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The Pentagon is 'pausing' a plan to have Guantanamo Bay detainees vaccinated against COVID-19 next week. Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby confirmed Saturday afternoon that the process was on hold following widespread outrage that terrorists were being given priority treatment for the in-demand vaccines. 'No Guantanamo detainees have been vaccinated. We're pausing the plan to move forward, as we review force protection protocols. We remain committed to our obligations to keep our troops safe,' Kirby wrote on Twitter.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has expressed willingness to aid a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia by victims of the attack if the federal government does not seek the death penalty against him, according to The Wall Street Journal. Mohammed’s offer was first made public in a filing Friday as part of the federal lawsuit, which seeks to hold the Saudi government responsible for assisting in the attacks, a charge the Saudis have denied. Lawyers for the plaintiffs reportedly reached out to three of five Guantanamo Bay prisoners accused of conspiring in the...

An Irish survivor of the 9/11 terror attacks, whose sister and niece were on one of the hijacked planes that were flown into the World Trade Center, is set to play a key role once the trial of five suspects gets underway. Ron Clifford, originally from Cork, witnessed first-hand the devastation of the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks and narrowly survived the disaster when flaming wreckage fell onto the building plaza in front of him. He later learned that his sister Ruth McCourt and her four-year-old daughter, Juliana, were passengers on board the second aircraft to crash into the...

A Turkish cosmetics company that ran a controversial online ad for its hair removal product has defended itself, arguing that it featured a notorious al-Qaeda militant “for his hair, not terrorism.” The ad for the hair removal product reads, in Turkish, “Waiting won’t get rid of that hair!” or, more literally, “The hair will not go away because you keep waiting!” The slogan is accompanied by a photo of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Pakistani former al-Qaeda leader who is best known as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack. Mohammed is currently being held in U.S. military custody in Guantánamo...

The September11 terror attacks in the US were staged to overcome disunity in al-Qa'ida, confidential computer records reveal. Alan Cullison reports on what happened after his laptop was wrecked while he was covering the combat in Afghanistan IN the autumn of 2001, I was one of scores of journalists who ventured into northern Afghanistan to write about the US-assisted war against the Taliban. After losing use of my computer in an accident, I scrawled stories by candlelight with a ballpoint pen and read dispatches to my editors at The Wall Street Journal over a satellite phone. When the Taliban's defences...

Note: The following text is a quote: IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 060-010 January 22, 2010 Military Commission Charges Withdrawn In Sept. 11 Case The Defense Department announced today that the convening authority for Military Commissions withdrew and dismissed the charges, without prejudice, against the five detainees charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. This action comes in light of the announcement by the attorney general of the United States that the Department of Justice intends to pursue a prosecution of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Walid Bin Attash, Ramzi Bin al Shibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, in...

EXCERPT (John Yoo, author of Crisis and Command and a former official in the Bush Justice Department) The Constitution requires that we have an open public trial for any criminal defendant tried by our government, and one of the rights that every defendant has is to force a government to open up its files and provide all the information it has on the defendant.This is going to be terrible for our efforts against al-Qaeda because we will have to explain, for example, how we knew where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, how we were able to intercept his cell phone calls,...

Gov. David Paterson openly criticized the White House on Monday, saying he thought it was a terrible idea to move alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists to New York for trial.

Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement Friday that five Guantanamo Bay terror suspects will face trial just blocks from Ground Zero, where almost 3,000 people were killed, has added more fuel to the already heated debate over whether civilian courts can handle terror prosecutions. The transfer of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and four other detainees to New York for trial presents daunting logistical and security problems for the Southern District, as well as a thicket of novel legal issues for the judge who handles the case. The detention and trial of the five defendants will...

Eric Holder's decision to move a trial on war crimes to American soil is morally confused, dangerous and political to a fault. Coming soon to a civilian courtroom blocks from Ground Zero: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other al Qaeda planners of 9/11. Be sure to get your tickets early, and don't forget to watch out for the truck-bomb barricades and rooftop snipers. Attorney General Eric Holder, who dropped this legal bomb on New York yesterday, called his decision to move their trial on war crimes from a military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay to American soil "the toughest" he...

Source: 9/11 Terror Detainees Face Trial in N.Y. Friday, November 13, 2009 WASHINGTON — Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, an Obama administration official said Friday. The official said Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning. The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

If Hillary Clinton had been any less supportive of the Obama admin's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan, she might have had to quit her Secretary of State job . . . Clinton damned the decision with faint praise during her Meet The Press appearance today. Asked by host David Gregory where should stood on the matter, her response was the ultra-tepid: "I'm not going to second-guess any decision the Attorney General made." And a bit later: "If the Attorney General and veteran prosecutors think this is the best way to achieve [the desired] outcome, then I think...

My brother was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. I have been waiting for justice ever since. Last month, I went to Guantanamo Bay to try to find it. What I witnessed was shocking. I saw a place where prisoners toy with the authorities, read the newspaper and get one hour breaks for prayer. I saw a place where detainees are treated far better than many ordinary American criminal defendants - and, as far as I'm concerned, far better than they deserve. I looked straight into the eyes of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man who masterminded the attacks...

Attorney General Michael Mukasey spoke at the London School of Economics today and surprised the audience with his comments on the application of the death penalty for the 9/11 plotters held at Guantanamo Bay. Given the administration’s support of the death penalty, they probably expected Mukasey to offer the usual justifications for it, especially for terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mukasey argued instead that the US should not give them the martyrdom they seek, but rather a lifetime of obscure captivity: U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Friday he hoped the six Guantanamo prisoners charged with the September 11...

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was strapped down to the water-board, he felt humiliated -- not by the treatment but by the fact that a woman, a red-headed CIA supervisor, was allowed to witness the spectacle, a former intelligence officer told ABC News. The al Qaeda mastermind, known as KSM, stubbornly held out for about two minutes -- far longer than any of the other "high-value" terror targets who were subjected to the technique, the harshest from a list of six techniques approved for use by the CIA and Bush administration lawyers, sources said. Then KSM started talking, in idiomatic English...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Fourteen suspected terrorists listed as "high-value detainees" at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been designated as enemy combatants, placing them in line to be charged and put on trial by the U.S. military, Pentagon officials said Thursday. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of 9/11, was moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, last September. The detainees -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States -- were moved to Guantanamo Bay by the president last September after being held in secret CIA prisons around the world....

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has told a Guantanamo Bay hearing he was the brains behind al-Qa'ida's biggest bombings, writes Sally Neighbour FROM the scowling mug shots splashed across the front pages of the world's newspapers, you wouldn't have picked him as an evil genius. Fat, unshaven and having a very bad hair day, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed looked more like an ageing drug pusher than the architect of the world's most audacious terrorist attack. But the images captured after Mohammed's detention in Pakistan in March 2003 belied the true nature of a man who was undoubtedly the world's most diabolical terrorist mastermind....

Al-Qaida operative became fountain of information for U.S. BY JOHN CREWDSON Chicago Tribune Moral and legal aspects aside, conventional wisdom is that torture simply isn't practical: that someone who is being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that information gleaned through torture is therefore not reliable. Some former military and intelligence officers say, however, that physically aggressive interrogation techniques that some human rights groups consider torture can be effective in the short term. When asked for specifics, the technique they cite is "waterboarding," in which water is poured over a subject's face to create the sensation...

Qaeda Letters Are Said to Show Pre-9/11 Anthrax Plans WASHINGTON, May 20 -Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan began to assemble the equipment necessary to build a rudimentary biological weapons laboratory before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, letters released by the Defense Department show.... The letters are among the documents recovered in late 2001 after the invasion of Afghanistan that United States intelligence officials have frequently cited as evidence that Al Qaeda was working to develop biological weapons.The letters...detail a visit by an unnamed Qaeda scientist to a laboratory at an unspecified location where he was shown "a special confidential room"...

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Lawyers for a Moroccan man accused in Germany of aiding and abetting the Sept. 11 attacks called Tuesday for President Bush (news - web sites) to be summoned as a witness. Lawyer Udo Jacob, defending accused Moroccan Mounir El Motassadeq, said Bush should be called to testify about accusations he granted the CIA (news - web sites) powers to send terrorism suspects to foreign countries for interrogation. The United States has already turned down a request for former CIA chief George Tenet to testify at Motassadeq's trial, and there is no prospect of Bush appearing in...