Government officials are still weighing the possibility of using Washington, D.C.'s federal courthouse as a site for prosecuting Guantanamo detainees, the court's chief judge said this morning.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said he has been in talks with the government about the significant security concerns related to bringing cases to Washington. He said courts in the Eastern District of New York and Eastern District of Virginia are also being considered as locations. The Obama administration chose Manhattan’s federal courthouse as the site to try alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as well as four other plotters.
"I'm not saying we're volunteering to do,” future cases, Lamberth said.
Lamberth made his remarks while speaking at a breakfast hosted by the American Bar Association. His talk focused mostly on the ability of the federal courts to handle the criminal trials of terrorism suspects. He said that while he did not want to weigh in on the politics of bringing the Guantanamo prosecutions stateside, the court system was more than prepared to handle them.
"I think federal judges are capable of trying whatever comes our way," he said. He noted a long list of terrorism cases which have been handled successfully by U.S. judges, including the trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the prosecution of the four men convicted for bombing the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.
"Wasn't that a war-like act?" Lamberth asked, in reference to the Kenya attack. "Wasn't that Al-Qaeda declaring war on us? And yet we tried them successfully in the federal courts."
Judges on the D.C. District Court have spent more than a year handling the habeas cases brought by Guantanamo detainees seeking release. Nonetheless, Lamberth said some judges on the court "aren't anxious" to preside over a potential criminal prosecution. He said he has offered to take the case himself if one is assigned to the court.
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