In the 18 years since al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into both World Trade Center buildings, the side of the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people, those responsible have yet to face trial.
But after multiple iterations of military commissions, battles over classified information, and allegations of torture, the death penalty trial for the 9/11 mastermind and its additional plotters has finally been set: January 2021. The military jury selection will begin eight months before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” in the 9/11 Commission Report and a close ally of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, will be on trial alongside four others accused of facilitating the terrorist plot.
Air Force Col. W. Shane Cohen, presiding over the military commissions proceedings, announced at the end of August that the trial would begin Jan. 11, 2021.
“Our client, this nation, deserves a reckoning,” prosecutor Edward Ryan told the judge in July.
The trial will be held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, at a unique national security courthouse known as the Expeditionary Legal Complex — a courtroom including a spectator gallery which has already featured nearly three dozen pre-trial hearing sessions. The case has been delayed multiple times, following unfavorable Supreme Court decisions under President George W. Bush and due to a controversial and aborted effort by President Barack Obama to try the men in federal court in New York City. The military commissions are a hybrid between a military tribunal and civilian court, authorized by the Military Commissions Act of 2009 after a prior set-up was found unconstitutional.
Guantanamo Bay, home to thousands of military members, is ill-equipped to accommodate dozens or hundreds of journalists along with large legal teams from both the prosecution and defense for what is expected to be a lengthy trial, and the judge ordered the government to keep him apprised of its preparations. Media members currently sleep in tents, and legal staff in trailers, near the legal complex.
The 90-page charging sheet from May 2011 alleges the plotters carried out a criminal conspiracy in planning and executing the 9/11 plot and further charges them with attacking civilians, hijacking, terrorism, violations of the rules of war, and more. The document lists the names of all 2,977 victims killed on Sept. 11, 2001. The men were arraigned in May 2012.
Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and faced interrogations at secret CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan and Poland before being transferred Guantanamo Bay in 2006, where he again faced harsh questioning. A judge still needs to rule on whether the information the CIA gleaned during interrogations will be admissible.
Mohammed confessed to planning the 9/11 attacks in a March 2007 statement to the Combatant Status Review Tribunal.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” Mohammed said. “I was the operational director for Sheikh Osama bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 operation.”
At the time, Mohammed claimed to feel “sorry” for what he’d done, saying “I’m not happy that 3,000 been killed in America” and “I don’t like to kill children and the kids.”
A federal lawsuit filed in July by victims of the 9/11 attacks implicated Saudi Arabia as complicit — of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudi nationals. Mohammed hinted he might be willing to give a deposition, but only if the death penalty was taken off the table.
That seemingly contradicts his previous desire to die a martyr.
When the judge in a 2008 hearing informed him he could be sentenced to death for his crimes, Mohammed said it was not the death penalty but “martyrdom.”
”This is what I wish,” Mohammed said. “I’ve been looking to be martyred for a long time.”
Gary Sowards, who represented Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber” whose domestic bombing campaign killed three people, announced in September he would lead Mohammed’s five-person Pentagon-paid defense team going forward.
In addition to his involvement in the deaths of thousands on 9/11, Mohammed confessed to planning assassination plots against presidents and a pope, and is suspected of participating in other terror attacks around the globe. These include the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 that killed six people, Richard Reid’s “shoe bomber” attempt to blow up an airliner in December 2001, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia which killed 202 people in October 2002, and the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.
“I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” Mohammed said in 2007.
Mohammed was likely born in Pakistan in 1964 or 1965 and is thought to have lived in Kuwait, where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and attended colleges in North Carolina in the 1980s. While he was living in Qatar in 1996, the U.S. requested to have Mohammed turned over. But Qatar, a rival of Saudi Arabia, opted to let Mohammed escape to Afghanistan. From there, Mohammed planned the 9/11 attacks.
If the trial moves ends in a conviction, it will likely be years before a sentence is carried out. A military commissions appellate court would first review the verdict, then the defendants have the right to appeal their case through the federal courts.
