Dripping from the hands of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the blood of 2,977 innocent people. That’s more than 2,600 Americans plus residents from 62 other nations.
That’s firefighters who climbed up the burning Twin Towers to rescue more people. That’s passengers on United Flight 93, who voted to give their own lives to overpower hijackers and force smashing the plane into the ground, sparing either the U.S. Capitol or White House and countless other lives. That’s children on the way to Disney Land. That’s servicemen at work at the Pentagon. That’s our people.
And yet, 16 years later, Mohammed has yet to stand trial for what is undoubtedly the worst crime in U.S. history. This is a national disgrace that no one is talking about.
Why has it taken so long for Mohammed, who bears equal responsibility with the more widely known Osama bin Laden (who thankfully sleeps with the fishes, courtesy of the U.S. Navy Seals) for planning the attacks?
That in itself is a long story.
The 53-year-old was already a veteran terrorist leading up to 9/11. His extreme Islamist beliefs led him to help with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and he had tried to hijack planes before, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. That same document called him the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” He did the planning and bin Laden funded it.
We caught him in Pakistan in 2003. For the next three years, he was moved between secret CIA prisons across the world while being tortured — let’s call it what it was rather than the official “enhanced interrogation techniques” — to extract information about other terrorists. I’m not going to shed any tears over Mohammed being tortured, but there’s a price to pay for extracting information that way. For one, you never know how reliable it is because it may have been said just to stop the pain. And when Mohammed ultimately comes to court, he can bring up what happened to him — surely exaggerated — to stoke up his supporters in the Muslim world and further fuel resentment to the U.S.
To try and avoid all that, the U.S. government set up a prison and court system at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba in 2006, moving Mohammed and others there. Clearly, the intent was to conceal what we’d done to them and get an easy conviction in a military court where the rules are more lax than established federal court.
It didn’t work so the Obama administration tried to move the trial to federal court in New York. That didn’t work either because of security concerns, and now we’re trying again at Gitmo with jury selection set for January 2019. I’m betting that won’t work.
What can we do?
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University law school, was quoted in a story this week by the British newspaper The Guardian saying the case should be brought back to normal federal court but to do it by video link.
“We have to try them,” she was quoted as saying. “This delay is shameful. It’s destructive and it casts a shadow over the American justice system. As a nation, you cannot bring closure to the events of 9/11 while you have people in custody awaiting trial on this. The American people are being deprived of justice.”
The best way to make sure that happens is to continue to bring attention to this travesty.
