Many ask to attend 9/11 trial but few can

By Carol Rosenberg, McClatchy Newspapers –

WASHINGTON — About 250 relatives of men and women killed on Sept. 11, 2001, vied for six courtroom seats. About the same number of journalists sought to work at Guantanamo this weekend. Senior human rights lawyers swept aside staff attorneys and interns for a three-night stay in a six-bunk tent.

Competition has been fierce to secure a weekend spot at Camp Justice, Guantanamo’s crude war-court compound in southeast Cuba, where Pentagon prosecutors will once again charge confessed mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four co-defendants with orchestrating the attacks on 9/11.

“It’s the Nuremberg of our times,” said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, accounting for the crush of press applications to report from Guantanamo on Saturday, when the one-day arraignment hearing restarts the clock on the trial by military commissions.

Reporters emailed from as far away as Australia and Pakistan, willing to travel at short notice to join the press flight from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to the U.S.-controlled corner of Cuba.

About a dozen German newspapers and broadcasters sought seats, probably because Yemeni defendant Ramzi bin al Shibh, 40, is accused of organizing the cell of hijackers from Hamburg, where he also allegedly helped them apply to flight schools in Florida.. Only Der Spiegel among the Germans got one of the 60 reporter beds in tent city.

Although nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks, only about 250 of their survivors submitted their names for a Defense Department lottery for seats set aside for “victim family members” — spouses, siblings, grandparents, parents or children of those killed.

Those chosen include two women whose husbands were killed on 9/11, a man whose wife was killed, and two women who lost two brothers inside the World Trade Center that day, said Karen Loftus, the Pentagon’s coordinator for Sept. 11 victims.

All will decide, at Guantanamo, whether to tell their stories and make their names public.

Interest in watching the proceedings has been building, said Loftus, who anticipates the lottery pool to expand for any actual trial. Saturday’s hearing follows years of legal controversy surrounding the court, which was initially closed by the Supreme Court during the George W. Bush administration, and then twice re-formed, most recently by President Barack Obama and Congress.

“People need to see that it’s really going to happen,” Loftus said Wednesday. “The Supreme Court has weighed in, Congress has weighed in, both presidents have weighed in. And this is happening.”

Four New York City newspapers also got seats— The Post, The Daily News, The Times and the Wall Street Journal So did television networks such as Fox, CNN, Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.

First-time journalists include Terry McDermott, author of “The Hunt for KSM,” and former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, who was a colleague of murdered Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Pearl and his wife were staying in Nomani’s rented home in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002 before his kidnapping and beheading, which Mohammed boasted at Guantanamo he did “with my blessed hand.”

Nomani will report for Washingtonian magazine. McDermott’s will file dispatches for Newsweek’s online blog, The Daily Beast.

McDermott’s co-author, Josh Meyer, secured a slot as an observer on behalf of The Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, where he now works. The last time he was there, he reported on the Bush-era efforts to prosecute Mohammed for The Los Angeles Times.

The observers will also include for the first time the Navy’s senior lawyer on 9/11 — retired Rear Adm. Donald Guter, who is being sent by the legal group Human Rights First. Guter, who was at work at the Pentagon when an airliner crashed into it that day, is no fan of the military commissions system.

“I think it should be in federal courts,” said Guter, calling the U.S. civilian system “the gold standard” of criminal justice.

Other lawyers taking up observer seats offered by the Office of Military Commissions include Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has funded some of the 9/11 defense work; former New York prosecutor and Iran-Contra investigator Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International’s Tom Parker; and Judicial Watch’s Lisette Garcia.

With only sporadic interest in earlier proceedings during the Obama administration, the 9/11 hearing puts a renewed spotlight on the expeditionary legal compound the George W. Bush administration fast-tracked in 2008 by requisitioning supplies from existing Defense Department inventories.

It’s built atop an abandoned airstrip on a remote corner of the base overlooking Guantanamo Bay.

Its centerpiece is a prefabricated maximum-security courtroom inside a building that looks like a warehouse. It is surrounded by fencing topped with barbed wire and displaying signs that forbid photography. It was brought in by barge in pieces and can be dismantled and taken away.

Reporters and observers are put up in nearby tents that look like Quonset huts, with drinking water chilled in a U.S. Air Force refrigeration container meant to ship the dead home from war. Lawyers get a nearby trailer park while senior court staff and the 9/11 victims get guest officer quarters.

The compound has been sparsely used during the Obama administration, with the tent city filled to capacity only as emergency transition housing for troops and journalists bound for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.