Court or tribunal – which is better to try terrorism suspects?

Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, better known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, faces spending the rest of his life in prison after a New York jury reached its verdict Monday.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, said the trial was proof of the success of civilian courts in trying and convicting terrorists. "Abu Hamza, as the trial showed, attempted to portray himself as a preacher of faith. But he was, instead, a trainer of terrorists,” Bharara said.

Known for fiery, anti-Western speeches when he was a cleric in a North London mosque, Mostafa was convicted of all 11 charges. This included a role in the kidnapping and killing of tourists in Yemen, financing terrorist plots and trying to build an extremist training camp in Oregon in the late 1990s. Jurors were presented with evidence and testimony from co-conspirators, witnesses and one survivor of the Yemen kidnapping, Mary Quin.

The case unfolded over a month in a New York City Federal Court, just blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks. Mostafa's attorney said the attacks tainted the jury's view. Mostafa's lawyer Joshua Dratel plans to appeal, saying, "Much of the evidence is about 9/11, about Osama bin Laden and about Al-Qaeda. All of those are buzzwords of the most nefarious order here. It turns off the jury to the defendant long before they hear any evidence.”

Mostafa was allowed to testify on his own behalf. The verdict marks the second successful high-profile terrorism case heard in a U.S. court this year. Bin Laden's son-in-law Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was the most senior Al-Qaeda member to be tried in the United States. In March, Abu Ghaith, the spokesman for al Qaeda after the 2001 attacks, was convicted of supporting terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. 

After the Mostafa conviction on Monday, Holder said, "Abu Hamza supported the cause of violent extremism. His conviction is as just as it was swift. This case is all the more noteworthy since it continues a trend of successful prosecutions of top terrorism suspects in our federal court system. With each efficiently delivered guilty verdict against a top Al-Qaeda-linked figure, the debate over how to best seek justice in these cases is quietly being put to rest.”

In 2009 the Obama administration said it would seek federal court prosecutions for the top five conspirators of the 9/11 attacks who were being held in Guantánamo Bay, including the confessed mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

But opposition in Congress from both Democrats and Republicans, stopped the idea in its tracks. They were concerned that closing Guantánamo and moving detainees to American soil could be a security threat.

In 2009 and 2010, Congress voted down bills that would have funded closing the prison. Instead the top Al-Qaeda suspects are still being held there and are stuck in the slow, painstaking process of military tribunals, set up under the Bush administration's to prosecute suspects picked up in the global war on terrorism.

There are fewer traditional legal guarantees to prisoners held in Guantánamo. For example, defendants have attorneys but have limited access to them, and meetings are not private. Also, the suspects cannot know all the evidence against them, and the conditions or time in custody bear no weight in the trial.

Obama has been unable to make good on his pledge to close Gitmo, but the debate, while theoretical, still simmers on Capitol Hill. This month the Justice Department issued a report that said if detainees were to be transferred into the United States, they would not acquire new legal protections, such as the right to seek asylum.

Why is Gitmo still open, given the success in convicting Abu Ghaith and Mostafa?

How did federal courts accommodate terrorism cases with unusual circumstances?

Is there any truth to idea that those who remain and have not been charged or transferred are a dangerous contingent lacking evidence to be charged?

We consulted a panel of experts for the Inside Story.