U.S. to Seek Death Penalty in 9/11 Cases

Last Updated 5:15 p.m. ET

Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be brought to trial in a civilian federal courthouse in New York, near the site of the devastating 2001 terror attacks. Prosecutors expect to seek the death penalty.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the long-awaited and politically fraught decision at a news conference Friday. He also said five other Guantanamo detainees, including a major suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will be tried through the military commission process.

Holder said the Sept. 11 defendants should be tried where their crimes occurred. Nearly 3,000 people died when the World Trade Center towers were brought down by two hijacked jetliners, another hijacked jet hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in western Pennsylvania.

"After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice," Holder said. "They will be brought to New York - to New York - to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood."

Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in President Barack Obama's plan to close the terror suspect detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the prison by Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.

"For over 200 years our nation has relied upon a faithful adherence to the rule of law," Holder said. "Once again, we will ask our legal system in two venues to answer that call."

The plan that Holder outlined is a major legal and political test of Obama's overall approach to terrorism. If the case suffers legal setbacks, the administration will face second-guessing from those who never wanted it in a civilian courtroom. And if lawmakers get upset about terrorists being brought to their home regions, they may fight back against other parts of Obama's agenda.

"This is not a huge surprise. There have been hints that the attorney general was leaning in this direction but it's a huge departure from the strategy and tactics of the Bush administration, which had tried and failed to get Mohammed tried by the military," writes CBS News chief legal analyst Andrew Cohen.

Early reaction was divided along political lines.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said bringing the terrorism suspects into the U.S. "is a step backwards for the security of our country and puts Americans unnecessarily at risk."

Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona said bringing Mohammed to New York for trial also could result in the disclosure of classified information. Kyl maintained that the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called "blind sheik" who was tried for a plot against some two-dozen New York City landmarks, caused "valuable information about U.S. intelligence sources and methods" to be revealed to the al Qaeda terrorist network.

Former President George W. Bush's last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge in New York, also objected: "The Justice Department claims that our courts are well suited to the task. Based on my experience trying such cases and what I saw as attorney general, they aren't."

But Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the federal courts are capable of trying high-profile terrorists.

"By trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system - a system respected around the world," Leahy said.

Some family members of Sept. 11 victims were angered by the decision.

"We have a president who doesn't know we're at war," said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles Burlingame, had been the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She said she was sickened by "the prospect of these barbarians being turned into victims by their attorneys," if the trial winds up focusing on allegations that the suspects were tortured after their capture.

Some Sept. 11 families have supported the move toward public trials, saying they want to see justice done openly.

"If we claim to be a country that believes in the rule of law, then we need to behave that way ourselves," said John Leinung, the stepfather of Paul J. Battaglia, who died in the collapse of the twin towers.

"Sept. 11 families are like any other group of people," said Leinung. "There are going to be people with different outlooks, but there are a significant number of us who believe that the federal courts were the proper way to do this."

The New York case may force the court system to confront a host of difficult legal issues surrounding counterterrorism programs begun after the 2001 attacks, including the harsh interrogation techniques once used on some of the suspects while in CIA custody. The most severe method - waterboarding, or simulated drowning - was used on Mohammed 183 times in 2003, before the practice was banned.

The five suspects are headed to New York together because they are all accused of conspiring in the 2001 attacks. The five headed to military commissions face a variety of charges but many of them include attacks specifically against the U.S. military.

Holder said no decision had been made on where commission-bound detainees like al-Nashiri might be sent. A brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of sites under consideration.

The actual transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York isn't expected to happen for many more weeks because formal charges have not been filed against most of them.

The attorney general decided the case of the five Sept. 11 suspects should be handled by prosecutors working in the Southern District of New York, which has held a number of major terrorism trials in recent decades at the courthouse in lower Manhattan. Other federal prosecutors from northern Virginia, site of the Pentagon, will help with the trial, he said.

Holder had been considering other possible trial locations, including Virginia, Washington, D.C., and a different courthouse in New York City. Those districts could end up conducting trials of other Guantanamo detainees sent to federal court later on.

The attorney general's decision in these cases comes just before a Monday deadline for the government to decide how to proceed against 10 detainees facing military commissions.

The administration has already sent one Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to New York to face trial. But he is not nearly as notorious as Mohammed, who has proudly proclaimed his role in 9/11 and dozens of terror plots.

Held at Guantanamo since September 2006, Mohammed said in military proceedings there that he wanted to plead guilty and be executed to achieve what he views as martyrdom. In a letter from him released by the war crimes court in September, he referred to the attacks as a "noble victory" and urged U.S. authorities to "pass your sentence on me and give me no respite."

Mohammed already has an outstanding terror indictment against him in New York, for an unsuccessful plot to simultaneously take down multiple airliners over the Pacific Ocean in the 1990s.

When some politicians have objected the trials would be too dangerous for nearby civilians, the Obama administration has pointed out that many terrorists have been safely tried, convicted, and imprisoned in the United States, including the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef.

"The decision is a vote of confidence in the federal courts and in civilian prosecutors and there are still some safeguards in place to ensure that Mohammed doesn't turn the trial into a religious or political showpiece. There also are ways in which the feds can protect their classified information and still use it at trial," says Cohen.

Mohammed and the four others - Waleed bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali - are accused of orchestrating the 2001 attacks.

Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, the military lawyer appointed to represent Ramzi Binalshibh, said Sept. 11 attorneys had not been notified of the administration's decision but welcomed the apparent move to civilian court.

The four other detainees headed to military commissions in the United States are: Omar Khadr, Ahmed Mohammed al Darbi, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi, and Noor Uthman Muhammed. Their cases are not specifically connected but two of them are accused of plotting against or attacking U.S. military personnel.

Barry Coburn, a lawyer for Khadr, called the decision about his client "devastating and shocking."

Khadr "was 15 years old when he was detained in Afghanistan as a child soldier and has been locked away in Guantanamo ever since," he said.

Supporters of a trial in the civilian court system in New York said the benefits for the trial's legitimacy outweigh the loss of any potentially tainted evidence.

"We can't be afraid of our own laws," said retired Rear Adm. John Hutson, who was the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000 and is now president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H.