Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Osama Bin Laden’s mastermind of 9/11, has been a prisoner of the United States for more than two decades. And he will remain so for the rest of his miserable life. Now aged 59, KSM could have another 10 or 20 or even 30 years behind bars, now that his defense lawyers and military prosecutors have reached a plea agreement after more than two years of negotiations.
After his capture in Pakistan in 2003, KSM was held at first by the CIA, which waterboarded him and he confessed to 9/11 and other terror plots, and since 2007 his home has been a cell in Guantanamo Bay, where he has had a dozen years of court proceedings before a military commission trying to try him as an enemy combatant.
That will now end and he will admit to his crimes and promises to answer inquiries from the families of 9/11 victims. As says a letter to the families from the chief prosecutor for military commissions, “in exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, [KSM and two others] have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet, and to be later sentenced by a panel of military officers.”
We support the death penalty and believe in certain circumstances it is a fitting punishment. Clearly KSM should be such a candidate well-deserving of being put to death. However, the military prosecutors have made their decision to forgo the ultimate penalty, which they wrote, “was not reached lightly.” In their letter, they said, “it is our collective, reasoned, and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case.” KSM will enter his plea as early as next week.
For many is it not satisfying that he and two other 9/11 plotters locked up in Gitmo, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, may stay alive into their old age while thousands at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93 were all abruptly murdered on that September morning in 2001.
But a life sentence can still be hell on Earth, as it must be for these fiends now saved from the lethal needle. Permanent solitary confinement and no contact with the outside world, including family, are harsh conditions that still live up to the decision to spare their lives.
KSM has led a life of murder and terror, also confessing to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the failed shoe bombing by Richard Reid (which is why we still have to remove our shoes at the airport) and the decapitation of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Long ago, the federal government proposed that KSM be tried in civilian court here in New York. Thankfully, that horrible plan never happened and he has stayed on Gitmo, far away from here. We don’t know if that tropical prison will be his final address or if he will be housed in another facility on the mainland. We believe that the isolation of the naval base in Cuba has been a useful dumping ground for these monsters and they should be kept there forever, awaiting their natural deaths.
