Thursday's arraignment before a military tribunal of five Al Qaeda members accused of planning and assisting the 9/11 terrorist atrocities seemed custom-made to assist the loathsome defendants in achieving exactly what they desire -- an aura of martyrdom.
The prisoners, including the plot's apparent mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were called to answer before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on murder, conspiracy and terrorism charges arising from the deaths of 2,973 people at New York's World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and in the Pennsylvania field where one of the airliners hijacked that day crashed.
It's a sad but salutary thing to recall that number and that terrible day. The consolations of legal justice never can be complete, but they're all we as a society have to offer the injured and the grieving. That's why, when it comes to the handling of these cases, the Bush administration's willful overreaching, contempt for fundamental American values and defiance of basic American notions of due process have set the stage for travesty and further tragedy.
By any reasonable standard, the Guantanamo tribunals are a farce. By the government's own admission, Mohammed and other high-level Al Qaeda detainees have been tortured. The five men arraigned Thursday all face execution if convicted. Their military defense lawyers say they've been denied adequate access to their clients or time to prepare a reasonable defense. The pool reporters the Pentagon is allowing to cover the proceedings have to sit behind a glass partition and listen over a sound system with a 20-second delay. Ostensibly that's to prevent the media from hearing any national security secret inadvertently blurted out during the testimony. Thursday, it apparently was used to shut off any mention of torture.
Mohammed has confessed his responsibility for 9/11 during an earlier proceeding: "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z." He also claimed he personally murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, among other atrocities: "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl."
