9/11 trial to showcase U.S. justice: Senator

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) talks to reporters at a news conference about the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington August 6, 2009. At right is Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ).

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Trying the accused architect of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States in New York criminal court will showcase the U.S. judicial system and will not degenerate into a circus as some critics predict, a senior Democratic senator said on Sunday.

"What we're saying to the world is the U.S. acts out of strength not out of fear," Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We have a judicial system that is the envy of the world. Let's show the world that we can use that system just as we used it with (Oklahoma City bomber) Timothy McVeigh," Leahy added.

The 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building killed 168 people. McVeigh was convicted and executed.

"If somebody murders Americans ... they ought to be prosecuted in America and hopefully convicted in America," Leahy said, rejecting arguments that they be tried in special military tribunals first set up by the Bush administration.

Many U.S. Republicans have sharply criticized the Obama administration's decision, announced on Friday, to try accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others in New York in a court near the site of the World Trade Center.

The announcement marked a key step toward meeting President Barack Obama's goal of closing by January the military prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Bush administration had set up special military commissions at the Guantanamo base to conduct trials, denying defendants many of the rights afforded under the U.S. legal system.

Republican U.S. Representative Pete Hoekstra said the decision to hold the trial in New York was "ideology run wild."

"The folks that are going to tried and their lawyers are going to try to extend this as long as they can," possibly as long as three or four years, he said on "Face the Nation."

"They're going to do everything they can to disrupt it and make it a circus and do everything they can to push their ideology," Hoekstra said.

Hoekstra said Attorney General Eric Holder had made a "bad decision" to give the accused "all of the extraordinary protections that you and I have as American citizens" in a criminal trial.

Leahy, a former prosecutor, said the trial would not be allowed to degenerate into a public circus. "I have a lot of faith in our judges," he said. "They know how to run a trial."

Mohammed could be convicted even without evidence obtained under torture such as the practice of simulated drowning known as "waterboarding," which could be ruled inadmissible in a civil trial, Leahy said.

"I have no question that they have enough evidence that was obtained outside of this waterboarding," Leahy said.

(Reporting by Todd Eastham; Editing by Will Dunham)