Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture?

I posted a link on New York Times Double Standard in which they unfairly singled out Andy Worthington. Here is an detailed reportage examining the six detainees at Gunatanomo Bay charged 6 1/2 after 9/11 - t

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Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture?

Finally, then, nearly six and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, the US administration has charged six Guantánamo detainees with, amongst other charges, terrorism, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, and conspiracy — adding, for good measure, that it will seek the death penalty in the case of any convictions.

The six men are: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who confessed in his tribunal at Guantánamo last March that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z”; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, reportedly a friend of the 9/11 hijackers, who helped coordinate the plan with KSM after he was unable to enter the United States to train as a pilot for the 9/11 operation, as he originally planned; Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), who are accused of helping to provide the hijackers with money and other items; Walid bin Attash, who is accused of selecting and training some of the hijackers; and, rather less spectacularly, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who is accused of trying and failing to enter the United States in August 2001 to become the 20th hijacker on 9/11.

From the top: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash.

The announcement of the charges is immensely significant. In one fell swoop, many of the complaints about Guantánamo appear to have been swept aside. These, chiefly, have centered on well-founded claims that the prison has mostly held innocent men or low-level Taliban foot soldiers. Of the 749 detainees who were held at the prison during its first two and half years of existence, none, according to dozens of high-level military and intelligence sources interviewed by the New York Times in June 2004, “ranked as leaders or senior operatives of al-Qaeda,” and “only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization’s inner workings.
[for more click on the heading]