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Trials & tribulations

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29 April 2011 / Roger Smith
Issue: 7463 / Categories: Opinion , Legal aid focus , Human rights
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Roger Smith reflects on detainees, masterly performances & Daily Mail fulmination

America’s star 9/11 detainee will, after all, be tried by a military commission. The Obama administration’s original plan to use civilian courts has been defeated. Attorney General Eric Hodder’s final capitulation was forced by Congress restrictions on the use of military funds to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) from Guantanamo to the US.

The trial of KSM, wherever held, poses difficulties. On the one hand, he has confessed to involvement in just about every major terrorist event involving Al Qaeda since the mid-1990s. This included the boast that “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl” and that he was responsible for 31 specific operations led by the “9/11 operation from A to Z”. The problem is, the US owns up to treatment everyone else would call torture since his arrest in 2003: its agents waterboarded him no less than 183 times.

KSM indicated three years ago that he would plead guilty. He may, indeed,

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