Obama gets mail from alleged 9/11 mastermind
UNITED STATES: A 2014 letter addressed to President Barack Obama from the man accused of orchestrating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., a White House source said yesterday.
There was no immediate word on whether Obama had read the letter and what, if any, reaction he had to it.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 51, is at Guantanamo awaiting a death-penalty trial as the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.
He wrote to Obama in 2014 about ‘‘Muslim oppression at the hands of the West in general and the United States in particular,’’ his lawyer David Nevin said then.
He also shares his views on what happened in Iraq during the period of US sanctions and ‘‘events in Palestine and Gaza over the years’’.
But the prison declined to deliver it.
Then on January 6, Mohammed’s judge, Army Colonel James L Pohl, ordered prosecutors to get it to the departing president at least a week before Donald Trump takes office.
Obama steps down on Friday (local time), and should be able to take the letter with him into private life.
Pohl ruled there was no ‘‘legal basis for continued sealing of the letter’s contents’’ but gave the prison an extra month to scrub it of sensitive information before releasing it on the Pentagon war court website whose motto is ‘‘Fairness-Transparency-Justice’’.
A White House staffer said ‘‘the correspondence has been delivered,’’ but said there were ‘‘no additional details to share‘‘.
The Pentagon’s chief war crimes prosecutor, Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, had opposed release of the letter, in a court filing that called it propaganda.
He also urged Pohl to defer to the prison whether it should be mailed to the president.
– Miami Herald