In Federal Court, a Docket Number for Global Terror
By BENJAMIN WEISER
The indictments are all filed under the same basic docket number, 93 Cr. 180, an indistinct series of numerals and letters that reveals more with each new installment.
The first came in 1993, three weeks after the first attack on the World Trade Center. That indictment ran one page and charged two defendants. More indictments would follow: 13 in all, each a superseding one, adding new terror conspiracies, suspects and charges to the federal government’s case.
The last installment came a week ago, with the unsealing of an indictment that charged Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others being detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the Sept. 11 attacks; a federal grand jury in Manhattan had secretly handed up the indictment on Dec. 14, 2009. The document was unsealed and dismissed last Monday after Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the detainees would receive military trials, reversing an earlier decision.
But despite its short lifespan, the 9/11 document is the culmination of a long line of federal indictments, offering a rich history of terrorist conspiracies that began with the first trade center attack. In another sense, the 2009 indictment is an update, many times over, of that 1993 filing.
“Normally, an indictment is a snapshot at a moment in time,” said Lev L. Dassin, a former United States attorney who was a junior prosecutor in the 1993 trade center trial, in which four defendants were convicted. “This one ended up telling a story.”
It is not uncommon in fast-breaking investigations for indictments to come in rapid succession. Several indictments followed the first in the months after the 1993 bombing. As years passed, new defendants, charges and plots were introduced.
“Very few people, if any, really understood what that indictment portended, and how it would change the everyday lives of people in the United States,” John J. Byrnes, a defense lawyer in the 1993 trial, said.
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who led the 1993 attack, was initially named in the second version. In another version issued in 1995, the government said Mr. Yousef had an aborted plan, which became known as Bojinka, to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, made his first appearance in the 13th indictment, which was released in 1998 on the same day Mr. Yousef was sentenced to life plus 240 years in prison by Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy of Federal District Court for his roles in the 1993 attack and the Bojinka conspiracy. Mr. Mohammed, then a fugitive, was charged with assisting in the Bojinka plot.
Thirteen years would pass before the unsealing of the next indictment, the 9/11 case. It runs 80 pages, with almost half devoted to a list of 2,976 victims.
Federal prosecutors have not elaborated on how they decided to present the 9/11 case.
It seemingly could have fit within another line of indictments that included a plot to blow up New York City landmarks.
Or it could have been placed in yet another series that began in 1998 and charged Osama bin Laden with leading a global conspiracy to kill Americans, which included the bombings of two American embassies in Africa. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the Guantánamo detainee tried in the civilian system last year, was part of that case.
But there appeared to have been legal, practical, and even symbolic reasons to charge Mr. Mohammed in the lineage that began with the 1993 trade center attack.
Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University, cited in particular Mr. Mohammed’s appearance in the Bojinka indictment years before 9/11.
“One big point of these trials is that they present to the public the narrative history that we otherwise wouldn’t have,” she said.
“Symbolically, it has everything to do with understanding the threat we’re under, and how it’s changed over time, and how significant K.S.M.’s role has been.”
The 9/11 case had been assigned to Judge Duffy, who had already handled three trials in the 1993 attack and the Bojinka conspiracy. In some ways, the indictments have evolved into a kind of terrorism genealogy that allows people, plots, and families to be traced. Mr. Yousef is tied to the 1993 attack and the Bojinka plot; Mr. Mohammed is accused in Bojinka and the 2001 conspiracy. He is also Mr. Yousef’s uncle.
Ronald L. Kuby, a lawyer who has long represented terrorism defendants, said he was skeptical of broad indictments that purport to link conspiracies and acts that have occurred around the world and years apart.
But the 93 Cr. 180 series has yielded convictions of all eight defendants who were tried (Mr. Yousef twice), with their convictions upheld on appeal.
After Mr. Holder’s announcement last week that the 9/11 detainees would be tried at Guantánamo, one former prosecutor sounded almost wistful in speaking of the indictment’s dismissal.
“It’s almost like an obituary,” he said. “You don’t get the sense that it’s going to come back anytime soon.”
