UQ Wire: U.S. Withholds Witnesses in 9/11 Trial

U.S.: No Testimony at 9/11 Retrial

Hamburg, Germany - The United States has said it will not let key al Qaeda suspects in its custody testify at the retrial of the only September 11 suspect ever to be convicted.

The announcement came as the retrial of Mounir el Motassadeq opened in a Hamburg courtroom on Tuesday.

In a letter to the German Embassy in Washington, U.S. officials said "interactive access" to such prisoners could hamper their interrogation and lead to critical secret information being divulged, The Associated Press reported.

However, the U.S. State Department letter, which was read out in court, said the United States would provide unclassified summaries, apparently of interrogations, according to AP.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/081104A.shtml

AP: U.S. Didn't Warn Las Vegas of Threats

Washington - When the Justice Department obtained two videos suggesting terrorists had cased Las Vegas casinos, the discussions didn't center on public alerts or heightened security. Rather, authorities worried about the effects on tourism and the casinos' legal liabilities, internal memos show.

One of the tapes, found in Spain in 2002, shows al-Qaida's European operatives casing Las Vegas casinos in 1997, engaging in casual conversation that included an apparent reference to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The other tape found in a Detroit terror cell's apartment had eerily similar footage of the MGM Grand, Excalibur and New York, New York casinos three hotels within a short distance of each other on the Las Vegas strip with a combined total of 11,000 rooms.

Though the FBI offered, most local law enforcement and casino security officers declined an invitation to view the footage after it was obtained in 2002, according to the memos and one of the prosecutors in the Detroit case.

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For Full Story See…
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/081104A.shtml#1

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