How New York May Tighten Security Vise

How New York May Tighten Security Vise
By CARA BUCKLEY and BENJAMIN WEISER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/nyregion/14security.html?hpw


Convoys of heavily armed officers, fields of barricades and additional checkpoints are likely to sprout in and around the jail where the accused will be housed and the courthouse where they will be tried. Access to nearby streets and areas may be sealed off. And bands of plainclothes officers — “people in civilian clothes with earplugs,” as one former law enforcement official put it — will probably be scanning the crowds to spot anyone with ill intent.

Those security efforts will probably be rolled out, former law enforcement officials and security experts said Friday, for the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four other 9/11 detainees in the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, blocks from where the Trade Center towers once stood.

New York has been home to trials of high-profile terrorists before, among them Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up the United Nations and other New York landmarks.

But those trials happened in a different era.

Anthony L. Ricco, a lawyer who represented defendants in two major terror trials before 9/11, said that today, courthouse security is more stringent, both in the building and on its perimeter, as are the restrictions on what people can carry in.

United States marshals will be in charge of securing the inside of the courthouse and the transport of the five suspects. The suspects are most likely to be held on a high floor in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal jail adjacent to two federal court buildings in Lower Manhattan, and the pretrial home to almost every notorious defendant who has been prosecuted in recent decades by the United States government in Manhattan, including mobsters and terrorists.

The New York police will provide support for the marshals as needed, said the chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne. But he declined to detail the extra measures that the police would take.

“We are also prepared to address any security issues that may arise because of the special notoriety of the defendants, including the anticipated augmentation of police presence downtown,” Mr. Browne said in an e-mail message.

One former law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity lest he lose his former colleagues’ trust, said high-ranking police officials would probably be convening soon with security directors for New York buildings, landmarks and sensitive diplomatic sites, like the Israeli Consulate, as well as with leaders of synagogues and mosques.

Increased communication between federal intelligence agencies and the New York police, forged partly by the intelligence failures of Sept. 11, should also help security efforts, the former official said.

Representative Peter T. King, a Long Island Republican, is bitterly opposed to trying the Sept. 11 defendants in New York, saying it would make the city even more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

“We’re already the No. 1 terrorist target in the world, certainly the U.S.,” said Mr. King, who wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder in April urging him not to transfer any terror suspect from Guantánamo Bay, where the five suspects are now being held, to New York.

As with most of the high-profile prisoners, the five 9/11 detainees will most likely be placed in the jail’s high-security wing, called 10-South, a fortresslike unit with a small number of cells that are reserved for prisoners awaiting trial for the most violent crimes.

They will most likely be held under strict rules that confine them to their cells virtually around the clock and bar them from communicating with outsiders other than lawyers and family members.