[Infowarrior] - KSM to be tried by military commission at Gitmo

[Richard Forno]

April 4, 2011 11:33 AM
KSM to be tried by military commission at Gitmo; Holder set to make announcement today

(Credit: AP)
Updated at 12:05 p.m. ET

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20050405-503544.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody

Attorney General Eric Holder today will announce that self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad will be tried in a military commission, CBS News has learned. A source says the commission will be held at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Trying Mohammed in a civilian court and closing the Guantanamo prison were once some of the Obama administration's top priorities, but political realities have hamstrung both goals.

In November 2009, Holder announced that Mohammed and four other alleged Sept. 11 plotters would be tried in New York City, but he scrapped that plan in the wake of public consternation. Republicans and some others in Washington said the decision compromised national security, while a CBS News poll at the time showed that most Americans thought such suspects should be tried in a closed military court.

Holder said on CBS' "Face the Nation" last July that he preferred trying the alleged terrorists in civilian court because the United States has an "extremely capable" court system that has proven effective in these kind of cases.

"I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. We have proven an ability to hold in our federal prison system people convicted of, charged with terrorist offenses very effectively, very safely," he said.

Congress in the past year has tried to undermine the administration's goal of closing Guantanamo by restricting funding for such policy changes. Meanwhile, the case of Ahmed Ghailani, the first Guantanamo detainee to be tried in civilian court, last year cracked open the debate over how to bring to justice detainees in the "war on terror." Ghailani was convicted of one conspiracy charge but acquitted of more than 280 other charges related to his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.