World Trade Center

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.

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Debra Burlingame, detainees, Eric Holder, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Military Commissions, September 11, USS Cole, World Trade Center

9/11 Families call Obama consultation on al Qaeda prosecutions and detention a ‘farce’

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Elise Cooper of The New Majority wrote today of the June 16 and 17 meetings with Department of Justice officials of family members of the victims of terror (two groups of family members of about 45 people each met with the DOJ on those two days). The meetings were not pretty and Attorney General Eric Holder found somewhere more comfortable to be on the 17th. From what I heard, the families left the meetings fearing that President Barack Obama will bend over backwards to release as many from Gitmo as possible this year and attempt to prosecute those he can from among the rest in federal court, the consequences of both those actions be damned:

President Obama has spoken in the past about accountability and transparency; yet, those attending were not granted simple requests such as having the meeting recorded, receiving a list of those present, and being able to pass out a military commissions comparison chart. Bob Hemenway, who lost a son at the Pentagon, summarized the feelings of all interviewed by stating the meeting was “a set-up. It was a political ploy. We were pawns. What a waste. We were a show case. It was a farce.” The former Commander of the USS Cole, Kirk Lippold, pointed out that he requested a list of those who attended the two June meetings but has so far been refused.

The Attorney General, Eric Holder, attended only the June 16th meeting and stayed for only one out of four hours. Debra Burlingame, the sister of the pilot of American 77 that crashed into the Pentagon, explained that the families asked substantial questions which were either not answered or hardly answered. She stated that “Holder was sorry he walked into that room. For one hour they did not accept his platitudes. The questioning was aggressive, hard, and pointed. They got the message that these people were not going to be satisfied with the celebrity appearance and vague remarks. “

Family members were angered at being blind-sided, such as finding out after the fact that Jennifer Daskal was present at both meetings. Ms. Daskal is now a member of the DOJ detainee review task force. Previously she was the senior counter terrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, where she wrote that the military commissions were “illegitimate, dysfunctional, and a kangaroo court.” [emphasis added mine] Alice Hoagland, whose son Mark Bingham died on Flight 93, remarked that she was appalled and that “Mr. Holder has a pre-disposition to listen and be swayed by the political opinions of these human rights groups. I felt violated and betrayed.” Debra Burlingame went further when she stated that “I would never have talked about the last moments of my brother’s life with a woman sitting there who has championed the rights of the people who killed him.”