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Mukasey: Don't Execute The 9/11 Plotters And Make Them Martyrs
LONDON — U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday he hopes the men charged with participating in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are not executed if found guilty to avoid making martyrs of them.
Mukasey said many terrorists want to be martyrs and that by sentencing them to death, U.S. authorities risk granting those wishes. He made the comments while answering a question after a talk at the London School of Economics.
However, Mukasey said that the punishment would be fitting if the accused are convicted.
"One of them at least is proud enough of it to have written to his wife that he thinks he is innocent because it was only 3,000 (people who died in the attacks)," he said. "If those are not poster children for the death penalty I don't know who is."
Still, Mukasey said he leans against the death penalty in this case because "many of them want to be martyrs."
The attorney general said his view was a personal opinion. The Justice Department will participate in the trial, he said, but the Defense Department will be in charge.
The U.S. military is moving ahead with plans to try six men at Guantanamo Bay. The six high-profile detainees include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed _ the alleged architect of the attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington _ and Mohammed al-Qahtani, who allegedly would have been one of the hijackers if immigration officers had not prevented him from entering the United States.
Military prosecutors have requested the death penalty, but a Pentagon panel must agree to the prosecutors' recommendations before they are presented to the defense and the military court, U.S. Justice spokesman Dean Boyd said in Washington. That panel has yet to issue its ruling, he said.
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March 14, 2008 07:02 PM EST |
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