Can’t We Just Execute The 9/11 Mastermind?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shown after his capture.
He’s a terrorist and the self proclaimed mastermind of the worst terrorist attack in American history. His name is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and he is currently facing a military trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He and the four other co-defendants have been charged with 2,976 counts of murder yet they still manage to turn a standard 2 hour pretrial hearing into a 13 hour circus. They’re killers and a stagnant reminder of what was supposed to be a beautiful September day. They were to be tried in U.S courts however Congress blocked that action and so they sit smugly at Guantanamo Bay where hundreds of other terrorists and some innocents have sat awaiting a trial.
The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) came with some new provisions that allow not only for indefinite detention of civilians without a trial but it also gave the President the authority to assassinate American citizens. The only trial they would get is whether or not the drone is functioning properly. Yes you read that right, American citizens can be assassinated by their own government. Predictably this caused a bit of a stir and so Obama stated that his administration would never use those powers but what happens after he leaves? Your guess is as good as mine.
So if the President can throw the judicial branch out the window in the name of national security then why can’t we just kill the mastermind of 9/11? Why does he get a trial when an American potentially would not? Is it because he is of Pakistani origin and we fear rocking the boat? Here is a list of what Mohammed had been up to before he was caught.
- Was a member of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group al-Qaeda organization.
- The 9/11 Commission Report alleges that he was “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”
- He is also alleged to have confessed to a role in many of the most significant terrorist plots over the last twenty years, including the World Trade Center 1993 bombings, the Operation Bojinka plot, an aborted 2002 attack on the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, the Bali nightclub bombings, the failed bombing of American Airlines Flight 63, the Millennium Plot, and the murder of Daniel Pearl.
- He confessed to being the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
He has been charged with war crimes, thousands of murders and faces the death penalty. It’s almost a sure thing that he will be executed but until that can happen he gets to continue to disrupt the trial and ignore the military judge. It is a dog and pony show where we are trying to get “justice” where the only justice is revenge. He deserves a military funeral and by that I mean a firing squad. A full 21 gun salute with live ammo. He is currently getting better treatment than that of a possible American being vaporized by his own government. He at least is getting a trial whereas an American can be held forever without one. We’ve let many leave GTMO without a trial only for them to go back to their terrorist ways. Are we actually risking putting this guy back into the world? Why is it the United States is now affording more rights to self confessed terrorists than they would their own citizens accused of similar crimes? Is this what the American way has boiled down to? Frankly I’m sick to my stomach.
Information
According to different sources, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Kuwait City, Kuwait, on March 1, 1964, or April 14, 1965, to parents who migrated from Balochistan, Pakistan. He spent some of his formative years in Kuwait, just like his nephew, Ramzi Yousef (three years his junior). He joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age sixteen. He returned to Pakistan soon after, and after spending some time there, went to the United States for further study.
He attended Chowan College and completed a degree in mechanical engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1986. The following year he went to Afghanistan, where he and his brothers (Zahed, Abed, and Aref) fought against the Soviet Union during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Some sources claim that Khalid was fighting in Afghanistan before he moved to the United States.) There, he was introduced to Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, of the Islamic Union Party. The 9/11 Commission Report notes on page 149 that “Sayyaf part of the Afghan Northern Alliance”.
The 9/11 Commission Report also notes that, “By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a controversial detainment and interrogation facility of the United States located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The facility was established in 2002 by the Bush Administration to hold detainees from the war in Afghanistan and later Iraq. It is operated by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) of the United States government in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which is on the shore of Guantánamo Bay. The detainment areas consist of three camps: Camp Delta (which includes Camp Echo), Camp Iguana, and Camp X-Ray, the last of which has been closed. The facility is often referred to as Guantánamo, G-Bay or GTMO, after the military abbreviation for the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
After the US Department of Justice advised that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp could be considered outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, the first twenty captives arrived at Guantanamo on January 11, 2002. After the Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on June 29, 2006, that they were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Following this, on July 7, 2006, the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that prisoners would in the future be entitled to protection under Common Article 3.
