here, in a carefully thought-out manner.”

Theirs is a powerful and emotional message from a sampling of victims’ kin, chosen by lottery, escorted to this base gingerly and with sensitivity to the families of the 2,974 people killed in al-Qaida’s coordinated hijackings that sent planes plunging into the Pentagon, Twin Towers and a Pennsylvania field.

READ THE REST, keep Gitmo open, and keep al Qaeda’s killers out the United States and our federal court system.