GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — A military lawyer defending the suspected mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks compared his representation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to John Adams defending British troops after the Boston Massacre.
Lt. Col. Derek Poteet has represented Mohammed for nearly a decade in the death penalty case at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he’s passionate in his defense of the man suspected of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, condemning the harsh interrogation tactics used against his client, including waterboarding, which the tall Marine attorney considers torture.
“When one of my kids was in approximately seventh or eighth grade, she came home from school and said that they were learning about John Adams and the Boston Massacre,” Poteet told the Washington Examiner. “And she said it struck her that, ‘That’s what like dad does!’ And I was very, very happy and proud that she had made that connection herself about that situation.”
In the Boston Massacre, a rallying cry for colonial revolutionaries, British soldiers stationed in the city to enforce Parliament’s unpopular laws fired into an angry crowd in 1770. Adams defended the troops in the interest of a fair trial, and six were acquitted, while two were found guilty of manslaughter, not murder.
The defense of al Qaeda members is likely even more controversial than that of British redcoats.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” Mohammed, 55, said in a 2007 statement to a now-defunct Guantanamo Bay tribunal.
Mohammed was captured in 2003 and was put through multiple, extended waterboarding sessions during which water was poured on his face 183 times.
His legal team has sought to have his statements to the FBI tossed as tainted by the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.
Mohammed, short and squat with a long beard dyed red, appeared with a black scarf wrapped around his head, tied in a long tail, along with a white tunic, over which he wore a bulky camouflage hunting jacket. His attention was raptly focused on the daylong testimony by his former interrogator, 67-year-old former Air Force psychologist Dr. James Mitchell, a thin man with a trimmed white beard wearing a white dress shirt, charcoal suit, and red tie.
“If they did this to U.S. service members, we’d be outraged, and it absolutely would be torture,” Poteet said. “But when we do it to people who aren’t wearing the uniform and who aren’t from our country and it’s Americans who are doing it, well, let’s argue about the justifications that we might be able to come up with.”
Mohammed also confessed to planning assassination plots against presidents and a pope and is suspected of participating in other terrorist attacks, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid’s 2001 attempt to blow up an airliner, and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia that killed 202 people. He further admitted to murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.
“On the one hand, it’s no different than having any other defendant client. You have to develop an attorney-client relationship of trust and open communication,” Poteet said. “And on the other hand, of course, it’s very different than sort of an average defendant client, but it’s been a really great experience to get to know and build that relationship of trust and communication with Mr. Mohammed.”
