By Tom Hays
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Defiant to the end, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for acting as al-Qaida’s spokesman after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who said he saw “no remorse whatsoever” from the 48-year-old imam.
“You continue to threaten,” the judge said. “You sir, in my assessment, still want to do everything you can to carry out al-Qaida’s agenda of killing Americans.”
Abu Ghaith was the highest-ranking al-Qaida figure to face trial on U.S. soil since the attacks. The Kuwaiti cleric became the voice of al-Qaida recruitment videotapes after the 2001 attacks. He testified at trial that his role was strictly religious.
Just before he was sentenced, Abu Ghaith said through an interpreter that he “would not come here today and seek mercy from anyone but God.”
“At the same moment you were shackling my hands and intending to bury me alive, you are at the same time unleashing the hands of hundreds of Muslim youths,” he said. “They will join the ranks of the free men soon and very soon the world will see the end of these theater plays.”
As he announced Abu Ghaith’s sentence, Kaplan said that “as recently as 15 minutes ago, you continued to threaten.”
Defense attorney Stanley Cohen asked the judge to impose a 15-year sentence. A prosecutor called for life inprison.
Abu Ghaith was convicted in March on conspiracy charges that he answered Osama bin Laden’s request in the hours after the attacks to speak on the widely circulated videos used to recruit new followers willing to go on suicide missions like the 19 who hijacked four commercial jets on Sept. 11.
“The storm of airplanes will not stop,” the Kuwaiti imam warned in an October 2001 video that was played for the jury.
Jurors also saw frames of a video made Sept. 12, 2001, in which Abu Ghaith was seated next to bin Laden and two other top al-Qaida leaders as they tried to justify the attacks.
Taking the witness stand in his own defense, Abu Ghaith calmly denied he was an al-Qaida recruiter and claimed his role was a religious one aimed at encouraging all Muslims to rise up against their oppressors. He insisted he agreed to meet with bin Laden in a cave on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, out of respect for bin Laden’s standing as a sheik.
“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 said.
In asking for leniency, Cohen compared his client to an outrageous shock-radio host. The attorney wrote in court papers that Abu Gaith “faces the harshest of penalties for talk — and only talk — which is at times zealous, pious and devout; at other times intemperate; at still others, offensive to core values of humanity.”
In a submission seeking a life sentence, the government responded by calling the comparison to a radio host “as absurd as it is offensive” and accused the defense of trying to minimize Abu Ghaith’s role in promoting al-Qaida’s deadly agenda.
“Abu Ghaith was a terrorist who sat alongside bin Laden on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, celebrating the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent, men, women and children the day before,” prosecutors wrote.