Mayor: Bring 9/11 trials to Newburgh, N.Y.

NEWBURGH, N.Y. - The mayor of an upstate city has a message for officials considering moving the Sept. 11 terrorist trial: Bring it to Newburgh.

Mayor Nicholas Valentine said Newburgh, about 60 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan, would be a perfect location to try professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged accomplices. The city has a new state-of-the-art courthouse that can easily be secured and is less than a 90-minute commute from Manhattan.

"We are not New York City," Valentine said. "We don't have high rises. We don't have clusters of apartment buildings."

Valentine thinks Newburgh would benefit from the international attention, as well as the hordes of lawyers and reporters attending the trial. The part-time mayor, who also owns a tailor shop across from the courthouse, said the trial also could attract tourists.

"For a city like Newburgh, it could not only put us on the map, but it could benefit us for many, many years to come," he said. "Maybe we'll truly be looked at as the sixth borough of New York."

Newburgh already made terror-related headlines in May, when the FBI arrested four men in what authorities called a plot to detonate a bomb outside a Jewish temple and to shoot military planes with guided missiles at the nearby New York Air National Guard base at Stewart Airport.

Stewart has been mentioned as a possible location for the terror trial, along with West Point and a federal prison in Otisville, about 27 miles west of Newburgh.