Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the main plotter of the 9/11 attacks, agrees to plead guilty
WASHINGTON: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001 al-Qaida 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 has killed thousands and changed the course of the United States 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, next week.
Defense lawyers asked for the men to receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas, according to federal government letters received by relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 people killed on the spot on the morning of Sept. 11.
Terry Strada, head of a group of families of the nearly 3,000 direct victims of the 9/11 attacks, cited the dozens of relatives who died awaiting justice for the crimes when he learned of the plea deal.
“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 plea negotiations.
The US settlement with the men comes more than 16 years after they began prosecuting the al-Qaida attack. It comes more than 20 years after militants hijacked four commercial airliners to use as fuel-filled missiles, flying them into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Al-Qaeda hijackers drove a fourth plane to Washington, but crew members and passengers tried to storm the cockpit and the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
The attack triggered what President George W. Bush's administration called its war on terror, prompting US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and years of US operations against armed extremist groups elsewhere in the Middle East.
The US attack and retaliation resulted in the total overthrow of two governments, devastated communities and countries caught in the conflict, and played a role in inspiring the popular uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring against authoritarian governments in the Middle East.
At home, the attacks inspired a much more militaristic and nationalistic turn to American society and culture.
US authorities point to Mohammed as the source of the idea to use planes as weapons. He allegedly received the approval of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whom US forces killed in 2011, to create what became the hijackings and killings of 9/11.
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 coercive interrogation.
The use of torture has proved one of the most formidable obstacles in US efforts to try the men in the military commission at Guantanamo because of the inadmissibility of evidence related to the abuse. The torture accounted for much of the delay in the proceedings, along with the location of the courtroom a plane ride away from the United States.
Daphne Eviatar, director of the US rights group Amnesty International, said on Wednesday that she welcomed news of some accountability in the attacks.
She called on the Biden administration to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which holds people arrested in the so-called war on terror. Many have since been cleared 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 state-sanctioned program of enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment is never again committed by the United States.”
Strada, the national president of a group of victims' families called 9/11 Families United, was in federal court in Manhattan for a hearing on one of many civil lawsuits when he heard the news of the plea deal.
Strada said many families 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 punishment.”
Michael Burke, one of the family members who received the government's notice of the plea deal, decried 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. “For me, it's always been a shame that these guys, 23 years later, haven't been convicted and punished for their attacks or murder. I 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 that we just witnessed they will be getting plea deals to 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 stayed behind: a quadriplegic who, because the elevators off, he was essentially stuck there in his wheelchair and that man's friend.
