Bin Laden’s son-in-law receives life sentence

WASHINGTON – Sulaiman abu Ghaith, a top al-Qaida leader and Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, was sentenced in New York on Tuesday to life in prison with no possibility of parole, becoming the highest-ranking adviser to the terrorist group to be convicted and now punished in a civilian court in the United States.

Ghaith, 48, was sentenced on three federal charges, including conspiracy to kill Americans and providing material support to terrorists. He was convicted in March after federal prosecutors accused him of working alongside bin Laden in an Afghanistan cave after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and serving as al-Qaida’s spokesman by warning, often in grainy videos, that more terrorist strikes were coming.

Obama administration officials hailed the sentence – which came a year and a half after Ghaith was brought to the U.S. – as an example of how federal civilian courts can effectively handle terrorist prosecutions, in stark contrast to the lengthy, cumbersome and routinely delayed U.S. military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted that since the 2001 attacks, the Justice Department has won more than 500 terrorism-related convictions in federal court.

But Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who has long pushed for interrogating terrorists rather than trying them in federal court, said she still believes Ghaith should have been sent to Guantanamo.

“Americans would be safer if he had been detained and interrogated at Guantanamo Bay in order to collect the intelligence necessary to protect Americans and prevent future attacks,” she said. “When we treat hard-core international terrorists like common criminals and focus on convictions rather than intelligence collection, we lose the information necessary to keep Americans safe.”