Gov. Paterson came out guns blazing against President Obama yesterday — taking the administration to task for sending 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed to Manhattan for a trial in the very shadow of the hallowed World Trade Center site.
“This is not a decision that I would have made,” fumed Paterson, when asked about the upcoming federal trial of Mohammed and four other 9/11 terrorists.
“Our country was attacked on its own soil on Sept. 11, 2001, and New York was very much the epicenter of that attack,” he noted. “It’s very painful. We’re still having trouble getting over it.
“We still haven’t been able to rebuild that site, and having those terrorists tried so close to the attack is going to be an encumbrance on all of New Yorkers,” said Paterson, whose position contrasts with Mayor Bloomberg’s support for the trial in New York.
“I think it’s anxiety, and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country,” the governor later added.
Paterson said that despite his scathing criticism of President Obama’s move, the state had been working out security issues for months in expectation of the trial, and he hoped “that this trial will go without incident.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Paterson’s comments — three days after US Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the five 9/11 defendants would be tried in Manhattan federal court — mark his latest public rift with the Obama administration, which has pointedly tried to get Paterson to bow out of the 2010 gubernatorial race.
The governor’s remarks also are markedly stronger than what he first said Friday after Holder’s announcement, when he largely dodged the issue of bringing the terror suspects here from Guantanamo Bay.
“I do not understand why they decommissioned [the detainees] from serving or being tried on Guantanamo Bay, but that’s a decision that the federal government made, and our job is to help them,” Paterson had told WPIX/Channel 11 News.
Meanwhile, legal experts told The Post that Mohammed and his fellow fiends are likely to each be assigned at least three or four attorneys — meaning there could be 25 or more people sitting at the defense tables when the case rumbles to trial.
Under federal rules dealing with death-penalty cases, each defendant must be assigned lawyers from at least two different firms or entities such as the Federal Defender’s Office. One of those lawyers, rules say, must have tried a death-penalty case to a verdict.
Additional reporting by David Seifman and Dan Mangan