Sept. 11 hearing: Prosecutors want sensitive details kept secret

FT. MEADE, Md. – Government prosecutors in the Sept. 11 conspiracy case, after earlier arguing for a protective order dealing with secret national security information, sought Thursday to broaden their request by asking for more restrictions against the public release of unclassified law enforcement material collected in the massive investigation into the 2001 terror attacks.

Edward Ryan, a Department of Justice prosecutor, said the government is prepared to turn over more than 200,000 separate documents to defense lawyers as part of the legal discovery process in the case and asked the military commission judge to bar the release to the public of much of that material to protect secret law enforcement investigative techniques and clandestine terrorist activities.

“This is an extraordinary matter,” Ryan said, describing the hour and 40 minutes between the first plane striking the World Trade Center in New York and the fourth plane slamming into a field in rural Pennsylvania.

“In 102 minutes, thousands of police officers and FBI agents began working on one case. Almost every agent in the country was involved in some way. This generated a huge investigation, probably the largest in the nation. It produced an enormous amount of material.”

That material, Ryan said, includes “911 calls from individuals trapped inside the burning towers to people who may have rented rooms or mailboxes to Mohamed Atta or one of the other hijackers.”

Other materials, he said, deal with “military operations that are sensitive” and the “names of suspected terrorists and the strategies they used to communicate with one another, their operational nicknames and code words.”

He added that similar restrictions were imposed in the federal court trials of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was sentenced to life in prison, and Oklahoma City federal building bomber Timothy J. McVeigh, who was later executed.

Ryan said that once the materials are handed over to the defense in the discovery phase of the case, the government does not want many of the materials made public in court filings or testimony, or released to the public in other ways. “Discovery,” Ryan said, “is not a public process. It’s not a source of open public access.”

Charged with conspiracy and terrorism are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, the alleged plot cell manager, Walid bin Attash, an alleged Al Qaeda training camp steward, and Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi and Ammar al Baluchi, aka Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, alleged Al Qaeda financiers.

Binalshibh and Hawsawi chose not to attend the pretrial hearing Thursday. The proceedings are being telecast via a secure video link to Ft. Meade.

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Richard.Serrano@latimes.com