Alleged 9/11 plotters say they want to confess
As families of the terror attack victims watch, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other defendants tell the military judge hearing their case that they wish to go straight to guilty pleas.
Reporting from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 terror attacks today told the military judge hearing what could be the last war-crimes proceedings at Guantanamo that they wanted to confess to the capital charges they face.
The defendants made their theatrical appeal as families of some of those killed in the terror attacks seven years ago watched the military court proceedings from behind a glass partition. The mother of one victim held up a photograph of her late son in his firefighter's uniform.
"I wanted my son to be part of it. I wanted him to see it," Maureen Santora said of her 23-year-old son Christopher's symbolic presence in the courtroom.
Guantanamo Bay: An article in Tuesday's Section A about the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, incorrectly gave the name of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.
It did not appear that any of the men charged with plotting the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people noticed the photograph or understood that relatives of their alleged victims were attending the pre-trial proceedings for the first time.
Santora said she wasn't trying to get the attention of the men she described as "hateful individuals in every way."
"When they admitted their guilt, my reaction was, 'Yes!' My inclination was to jump up and say 'Yay!' But I managed to maintain my decorum," she said after the morning session.
The session was devoted to the defendants' request to dispense with pre-trial issues and go straight to entering guilty pleas.
Mohammed and the others facing the death penalty for plotting the attacks on New York and Washington expressed their impatience with a process that has accorded them broad rights to defense attorneys and opportunities to contest the proceedings through legal motions.
After being allowed to meet together for a defense strategy session on Nov. 4, the five wrote a letter to the military judge newly assigned to their case, Army Col. Stephen R. Henley, asking that all motions filed by their attorneys be dismissed and that the court refuse to accept any others without their consent.
Four of the five had expressed during their June arraignment the desire to die a martyr's death at the hands of the U.S. military, and the fifth apparently joined them during the collaborative session last month that resulted in the letter to Henley the same day.
Henley didn't review the letter until Sunday, though, as the rules governing the Bush administration's special military commissions court for terrorism suspects require that communications from "high value detainees" be read only in secure facilities. Henley said he didn't have access to the top-security venue until he arrived here over the weekend.
