September 11 attackers seek martyrdom

Source: Agencies  |   2008-12-10  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

THE five men charged with orchestrating the September 11 attacks are in a hurry to enter guilty pleas on their apparent quest for martyrdom, with only six weeks remaining before United States President-elect Barack Obama takes office.

But a lawyer for one said he would not give up the fight, despite his client's wishes.

The Guantanamo detainees said they decided on November 4, the day Obama was elected, to abandon their defenses in their death-penalty trials. Obama opposes the military war-crimes trials and has pledged to close Guantanamo's detention center, which holds some 250 men.

Thomas Durkin, a Chicago lawyer for one of the defendants, said he did not think it was a coincidence that they wrote a letter on election day announcing they would confess.

Another lawyer said he would not give up. "A lawyer's ethical obligation is to raise every defense possible," said defense lawyer Edward MacMahon.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said on Monday he would confess to masterminding the attacks that killed 2,975 people. The four other defendants did the same, in effect daring the Pentagon to give them death sentences.

The judge ordered lawyers to advise him by January 4 whether the Pentagon could apply the death penalty, which military prosecutors are seeking, without a jury trial.

Mohammed, who has already told a military panel he was the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, said he has no faith in the judge, his Pentagon-appointed lawyers or President George W. Bush. Mohammed told the judge in English: "I don't trust you."

The defendants' announcement shocked victims' relatives who watched from behind a glass partition, the first time family members have been allowed to observe the war-crimes trials.