Eight relatives of the victims of the September 11 attacks expressed frustration with this week’s unexpected derailment of the 9/11 military tribunal on Wednesday, saying they suspected that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s surreptitious inquiry into the defense teams amounted to sabotage.



“How can you not have a suspicion with all that we’ve gone through, just in the last two years?” said Bill McGinly III, whose son Mark Ryan McGinly died on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center, where he worked as a precious metals trader.

McGinly was among ten family members who arrived at Guantánamo last weekend expecting to see the commissions address whether Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 defendants, is sufficiently mentally competent to understand the proceedings, another in the litany of pretrial questions under consideration by the court ahead of the military trial proper.

Instead, McGinly and the other family members watched the commissions learn that the FBI secretly approached a classification specialist advising bin al-Shibh’s lawyers to get him to become an informant, apparently because of an investigation into the media leak of an unclassified manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The defense teams argue that a government investigation into their own conduct creates a potential conflict of interest, pitting their need to defend themselves against their responsibilities to defend their clients. On Tuesday morning, after a session lasting less than two hours, the judge in the case, army colonel James Pohl, ordered the defense teams to internally examine the extent of their penetration and to provide him with a witness list.

That move – a prelude to an investigation of an investigation on the fringes of the commissions – was the latest meandering for a military trial that has yet to get under way two years since the defendants were arraigned. There were two aborted prior attempts, one in military court and one in civilian court, to bring justice for 9/11. The first of those came nearly seven years after the attack.

The assembled family members expressed bitterness, frustration and anger. They are distrustful of the government, they said, citing not just the commission delays, but the IRS scandal, the Benghazi scandal and the Obama administration’s thwarted attempt to try the 9/11 defendants in federal court. Moreover, they expressed distrust of the FBI, of the detainees’ lawyers, of the human-rights groups monitoring the trial and of the media.

Some speculated that the FBI was trying to sabotage the commissions in order to bring the 9/11 case back to federal court. “The FBI is populated by lawyers. They had to know that this would have some effect on the proceedings here. Were I a very suspicious person, some could even say that that was done purposely, to derail these hearings, to force it back into federal court,” said Don Arias, a former air force officer and New York firefighter and now chat host, whose brother Adam died in Tower Two.

“How could the FBI not know that this would impact these hearings?” added Gloria Snekszer, whose sister died on American Airlines flight 77, which was deliberately crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

“To me, it’s absurd that this situation even occurred. How could you not know that this would happen? And how convenient that the person they had to speak with, and they signed the nondisclosure, conveniently decides to break the nondisclosure? It’s absurd, it had to have been something out there to slow this down.”

The FBI has declined comment, citing the ongoing legal process. It is as yet unclear how an investigation into the defense counsel began. The document at issue, a manifesto by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed spanning everything from gay marriage to the divinity of Jesus, was not classified. The prosecution passed it to the FBI in December, but has denied knowing anything about the FBI’s involvement.

The suspicions of the family members underscored the shock that the FBI revelations have provided to the commissions. For those that came to Guantánamo on the current trip, the length of time the process has taken has removed any benefit of the doubt they might have been inclined to extend the government, even as several said they believed a military trial was the appropriate venue for the 9/11 defendants.

“It looks like a well-orchestrated snafu,” said Lorraine Arias-Beliveau, the sister of Don Arias. “We’re going to stall now for them to all be investigated, or one party, and then a reappointment process could drag out for another year or more?”

The prosecution brings family members to the commission hearings, chosen randomly through a lottery funded by the Justice Department. Most met each other for the first time on this trip, and said it was comforting to encounter others who could relate to their experiences.

Several of the family members present here said that closure would be impossible for them. They said they wanted swift justice – which, for some, meant the execution of the 9/11 defendants. “They’re guilty. Let’s try them fairly and then kill them,” said Charlie Clyne, whose wife died in Tower One.

“Take them out to the Bronx Zoo – no, I’m serious. Feed them to the lions. And this way we’ll turn them back into the streaming piles of steaming shit that they have always been.”

• This article was amended on 16 April 2014 to correct a misattributed quote. A line attributed to Claudia Jacobs, whose brother was killed in the 9/11 attacks, was in fact spoken by Gloria Snekszer, whose sister died.