Holder: Congress holding up 9/11 mastermind trial

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder blamed Congress on Sunday for a standstill in the trial of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Nearly one year after declaring Mohammed would be tried in civilian court in New York City, the nation’s top law enforcement official admitted that “no decision has been made yet as to exactly where the trial is going to occur.”

“We’ve had to deal with a variety of things, funding and dealing with Congress, the concerns that have been expressed by local officials. We’re trying to work our way through that. And as soon as we can, we will make a decision as to where that trial will occur,” Holder told CBS News’s Bob Schieffer on “Face The Nation.”

Holder conceded that they were still deciding whether to hold the trial in civilian court or a military tribunal.

The attorney general set off a firestorm of protest last fall when he announced Mohammed would be tried in New York City, several miles from the site of the 9/11 attacks.

“One of the things, I think, that is particularly bothersome to me is that this really has become something that has become political. And to have Republicans and Democrats arguing about this in a political way, as opposed to dealing with the substance that we have to really focus on, is something that I think is regrettable and has resulted, I think, in the delays that we have seen,” Holder lamented.

Mohammed and others suspected of orchestrating the devastating terror attacks are currently being held in the U.S. military detention center on Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

One of President Barack Obama’s first acts as president was to announce the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison, but to date no action has occurred on that hot-button issue.

The administration set off an equally hot political firestorm when it revealed that an underused maximum security prison in Illinois would be able to detain prisoners currently held in Guantanamo Bay.

Holder expressed his frustration on that point as well.

“This is another instance where I think politics unfortunately has entered into this discussion. I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there. We have proven an ability to hold in our federal prison system people convicted of, charged with terrorist offenses very effectively, very safely. There’s no reason to believe that people held in Guantanamo cannot be held wherever we put them in the United States, again, very safely and very effectively. And so it is our hope that we will be able to persuade Congress to give us the ability to open that Thomson facility,” Holder said.