For 25 Years After 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Has Avoided a Reckoning

As the United States commemorates the 25th anniversary of September 11th, a shadow will hang over our remembrance. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — identified as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” in the 9/11 Commission Report — is successfully avoiding a reckoning. While Osama bin Laden was the animating spirit and “face” of 9/11, it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who painstakingly planned the attacks and, in his own words, “was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z.” Captured in March 2003, he arrived at Guantanamo in 2006 and remains its most infamous inmate. In the two decades since, he has waged a successful campaign to delay a final reckoning for his crimes. Foremost among the crimes are 2,977 counts of first-degree murder. Twenty-five years after 9/11, not only has its mastermind thus far escaped trial; his trial date has not even been finalized. Far from welcoming the martyrdom he claimed to extol, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has sought every opportunity to cop a plea like the coward he is. Shockingly, in July 2024 he actually came within hours of achieving this goal. The convening authority in Guantanamo — a United States Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, no less — entered into a plea agreement that would have spared Khalid Sheikh Mohammed any possibility of a death sentence. Only a hasty intervention 48 hours later by a White House in political freefall, and a federal appellate court ruling a year later, voided this deal and averted the permanent travesty of justice it would have represented.The fact that such an arrangement could have even been contemplated, though, discloses how badly this case has been bungled across four successive American presidential administrations and how far the lessons of 9/11, and of history, have receded from our national consciousness.Immediately following World War II, America and its allies convened the Nuremberg Tribunal to judge the worst of the Nazi war criminals. On October 18, 1945 the first group of 24 Nazis were indicted. After scrupulously fair trials observed by the entire international community, verdicts were handed down and on October 16, 1946, ten of the worst offenders were hanged for their crimes — less than one year after their indictment.Led by the United States, the Nuremberg Tribunal achieved this outcome despite the immense legal and logistical challenges that needed to be overcome: Assembling lawyers and jurists from four nations with different legal systems and competing postwar ambitions; creating an entirely new body of international law to govern the proceedings; translating every scrap of paper and every word of testimony into multiple languages; all in a city which had been razed to the ground during the war. By contrast, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has sat in Guantanamo for more than 20 years: first a Bogeyman, then an inconvenience, and now worst of all an afterthought. It is important to recognize what this delay has cost us. The Nuremberg Tribunal not only provided a venue for judging war criminals. It was also at Nuremberg that the first horrifying evidence of the Holocaust and the years of planning which led to it were publicly exposed to the world. For a quarter century now, Americans have been deprived of a similar opportunity to hear firsthand the evidence of how 9/11 happened, straight from its chief instigator’s mouth.Not only Americans. In addition to murdering thousands of our own fellow citizens that day, Khalid also murdered citizens from dozens of other countries. Their nations, their families, also looked to the United States to deliver justice, just as the world once looked to an earlier generation of Americans to lead the international community in exposing and punishing crimes against humanity.So on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, let this bitter milestone ignite a renewed demand for final justice in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Let his name be on the lips of every elected official and in every media story about 9/11. Just as the Nuremberg trials brought closure to the tragedy of World War II, the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can become for our generation the closing chapter of 9/11 — and a fitting way to remember those lost on that day.

For 25 Years After 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Has Avoided a Reckoning

For 25 Years After 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Has Avoided a Reckoning

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