Kingpin of 9/11 mocks the US
GUANTANAMO BAY: As America prepares for the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 people, a grim shadow will lurk in the background – attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has yet to be tried and convicted for the heinous crime.
Mohammed, who boasted to interrogators of designing and managing the 9/11 plot, still sits in a high-security cell at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
He has been there for 15 years, as the attempt to hold him accountable in a US military court plods, stuck on whether his being tortured by the CIA renders his boastful confessions inadmissable.
He remains, after the nowdead Osama bin Laden, the most reviled figure tied to the 9/11 terror attacks.
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated the attacks, calls Mohammed a “wild-eyed killer” whose “demented” plotting set him apart from others in al-qaeda.
Most people know him by the photograph taken of him when he was captured, his thick body clothed in a nightshirt, wearing a thick moustache and dishevelled hair.
Appearing in the Guantanamo military courtroom for the first time in over 18 months this week, Mohammed was thinner, with a long, greying red-dyed beard, wearing more traditional Pakistani dress.
He walked in easily, chatting with a fellow defendant in the death-penalty case, and knelt on a small carpet between the tables for prayers.
The official 9/11 Commission report and a Senate report about the CIA’S torture program describe the 56-year-old “KSM” as a capable and bloodthirsty lieutenant of bin Laden.
A Pakistani citizen, he was raised in Kuwait and studied at a US university.
By the time he graduated in 1986, he was already a Muslim hardliner. Working for the Qatar government in the early 1990s, Mohammed appears to have been inspired to action by a nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who undertook the bombing of New York’s World Trade Centre in 1993. After that, the two joined forces with a plan to blow up Us-bound jetliners flying from the Philippines.
Yousef was arrested in Pakistan after the first attempt failed, while Mohammed hid in Qatar before going to Pakistan in 1996 to evade capture.
It was then that he first proposed the 9/11 attacks to bin Laden. “Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse, KSM applied his imagination, technical aptitude, and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes,” the 9/11 Commission report says.
After the attacks, Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003 and taken by the CIA to a black site for interrogation.
The Senate report describes him as deeply resistant, frustrating interrogators with lies and fabrications. But following his transfer to Guantanamo in September 2006, he confessed to the military court and compared himself to George Washington, fighting to escape oppression.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said. He also claimed responsibility for 30 other operations and said he beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl, who was killed in Pakistan in 2002.