Reliving the pain of 9/11

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/01/2017 (3522 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Monday, Ellen Judd will return to Cuba for the first time she since she and her spouse, Chris, vacationed there in 2000. That was the year before her beloved, Christine Egan, became the only Manitoban killed in the terror attacks of 9/11.

Judd is returning to Cuba now to attend court proceedings at Guantanamo Bay for five men accused of participating in the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center where Egan was visiting her brother, Michael Egan, who worked there. They were among the nearly 3,000 innocent people murdered Sept. 11, 2001.

“I don’t expect it to be pleasant,” Judd said in an interview Thursday. She is going to observe U.S. military commission proceedings against five defendants alleged to have masterminded attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Since the case began in 2011, close family members of the victims and some of the survivors have been invited to attend the proceedings in person so they can see what’s going on and talk to the prosecution and defence teams involved. Judd said a draw took place, with five observers a week taken to the military base by charter from an air force base outside Washington D.C. She’ll be there for some of the pretrial motions that have to be settled before the actual trial can begin. Some observers say that’s not expected to happen until 2020.

Judd, an anthropology professor at The University of Manitoba, said she wasn’t sure, at first, if she wanted to be there for the court proceedings.

The military commissions process has been plagued from the start by detours and scandals, including the legacy of the use of torture against detainees, an FBI attempt to penetrate a defence team and the unexplained censoring of court deliberations, believed to be the work of the CIA.

Legal experts and lawyers who have been involved in the trials at Guantanamo Bay say the system may be irreparably flawed. Even if the cases can be concluded, they say, the process is now seen as so tainted those verdicts may be publicly dismissed.

Judd, who is also peace and human rights advocate, said she believes justice is the righting of wrongs, and that it won’t happen in this case.

“I don’t think it’s legitimate, but I don’t think the answer is to pay no attention to it,” she said. “The pretrial hearings are addressing questions about what evidence can be brought to bear and trying to bring to light many of the issues that people are distressed about,” she said.

Judd received a copy of an unofficial docket listing some of the issues that may come up when she’s at the proceedings next week. Most are defence motions such as a remedy for the seizure of one of the defendant’s legal materials and the monitoring of attorney-client communications by the intelligence community. There are others about human rights violations. One motion seeks access to International Red Cross reports about Bagram Air Force base where torture was carried out before detainees were shipped to Guantanamo Bay.

If the five defendants on trial are guilty of mass murder, they should be locked up so they can’t inflict any more harm on innocent people, said Judd.

She has no desire to stare down the accused or see anyone get the death penalty, she said. “I do want to see them. I want to see the people who could do this.” She has no interest in punishment.

“No matter what happens there, it’s not going to bring Chris back.”

She decided to go to Cuba after talking to her family about it. She’s allowed to take a family member, and her brother will accompany her, she said.

“I had some sense of wanting to see it first-hand,” Judd said. Partly because she didn’t want to have any regrets later but mainly out of respect for her beloved.

“I should be there as a witness for Chris,” said Judd. Being there won’t “trigger” her grief, she said. “It’s there all the time.” She said trying to do some good through activism has helped her through the grief. She’s pleased that the Dr. Christine Egan Memorial Scholarship fund is helping Inuit nursing students in the North — people and a place Egan, a nursing instructor, loved.

Judd has visited the 9/11 site in New York City twice, she said. Once on the 10th anniversary, where she saw the reflecting pools and the memorial with Egan’s name on it. She took part in reading the names of the victims, she said. She went back a second time for the opening of the 9/11 museum. She didn’t want to see all of it, she said. She just wanted to make sure the memorial information about Chris was correct. Neither event was open to the general public, said Judd, who wanted to avoid tourists at the site.

She knows some of the family members who will be in court with her next week may have “strong opinions” that differ from hers about whether justice is being served and what should happen to the defendants. They have differing views but share the same pain, she said.

“I don’t think there’s ever going to be closure,” said Judd, who’s watched reports about families of the Air India bombing victims decades after they were murdered. “There’s never an end to this, but there are still things that we can do.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

— with file from the Washington Post