Why isn’t The 9/11 Mastermind Dead Yet?

When the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed showed up at a military commission hearing in Guantanamo Bay last week, smiled and waved at the gallery, millions of Americans collectively wondered: Why isn’t he dead yet?

The answer is: over a decade ago, Mohammed tried to plead guilty and be immediately executed. But instead of accepting his request, the Obama-Biden administration ended his military trial and tried to take his case to the federal criminal court as part of his disastrous attempt to shut down Guantanamo Bay.

Almost from the moment they entered Gitmo, Mohammed and his four 9/11 conspirators have openly confessed to their crimes and called for the death penalty. No evidence of the interrogation was required to prove Muhammad’s guilt. In a hearing on March 10, 2007, Mohammed openly admitted what he had done. “I was Sheikh Osama Bin Laden‘s operations director for the organization, planning, supervision and execution of the 9/11 operation,” he bragged, adding that he was in charge of the 9/11 operation. September “from A to Z”.

Mohammed also confessed that he “decapitated the head of American Jew Daniel Pearl with my blessed right hand”, adding, “For those who want to confirm this, there are pictures of me holding his head on the Internet.” He further admitted: “I was responsible for the operation of the World Trade Center in 1993”, as well as “the bombing of a nightclub frequented by British and Australian citizens in Bali, Indonesia” and “the Filka Island operation in Kuwait. “. two US soldiers “e” for Operation Shoe Bomber to crash two US planes.

And he confessed to a series of planned follow-up attacks that were only stopped when he was captured and interrogated by the CIA. “I was responsible for planning, training, researching and financing the new (or second) wave of attacks on the following skyscrapers after 9/11: a. Library Tower, California; B. Sears Tower, Chicago; C. Plaza Bank, Washington, said, adding that he had also planned an operation to destroy Heathrow Airport, the Canary Wharf Building and Big Ben on British soil.

In total, Mohammed proudly confessed 31 terrorist attacks planned, executed, attempted or aborted and declared: and / or a personal participant in “all these conspiracies”.

Then, during his indictment in June 2008, Mohammed and his accomplices offered to plead guilty to these crimes and be executed for them. When asked by the military judge if he understood that the charges against him would lead to the death penalty, Mohammed replied: “I understand very well”, adding: “I want to be a martyr.”

As the months passed and nothing happened, Mohammed and the other terrorists wrote to the judge on September 11 asking for “an immediate hearing to make our confession known.” In a December 2008 hearing, when the judge asked Mohammed and his co-defendants if they were willing to plead guilty, the Associated Press reported that “all five said yes, but there was no indication of when they were allowed to do so.”

The Obama administration took office in January 2009. One of the first acts of the new president was the issuing of an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay. Instead of accepting the pleas of Mohammed and the other 9/11 conspirators, the government did the opposite: in November 2009, the government announced that the Guantanamo defendants would be transferred to a federal prison and tried in a courtroom. Manhattan courthouse. The decision prompted an immediate response on two fronts. Then Vice President Joe Biden defended the decision, saying, “We have no doubt that the best and most effective legal means to get this man behind bars for the longest time is a section 3 court.”

Sorry, I didn’t want to put Mohammed behind bars; the goal was to kill him. Had the Obama-Biden administration not made the decision to answer him in an Article 3 court – which was later reversed by Congress – Mohammed would have been executed a long time ago. Instead, his case spanned eight years of the Obama administration plus another four years under Donald Trump.

During his CIA custody, Muhammad said something prophetic to his interrogator. Eventually, he said, al-Qaeda will win this battle because “the Americans don’t realize… that we don’t have to fight them militarily; we just have to fight long enough to defeat you by stopping you. To our nation’s eternal shame, he was allowed to see his prophecy come true – when the Taliban regime returned to Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks it had orchestrated.