Senior bin Laden aide gets life in terror case; defense argued his only crime was offensive speech
Rejecting a defense argument that a Kuwaiti cleric who served as a senior adviser to Osama bin Laden was guilty only of offensive speech, a federal judge in Manhattan on Tuesday sentenced Sulaiman Abu Ghaith to life in prison for his terrorism-support conviction earlier this year.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said the 48-year-old imam, who acted as bin Laden’s spokesman after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, showed “no remorse whatsoever” and “continue[d] to threaten” even during his sentencing, according to the Associated Press and the New York Daily News.
“You sir, in my assessment, still want to do everything you can to carry out al-Qaida’s agenda of killing Americans, guilty or innocent, combatants and non-combatants, adults and babies,” the judge told Abu Ghaith, who is a son-in-law of bin Laden.
The imam testified at trial that he served only in a religious role when he urged Muslims to resist oppression. His defense counsel, Stanley Cohen, argued for a 15-year sentence, comparing Abu Ghaith to “an outrageous daytime ‘shock-radio’ host, or a World War II radio propagandist for a losing ideology,” the New York Times (reg. req.) reports.
Cohen also said his client’s only crime was offensive speech; no evidence whatsoever connected Abu Ghaith to any specific plot, the attorney argued.
Before he was sentenced, Abu Ghaith said, speaking in Arabic through a translator, that he would seek mercy only from God, the Daily News reports.
“Today, at the same moment you’re shackling my hands and intend to bury me alive you’re unleashing the hands of hundreds of Muslim youths and removing the dust from their minds, and who will join the ranks of free men,” he told Kaplan. “Soon very soon, the whole world will see the end of these theater plays known as trials.”
Convicted in March of conspiracy to kill Americans, providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, Abu Ghaith appeared on videotapes promoting al-Qaida in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
He also testified at trial that he met with his father-in-law in an Afghan cave on Sept. 11, 2001, explaining that he had done so in respect for bin Laden’s standing as a sheik, according to the AP and Reuters.
“I didn’t go to meet with him to bless if he had killed hundreds of Americans or not. I went to meet with him to know what he wanted,” Abu Ghaith testified. He said bin Laden told him during that meeting: “We are the ones who did it.”
Abu Ghaith is the most senior al-Qaida figure tried in the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has pointed to his conviction as an example of how well the criminal justice system works.
Al Jazeera, the BBC News, CNN, Courthouse News and The Hill also have stories.
