Terror Trial Lawyer Calls for Bush to Testify

A lawyer for a Moroccan man being tried in Germany for complicity in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks demanded on Tuesday that US President George W. Bush be called to give evidence. The lawyer, Udo Jacob, said that Bush should provide testimony about allegations that US intelligence operatives tortured suspected organizers of the suicide hijackings who had been abducted and held abroad. "We fear that concrete torture measures could have been used during their questioning," said Jacob, who is defending Mounir El Motassadeq at a court in Hamburg. Motassadeq is charged with accessory to the murder of some 3,000 people in the attacks and membership of a terrorist organisation. He was jailed for 15 years in February 2003 for his role, but in March 2004 a new trial was ordered because US authorities refused to allow key witnesses Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to testify. In testimony on Tuesday, a member of the official US commission on the attacks, Dietrich Snell, said that his team had been unable to question the two men, were unaware of how they were being treated or where they were being held. They are both believed to be in US custody. Both the prosecution and the defense have sought more information about Binalshibh and Sheikh Mohammed, two other suspected organizers of the attacks.