Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks, agrees to plead guilty
WASHINGTON: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, has agreed to plead guilty, the Defense Department said Wednesday. The development points to a long-overdue resolution in an attack that killed thousands and changed the US and much of the Middle East.
Mohammed and two accomplices, Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi, are expected to enter pleas at the military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as soon as next week.
Defense attorneys have asked for the men to receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas, according to letters from the federal government received by relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 people killed on the morning of Sept. 11.
Terry Strada, head of a group of families of the nearly 3,000 direct victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, invoked the dozens of relatives who have died awaiting justice for the killings when she heard news of the settlement.
“They were cowards when they planned the attack,” she said of the defendants. “And they are cowards today.”
Pentagon officials declined to immediately release the full terms of the appeals.
The US deal with the men comes more than 16 years after their indictment was launched for the al Qaeda attack. It comes more than 20 years after militants commandeered four commercial airliners to use as fuel-filled missiles and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
Al-Qaeda hijackers piloted a fourth plane to Washington, but crew members and passengers tried to storm the cockpit and the plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
The attack triggered what President George W. Bush's administration called its war on terror, which led to the US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and years of US operations against armed extremist groups elsewhere in the Middle East.
The attack and U.S. retaliation led to the outright overthrow of two governments, devastated communities and countries caught in the crossfire, and played a role in inspiring the 2011 popular uprising against the authoritarian Middle Eastern government.
Domestically, the attacks inspired a sharply more militaristic and nationalistic turn to American society and culture.
American authorities point to Mohammed as the source of the idea to use airplanes as weapons. He allegedly received approval from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whom US forces killed in 2011, to set up what became the 9/11 hijackings and killings.
Authorities captured Mohammed in 2003. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times while in CIA custody before coming to Guantanamo, and subjected to other forms of torture and forced interrogation.
The use of torture has proven to be one of the most formidable obstacles in US efforts to try the men in the military commission at Guantanamo, due to the inadmissibility of evidence linked to abuse. Torture has accounted for much of the delay in the proceedings, along with the courtroom's location a flight away from the United States.
Daphne Eviatar, a director at Amnesty International's US rights group, said Wednesday that she welcomed news of some accountability in the attacks.
She urged the Biden administration to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which holds people in the so-called war on terror. Many have since been approved, but are awaiting approval to go to other countries.
In addition, Eviatar said, “The Biden administration must also take all necessary steps to ensure that a program of state-sanctioned enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment will never be committed by the United States again.”
Strada, the national president of a group of victims' families called 9/11 Families United, had been in Manhattan federal court for a hearing on one of many civil lawsuits when she heard news of the settlement.
Strada said many families have just wanted to see the men plead guilty.
“For me personally, I wanted to see a trial,” she said. “And they just took away the justice I expected, a trial and the punishment.”
Michael Burke, one of the family members who received the government's notice of the plea hearing, condemned the long wait for justice and the outcome.
“It took months or a year at the Nuremberg trials,” said Burke, whose fire captain brother Billy died in the collapse of the World Trade Center's north tower. “To me, it has always been shameful that these guys, 23 years later, have not been convicted and punished for their attacks or the crime. I have never understood how it took so long.”
“I think people would be shocked if you could go back in time and say to the people who just saw the towers come down, 'Oh, hey, in 23 years these guys who are responsible for this crime we just witnessed will be to get plea deals so they can avoid death and serve life in prison,” he said.
Burke's brother, New York City Fire Captain Billy Burke, ordered his men out but remained on the 27th floor of the North Tower with two men who had remained: a quadriplegic who, because the elevators had shut down, was basically stuck there in his wheelchair and that man's friend.
