With 9/11 plea deals in flux, victims’ families sort through their feelings
NEW YORK– After his only child was murdered 9/11Ken Fairben sought justice in a distant military courtroom on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.
He traveled there several times to attend the hearings of the September 11th suspect’s mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and co-defendants, and Fairben watched other proceedings via closed-circuit video at a military facility near his home on Long Island.
During these trips, he got to know the families of other victims and was saddened to learn of the plaque on the wall of a Guantanamo trailer where family members take a break in court. The sign lists the names of several loved ones who died while the case continued.
And now, after nearly two decades of twists and turns, delays and emotionally draining flow, Fairben and his wife Diane wait to see if Mohammed pleads guilty as planned in the hijacked plane attacks of September 11, 2001. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, including paramedic Keith Fairben, at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
It is unclear whether oral arguments will take place.
The federal government negotiated, but then denied the deals and is now asking a court to block them, while lawyers want the plan to go ahead. That includes Ken Fairben, who planned to be at a military site on Long Island on Friday to see if the hearing will go ahead.
“I honestly felt like progress was being made. “Whether you agree with a settlement or not, it wasn’t like we were in limbo and there was no light at the end of the tunnel,” Fairben said, emphasizing that he speaks only for himself.
“There is never closure,” he added, but he sees some meaning in a guilty plea and life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Among September 11 survivors and victims’ relatives, the possible end of the long, debated and fraught case evokes a range of feelings: uncertainty, hope, anger, satisfaction, resignation and a desire for more answers about what the attacks were like. . arranged and financed.
Some families are dismayed by the plea deals. The deals would take death sentences off the table and guilty pleas would short-circuit the possibility of a trial and the information it could uncover — a prospect particularly unsettling to some family members.
“Doesn’t the American public, as well as the families of the victims, deserve to hear the evidence we have against these individuals?” asks Gordon Haberman, who has traveled from his home in Wisconsin to multiple Guantanamo hearings but now finds traveling physically difficult. His daughter Andrea was on a business trip to New York for the first time when she was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center.
Congressional intelligence committees and later an independent, bipartisan commission investigated the attacks and released their findings in the early 2000s. In recent years a secret chapter of the congressional investigation And some FBI documents have been cleared and released.
Some survivors and relatives of victims believe a Guantanamo trial could yield more information, especially about whether the Saudi Arabian government supported the hijackers. That is the central question a lawsuit Some families are pursuing the case in federal court in New York. The kingdom denies involvement, and information released by the US provides no evidence that senior Saudi officials were complicit.
Brett Eagleson, a son of September 11 victim John Bruce Eagleson, views the possible plea deals at Guantanamo as a betrayal and part of a “long and epic trail of failure” by the US government to provide evidence to the September 11 families who pursuits, the Saudis claim.
“It’s a sad day for America. It’s a sad day for justice,” said Eagleson, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and president of a victims and survivor advocacy group called 9/11 Justice. He was a teenager when his father, a mall manager from Connecticut who went by Bruce, was murdered while on business at the World Trade Center.
Any possible trial before a military commission at Guantanamo would likely be complicated by the torture of the defendants while in CIA custody in the first years after they were arrested. The pretrial hearings focused largely on how the abuse could taint the overall evidence in the case.
For Eagleson, it is infuriating that the issue has damaged the viability of a trial. What happened to the defendants in custody is “not my mother’s fault. It’s not my brother’s fault. The lives of 3,000 dead Americans are not to blame,” he said.
Elizabeth Miller drove 5.5 hours into a threatening winter storm to catch a military flight to Guantanamo in hopes of seeing Muhammad’s planned plea in person.
After several previous trips to the barren, isolated military base to watch him and other elderly suspects attend one hearing after another, she came to expect dysfunction and disappointment from the military commission. But this time she was excited to make the trip.
‘It is important to me that KSM says he is guilty. And I think it’s important to the American people,” said Miller, who was 6 when her firefighter father, Douglas Miller, was killed at the World Trade Center.
She now leads a group of September 11 families who support the plea deal and oppose any death penalty for the suspects.
Robert Reeg, a now-retired firefighter who was seriously injured as a result of 9/11, over the years went to Guantanamo to attend a hearing and to Washington to talk to lawmakers about the slow pace of the case. He wanted it to go to trial and considers the future plea deals a “surrender.”
“These enemies think we are weak and indecisive, and this just proves that,” he said.
But he won’t be following the moment-to-moment news from Guantanamo as it continues Friday. He’ll be too busy caring for his toddler granddaughter, and “I’ve had enough salt in my wounds,” he says.
“At some point you just have to resign,” he said. “All you can do is give your best, and I did that. And I can live with that.”
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Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.