US to seek death penalty for 6 in 9-11 attacks

NY Times:

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday.

The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as Monday and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because “if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale.” The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.

A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial.

“The system hasn’t been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date,” said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

In addition to Mr. Mohammed, the other five to be charged include detainees officials say were coordinators and intermediaries in the plot, among them a man labeled the “20th hijacker,” who was denied entry to the United States in the month before the attacks.

...

The Times does not indicate why death penalty cases should be more complicated, but the real reason they are is because opponents of the sentence do what ever they can to make the cases more complicate in hopes that the sentence will not be applied. By doing so they cause more innocent people to be murdered while guilty people avoid the punishment they deserve. It is another example of how terrorist rights organizations join the enemy in a lawfare operation against this country.

Hopefully the times will eventually describe the war crimes involved in the case. that is something it has failed to do on most occasions when describing enemy attacks in Iraq which are war crimes for several reasons.