by Steven Richards
As the passage of 23 years fades the nation’s memory, the terrorist who has now received a plea deal from the Biden administration was a diabolical plotter who planned even more insidious carnage than what the terrorists achieved in the September 11 attacks on the United States.
The U.S. Department of Defense announced Wednesday that it had reached a plea deal with notorious 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two of his accomplices after more than 16 years after they were first prosecuted.
It turns out that the attacks carried out with his planning on September 11 were only a sliver of the terror the Osama bin Laden confidant wanted to carry out on the United States.
The plea deal, which takes the death penalty off the table, was greeted by astonishment by many Americans for whom the scars of the 9/11 attacks are still felt, even after more than two decades and as the younger generations are less connected to the event.
“The prosecution and families have waited 23 years to have our day in court to put on the record what these animals did to our loved ones. They took that opportunity away from us,” retired police officer Jim Smith, whose wife Moira Smith was a NYPD officer who died in the attacks, told the New York Post.
“They committed the worst crime in the history of our country, they should receive the highest penalty.”
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was personally tasked with planning the 9/11 terror attacks by Osama bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda, in 1998. But, Mohammed’s original plans for the attacks were much more extensive and intended to cause carnage on both the East and West coasts.
He originally approached bin Laden in 1996 and proposed a plan to hijack ten commercial airplanes and fly them into targets across the United States—five on the East coast and five on the West coast. However, bin Laden reportedly believed this plan to be impractical, eventually leading to the scaled-down version that the terrorists carried out on 9/11.
Mohammed told investigators he went to bin Laden “to give him money and operatives so he could hijack 10 planes in the United States and fly them into targets,” the Associated Press reported in 2003.
One of those would-be targets was identified as the U.S. Bank Tower—called the Library Tower at the time—in Los Angeles. It was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River at the time.
The core of his original plans was borrowed from a foiled 1995 terror plot he hatched, known as the Bojinka plot, where he planned to blow up 12 airliners across Southeast Asia, according to the Associated Press. Mohammed’s scaled-up plan, which was based on this plot, was ultimately refined with the help of bin Laden, who believed the plan was too ambitious, Mohammed told U.S. authorities during an interrogation.
Mohammed has been detained by the United States government more than 20 years and families of 9/11 victims have been waiting a long time for him to stand trial and see justice done. However, many have been stung by plea deal, which means that Mohammed and his co-conspirators will not face the death penalty for their crimes. “They committed the worst crime in the history of our country, they should receive the highest penalty,” Jim Smith told the New York Post.
Other family members echoed Smith’s sentiments.
“I am angry and disappointed that enemy combatants who killed thousands of Americans in our homeland are now able to exploit the US judicial system to their benefit, receiving support from American taxpayers for shelter, food, and healthcare for the rest of their lives,” another retired police officer, Kathy Vigiano whose husband was killed on 9/11, told the Post.
“I am very disappointed. We waited patiently for a long time. I wanted the death penalty — the government has failed us,” said Daniel D’Allara, whose twin brother was also killed that day.
It is not clear yet what the other specific terms of the plea deals include, but the three co-defendants will reportedly plead guilty to the murder of the 2,976 people killed on 9/11 in addition to other charges. In exchange, they will receive life imprisonment, rather than the death penalty.
In a letter to the family members of victims, the Defense Department justified its decision to pursue the plea agreements. It wrote that its decision to settle the cases “was not reached lightly; however, it is our collective, reasoned, and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case,” according to NPR.
Part of the reason for the delays turns on the fact that the 9/11 defendants were allegedly tortured in CIA prisons. Attorneys have spent years arguing whether evidence obtained through torture would be admissible in court. After a judge threw out a confession obtained using torture last year related to the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the Defense Department may have taken that case as a warning for prosecutors to make the plea deal with the 9/11 defendants.
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Steven Richards is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “September 11 Attacks” by Michael Foran. CC BY 2.0.
