WASHINGTON: Let’s see: Whose diabolical plan was it to have alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants tried in downtown New York City — just blocks from the former World Trade Centers?
New Yorkers, already traumatized from two devastating attacks on their former World Trade Centers, are freaking out at the thought that the trial could become a potential terrorist target. They also fear the requisite security could disrupt residents and businesses.
“It would be great if the federal government could find a site that didn’t cost a billion dollars,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters. “It will also impact traffic and commerce and people’s lifestyles downtown and it would be great if we didn’t do it.”
The trial’s costs are estimated at more than $200 million a year and it is not known how long the trial, or future trials, might last.
New York officials say they back a criminal trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had admitted planning the attacks, and the other four accomplices. They asked for a review of other possible sites in the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx and six counties north of the city.
Alternative trial locations are also being considered because Congress is now thought to almost certainly deny President Obama the funds necessary to conduct the trials there, as originally planned, in the federal courthouse mere blocks away from the Twin Towers, the epicenter of the 9/11 attacks that took the lives of nearly 3,000 civilians.
Other New York sites also being considered are an Air National Guard Base and a federal prison, but the base has no court or prison facilities and the prison has no courtroom. Another possibility is said to be the federal courthouse in White Plains, 30 miles north of Manhattan, but the mayor there is adamantly against the idea.
Some sites outside the state being considered is a court in the Eastern District of Virginia, where terror trials have previously been held; or the unused Illinois prison where the Obama administration has proposed to move detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
As a result of the New York rebuff, the White House has told the Department of Justice to consider a new location for the trials — which are sure to attract massive publicity and require intense security preparations wherever they are held. Officials at the Justice Department are said to be “scrambling” to assess the options.
Until the brouhaha began, the Obama administration supported Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to move the suspects from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to New York to be tried in federal court rather than before a military commission, as many Republicans had demanded. The White House is, however, standing by its decision that a civilian trial is appropriate and worthy venue for seeking to bring the alleged conspirators to justice.
“President Obama is still committed to trying Mohammed and four other terrorist detainees in federal court,” spokesman Bill Burton told reporters on Thursday. “He agrees with the attorney general’s opinion that ... (the detainees) can be litigated successfully and securely in the United States of America, just like others have.”
