Associated Press/Gene Boyars
Sixteen years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, five of the accused terrorists are still awaiting trial and are still being held in detention at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba, and a trial still isn’t expected until at least 2019.
Some of the family of the victims in the attacks of that day say they don’t expect to see a trial completed in their lifetimes.
The five men on trial were arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003, and for some periods were held in undisclosed CIA detention facilities. Among them is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks.
The remarkable circumstances of the crime, the detention of the accused, and other issues like the death penalty and waterboarding have all combined to make advancement of a trial extremely slow and tedious.
The most recent example of the complexity of the process is a newly unsealed document in which the Pentagon prosecutor asked the military judge to set jury selection for the first week of January 2019, according to the Miami Herald.
The prosecution also asked the judge to impose a four-week deadline by which the defense would have to submit all “legal motions,” something the defense called “impossible.” The judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, seemed inclined to agree with the defense.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that the Guantanamo facility only has one courtroom, and that court is also in pre-trial hearings for the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, a terror attack on a U.S. ship in Yemen that killed 17 sailors and foreshadowed the 9/11 attacks.
To be ready for a trial in 2019, the prosecution is suggesting a series of small construction projects that would add needed extra office space and a sixth prisoner holding cell.
Also in the filing, the prosecution suggested to the judge that if the defense would not invoke top secret information into the death penalty trial, then correspondingly, the trial would not need a top secret court house.
The court is also wrestling with the death penalty. Defense attorneys, all of whom have top secret clearances, are trying to obtain and sift through thousands of pages of what happened to their clients when they were arrested.
Defense attorneys have signaled that if the defendants are convicted, they will argue the U.S. lacks the moral authority to execute them because the years-long road between their arrests and their arrival at Guantanamo included beatings, sleep deprivation, confinement in coffin-sized boxes, and more.
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