Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, and four others held at Guantánamo Bay detention center who were intimately involved in planning and executing the attacks, may never face the death penalty for their crimes, according to the FBI and Pentagon officials.
The news came in a letter to the families of victims of the terrorist attack, who were informed by the FBI that there were pre-trial negotiations underway that might lead to taking the death penalty off the table.
“The Office of the Chief Prosecutor has been negotiating and is considering entering into pre-trial agreements,” or PTAs, the letter said. It told the families that while no plea agreement “has been finalized, and may never be finalized, it is possible that a PTA in this case would remove the possibility of the death penalty.”
It was Mohammed who dreamed up “The Planes Operation” and got the personal blessing of Osama Bin Laden to carry it out. He also planned and executed “the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner; the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia; the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the murder of Daniel Pearl; and various foiled attacks as well as numerous other crimes,” according to Wikipedia.
He was charged in February 2008 with war crimes and murder by a U.S. military commission at Guantánamo Bay. And now he may escape justice?
Jim Riches, who lost his firefighter son Jimmy in 9/11, went to Guantanamo for pretrial hearings in 2009. He remains deeply frustrated that the case remains unresolved 14 years later. He said he laughed bitterly when he opened the government’s letter Monday.
“How can you have any faith in it?” Riches asked. The update “gives us a little hope,” he said, but justice still seems far off.
“No matter how many letters they send, until I see it, I won’t believe it,” said Riches, a retired deputy fire chief in New York City. He said he initially was open to the use of military tribunals but now feels that the process is failing and that the 9/11 defendants should be tried in civilian court.
It’s about “holding people responsible, and they’re taking that away with this plea,” said Peter Brady, whose father was killed in the attack. He received the letter this week.
The case “needs to go through the legal process,” not be settled in a plea deal, Brady said.
Many of the families want the opportunity for their lawyers to question Mohammed to try to ascertain any involvement by the Saudi Arabian royal family in the plot. There is already plenty of evidence of individual royals helping Bin Laden, but what the families lack is evidence of Saudi government involvement. KSM may be able to shed light on that very dark corner of U.S.-Saudi relations.
The problem with prosecuting Mohammed is that much of the evidence against him and the other defendants was extracted by using waterboarding and other torture techniques. For more than 14 years, the legal wrangling about the way the terrorists were treated has delayed justice. And now it appears that, whatever plea deal is reached between the U.S. government and the radical left lawyers defending the terrorists, the death penalty will not be in play.
It’s an open question of what the terrorists will eventually plead to. Will they be allowed to leave Guantánamo at some point? Given the way that Joe Biden handled the skedaddle from Afghanistan, it wouldn’t surprise me if he “repatriated” the terrorists back to some other country.
The memory of that awful day has faded, and the left would dearly love to memory-hole the thoughts and feelings most of us experienced that day. It doesn’t serve its purpose to remind us all of how much that attack united America that day and how the jihadist ideology continues to threaten us.
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