RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, hearings began this morning for five men charged with planning the September 11 attacks. And they began with an unusual turn. The five defendants told the military court that they intend to confess and plead guilty. Families of some of the 9/11 victims are for the first time present at the hearing. It represents a last stand for the Bush administration in its efforts to try the men before military commissions. And before the proceedings got under way, we spoke with Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald. She's covered Guantanamo since the first detainees arrived back in 2002. Welcome to the program.
Ms. CAROL ROSENBERG (Reporter, The Miami Herald): Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: Could you just begin by giving us just a couple of key names of those who are going before this tribunal, and in a sense, you know, put in context why these five?
Ms. ROSENBERG: These five are accused of being the orchestrators of the September 11th attack. There's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is known as the mastermind, and there's another fellow named Ramzi Binalshibh who supposedly organized the hijack cell in Hamburg, Germany. And the allegation is that these five men arranged the travel, the training, the cash transfers for those 19 men to hijack those airplanes. These are the men behind the hijackers, or that's the government's case.
MONTAGNE: And there are five family members of September 11th victims there to watch the proceedings. What do you know of them and why the Pentagon flew them down?
Ms. ROSENBERG: Well, we know a couple of them are the parents of young men who died on September 11th. One was a firefighter who died in the World Trade Center and another is the mother of one of the people on United 93. They brought them down because the Pentagon has tried to figure out a way to allow the victims to get a glimpse of these trials, because they're being held, you know, on this remote base by invitation only, and you fly down there under military escort in military aircraft. You know, some people say they want to look in the eyes of evil. And so they're not going to get to look in the eyes of evil, but they'll get that much closer to the accused.
MONTAGNE: Again, a pretrial hearing is what's up today - still no date for an actual trial. Is there uncertainty about whether that will ever begin with the new administration arriving in Washington?
Ms. ROSENBERG: For sure. I mean, Barack Obama has said that he prefers federal criminal trials and traditional military courts-martial.
MONTAGNE: Basically, the Obama team could actually throw all these preparations out and start over.
Ms. ROSENBERG: They could freeze the process. I mean, trials is only one aspect of Guantanamo. They've said that they'd like to close Guantanamo. So they have to go through step by step and figure out, well, if we close Guantanamo, where do we send them? If we send them somewhere, under what jurisdiction do we hold them? And do we want to try them?
MONTAGNE: Ultimately, the decision has to be made about these others. And there's about 250 detainees still being held at Guantanamo. Any change in the short run expected, that is before the Bush team exits?
Ms. ROSENBERG: You know, they've been trying to empty that prison in dribs and drabs for the past few months. They sent someone recently to Somaliland. They sent the convicted driver of Osama bin Laden to Yemen. But in terms of the big picture, they've been trying to negotiate with other nations to either resettle or detain or try a number of these men that the U.S. government no longer wants to hold. And you know, the countries of the world haven't really stood up and said, OK, we'll help you out of this thing.
MONTAGNE: Thank you very much for joining us.
Ms. ROSENBERG: Thank you.
MONTAGNE: Carol Rosenberg is with The Miami Herald, and she's covered Guantanamo since it first opened back in 2002. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
