US officials are still aiming to try the "big fish" of the Al-Qaeda terror network at Guantanamo Bay, but time is running short before a new president takes office next year.
Last week’s trial of Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Hamdan, seen as a minor player in the network, ended badly for government prosecutors who failed to sway a military jury at the first full trial at the controversial “war on terror” tribunals set up at the US military base in southern Cuba.
But despite the setback for the government, which saw Hamdan cleared of a conspiracy charge and given a light sentence, the conclusion of the hearing paves the way for trials of what officials call “high-value” suspects.
The most prominent is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has told interrogators he was the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks as well as other atrocities, including the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl.
Mohammed, a Kuwaiti of Pakistani origin captured in March 2003, has been charged along with four other alleged Sept. 11 plotters and faces the death penalty if convicted.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation — from A to Z,” said Mohammed, according to a transcript of his interrogation.
And the case is plagued by complicated questions about the credibility of their evidence extracted during interrogation and whether some of the defendants can represent themselves in court.
“There are a number of variables that need to be solved before we can accurately project a trial date, chief among them whether the judge will affirm pro se [self] representation for those who requested it, and then management of that process if it comes to pass,” Colonel Lawrence Morris, chief prosecutor for the military commissions system, said in an e-mail.
The trial could once again divert attention from terrorism to allegations of US torture and harsh interrogations, as the CIA has admitted that Mohammed was the subject of waterboarding — a simulated-drowning technique widely condemned as torture.
A new president taking office in January might choose to scrap the tribunals altogether, as Democratic Senator Barack Obama has suggested. Or he might make major changes to the system reconstituted under a 2006 law, after the previous tribunals were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.
Republican White House hopeful Senator John McCain has also said he would close down the facility, although he backed the 2006 modifications to the tribunal system.
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