Walid bin Attash

With just over two months to go until President Obama’s deadline for the closure of Guantanamo, the administration has finally woken up to the necessity of actually doing something to facilitate the prison’s closure by announcing on Friday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September [...]

Last Monday, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants in the long-delayed 9/11 trial at Guantánamo were scheduled to make an appearance before their Military Commission judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, to discuss some procedural arrangements and the ongoing dispute about the mental health of one of the men, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the naval [...]

On Monday, following a request from the Obama administration, Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge in the proposed trial by Military Commission of five men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash (from top to bottom in [...]

At Guantánamo this week, the Military Commission trial system convened for only the second time since President Obama announced a four-month freeze on all proceedings on his first day in office to give the new administration’s inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force an opportunity to review the best ways in which to deal with the remaining prisoners [...]

So what’s happening now? According to a joint Washington Post / ProPublica article on Friday, “The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantánamo, has drafted an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely,” according to “three senior government officials.”
The administration moved swiftly to [...]

In a leak that seems designed to gauge public opinion — and that of lawyers and other relevant parties around the world — anonymous officials in the Obama administration have told the New York Times about a proposal, in draft legislation to be submitted to Congress, which, as the Times put it, “would clear the [...]

In a genuinely surprising announcement from Guantánamo, the five men accused of plotting and facilitating the 9/11 attacks — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who stated in his tribunal at Guantánamo last March that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin [...]

As Barack Obama and his transition team begin looking at ways to fulfill the President-Elect’s pledge to close Guantánamo, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, recalls that Barack Obama also promised to “reject the Military Commissions Act” (the legislation that revived the system of “terror trials” conjured up in the Office of Vice President [...]

It could all have been so different. Between September 2002 and April 2003, the five defendants in the forthcoming 9/11 trial at Guantánamo — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi) and Walid bin Attash — were seized and transferred to secret CIA prisons, where they were [...]

Finally, almost seven years after the horrendous attacks of September 11, 2001, the arraignments of five prisoners allegedly responsible for orchestrating and facilitating the attacks took place at Guantánamo on June 5.
60 reporters from around the world were in attendance, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid [...]