Washington, February 08: US President Barack Obama says he has not ruled out putting the September 11 suspect on trial in New York despite oppositions from both Republicans and fellow Democrats.
In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Obama said he still planned to hold the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City but acknowledged logistical issues and opposition from locals made it difficult.
“I have not ruled it out; but I think it’s important for us to take into account the practical, logistical issues involved,” he said.
“If you’ve got a city that is saying ‘no’ and a police department that’s saying ‘no’ and a mayor that’s saying ‘no,’ that makes it difficult,” Obama admitted.
Mohammed, according to US officials, has claimed responsibility for organizing the September 11attacks which leveled the World Trade Center’s twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York.
In November, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department decided to transfer Mohammed and four other suspects to New York to be tried for the attacks.
The plan was to hold the trial in a federal courthouse in the vicinity of the ruined complex, but the decision faced vehement opposition from officials who cited high costs and security risks.
In January, the administration was said to be having second thoughts about the decision.
Mohammed has been in US custody since March 1, 2003, when he was captured in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi.
After initially blaming al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, and attacking Afghanistan in order to capture the Saudi national, US officials changed focus of their attention and announced that the main culprit has been transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
In March 2007, Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing in Guantanamo Bay claimed Mohammed and four co-defendants confessed to plotting for the attacks.
On December 8, 2008, they allegedly sent a note to the military judge expressing their desire to confess and plead guilty.
Human rights groups, such as the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch say the harsh treatment inflicted on Mohammed during his stay at the Guantanamo detention center amounts to torture, questioning credibility of the ‘confessions’ under interrogation.
The US says four of its commercial passenger jet airliners were hijacked on September 11, 2001. Two of the airliners crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, one hit the Pentagon and the fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
Many analysts and scientists have however stated that the attacks were either intentionally allowed to happen or were a ‘false flag’ operation orchestrated by an organization with elements inside the United States government.
Demolition theory proponents, such as physicist Steven E. Jones, architect Richard Gage, software engineer Jim Hoffman, and theologian David Ray Griffin, argue that the aircraft impacts and resulting fires could not have weakened the buildings sufficiently to initiate a catastrophic collapse.
The buildings would not have collapsed completely, nor at the speeds that they did, without additional energy involved to weaken their structures, they argue.
Italian MEP Giulietto Chiesa, whose documentary film Zero was aired on Russian state television in late 2008 has questioned the official American version of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The documentary film is based on a collection of essays by the same name which has attracted much attention in Italy since their publication in the late summer of 2007.
The film features prominent figures including novelist Gore Vidal and playwright Dario Fo as well as retired American professor of philosophy David Ray Griffin.
Federal Aviation Administration controllers, US Air Force pilots, military commanders and physicists also appear in the critical documentary, expressing strongly divergent opinions about what happened on September 11, 2001.
To date the American intelligence apparatus has not explained the circumstances in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices had managed to conduct such attacks on American soil.
——-Agencies