Allowing Death Penalties Without Trial for Alleged 9/11 Plotters Would Be the Ultimate Obstruction of Justice

This Would Be Unprecedented

Remember, allowing guilty pleas would not follow standard criminal or even military procedure. Normally, prosecutors in military trials are normally required to prove guilt in a trial even against service members who want to plead guilty.

And in normal American criminal trials, the judge has to make sure that the defendant understands that he is pleading guilty, that he has the capacity to understand what that means, and that he wishes to accept the consequences.  But some of the prisoners have been tortured until they are literally crazy, and may not understand what they are pleading guilty to or even what the death penalty means.

Obstruction of Justice

In addition, the government has obstructed justice at every turn regarding 9/11. Indeed, even the 9/11 Commissioners themselves now say this:

• The Commission's co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) "obstructed our investigation"

• Indeed, they said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements (free subscription required)

• 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't have access . . . ."
  

• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"
  

• 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up"
  

• The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) - who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry - said "At some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."

The torture sessions of the alleged 9/11 suspects were in fact videotaped, but the CIA illegally destroyed the videotapes, so that the extent of torture and the prisoner's actual words will never be known (and see this).

Allowing these prisoners to now be executed without trial would be the ultimate obstruction of justice. It would be just like killing the captured American Christian and putting him to death based upon his supposed "confessions" and his supposed wish to become a Christian martyr.

Indeed, the analogy would be closer to the current situation if the murder in the tin-pot dictator's country were suspicious (for example, if the dictator had received numerous warnings that the victim's life was in danger but had provided no protection), and if the dictator had used the murder as the main excuse to strip away all of the liberties and freedoms in his country and to launch several wars against other nations which he had long wanted to invade.

The world would obviously insist that the prisoner receive a fair trial both to establish his innocence or guilt and to see if the dictator's rationale for launching wars and crushing the rights of his people was an honest one.

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