US to try 9/11 accused at Guantanamo
In a major about-face, the Obama administration said on Monday that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators will be tried by a military tribunal at Guantanamo rather than a civilian court in New York.
Announcing the U-turn, Attorney General Eric Holder insisted the accused plotters accused of the September 11, 2001 attacks could have been successfully prosecuted in a federal court, but blamed Congress for imposing measures blocking the trials of Guantanamo inmates in the United States.
President Barack Obama's administration had to "face a simple truth" that the congressional restrictions were "unlikely to be repealed in the immediate future," Holder said.
"And we simply cannot allow a trial to be delayed any longer for the victims of the 9/11 attacks or for their family members who have waited for nearly a decade for justice," he said.
Holder, saying he made the decision "reluctantly," formally referred the cases of Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, and Mustapha Ahmed al-Hawsawi to the Defence Department for trials before military commissions.
The move came the same day the president announced plans to stand for re-election and also followed a decision earlier Monday by the US Supreme Court rejecting three appeals by Guantanamo detainees protesting their indefinite detention.
Obama has vowed to close Guantanamo, having held it up as a symbol of all that was wrong with the so-called "war on terror" waged by his predecessor George W Bush.
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