For 9/11 families, it’s 22 years without answers, justice or accountability

[Kamaji]

For 9/11 families, it’s 22 years without answers, justice or accountability

By Terry Kay Rockefeller
Published Sep. 10, 2023

For 22 years, my family and I — and most of all my sister, Laura, and the nearly 3,000 others who were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks — have been denied justice.

The betrayal began with the Bush administration’s 2003 decision to take the men accused of planning and supporting the attacks ­­­­­to CIA “black sites,” where they were tortured.

Then the administration compounded its shameful decision by sending the accused to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and attempting to conduct a trial in an inadequate military-justice system, rather than in federal court.

When a majority pleaded guilty, the judge was unsure how to proceed since Guantanamo rules were unclear about death sentences if the defendants had no lawyers.

Congress later overhauled the Guantanamo legal system.

The Obama administration made a half-hearted attempt in 2009 to move the 9/11 case to federal court in New York.

State and city politicians opposed this, so the case returned to Guantanamo.

In 2018, six years after the five accused were arraigned for a second time, no trial had begun.

The military official with authority to do so began negotiating plea agreements (guilty pleas in exchange for abandoning the death penalty), but then-President Donald Trump’s defense secretary fired him, and we were back to pre-trial hearings!

By March 2022, the complete failure of the 9/11 military commission became so apparent that the prosecution — the attorneys representing the US government and the American people — began plea-agreement negotiations with the defense.

But Wednesday, the Biden administration, after doing nothing for 17 months, rejected proposals concerning the defendants’ future terms of confinement, pretty much destroying any hope I see for a resolution of the case any time soon.

The 9/11 family community is large and diverse, and understandably we hold a range of opinions about trials, the death penalty and plea agreements.

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Source:  https://nypost.com/2023/09/10/for-9-11-families-its-22-years-without-answers-justice-or-accountability/