We still get painful updates on the cases of five alleged 9/11 conspiracists. Try them already and release the others at Gitmo or move them to US prisons.
This new year brings more frustration over the prisoners — euphemistically called detainees — still housed at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and more pain for 9/11 families, including mine, as we prepare to mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
It’s long past time to bring the alleged 9/11 conspirators to trial and either release the others still held there or move them to U.S. prisons and try them in U.S. courts. All that should be high on President Joe Biden’s agenda.
So where are we with Gitmo?
Forty prisoners remain there, among them five men accused of planning and supporting the 9/11 attacks. Those five are being tried before a military commission, but so far the start of the trial has been repeatedly delayed — often for acceptable reasons, including pandemic considerations. The rules of the proceedings generally have reflected basic American values about innocence and guilt, but the delays have become enormously frustrating, especially for 9/11 families monitoring all this.
Every update is a stab in the heart
Periodically, I get email from the director of the Victim Witness Assistance Program of the Office of the Chief Prosecutor of Military Commissions, updating me and other 9/11 family members on the progress — or lack of it — of the pre-trial business in the cases of Mohamed Atta, Abdul Aziz al Omari, Satam al Suqami, Wail al Shehri and Waleed al Shehri.
Every email is a stab in the heart reminding me that Karleton D. B. Fyfe, the 31-year-old son of one of my sisters, was a passenger on American Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center. Karleton’s murder traumatized my extended family in endless ways. My new book tells that story and also explores the question of why some people get sucked into monochromatic thinking that leads to violence and what we can do to oppose such extremism.
The long story of how essential American values have been ignored or brutalized at Gitmo is a national embarrassment. Worse, it simply provides additional fodder for the religious and political radicals around the world who love to hate America.
The George W. Bush administration’s decision to go into Afghanistan to wipe out al-Qaida training camps was justifiable as self-defense. But even before Bush and his staff lost focus in Afghanistan and started an utterly unjustifiable war in Iraq, America faced the question of what to do with captured terrorists.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/01/27/biden-end-guantanamo-saga-for-prisoners-9-11-families-column/6671262002/
