Because of Dick Cheney’s sweet-tooth for torturing people and the eagerness of his underlings to satisfy it, the legal proceedings against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, has become an extended farce. KSM has been imprisoned at Guantánamo for 20 years. Now they're saying he will go on trial before a military commission ... two years from now. What a mess this has turned out to be.
In 2024, KSM and two other suspects struck a deal with the military authorities by which the death penalty would be taken off the table. Then-secretary of defense Lloyd Austin squashed that arrangement. A military court ruled that Austin did not have the right to do so, but a civilian court reversed that decision, so the three suspects appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which this week ruled in favor of the government. This allows the government to keep the death penalty on the table for KSM and his two fellow defendants.
So much of this protracted exercise was directly tied to the fact that the Bush administration made this a country that tortured people. In August, a judge ruled that, in any future proceeding, the government cannot use the transcripts of FBI interrogations of KSM. From PBS:
In late August, the U.S. military judge who set a June 5, 2028, trial date for Mohammed and three others charged in the September 11 attacks ruled that prosecutors could not use an alleged confession he made to the FBI in 2007. Those statements were deemed tainted because Mohammed was subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" overseas, including the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding. While the ruling was a blow to the prosecution, the U.S. government decided not to appeal, in part because doing so could have further delayed a possible trial.
We also can blame cowardly Republican politicians, especially the late Senator Lindsey Graham, for resisting any plan to try KSM in an American civilian courtroom.
For a time in 2009, it seemed Mohammed was headed to New York after then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to try him and four other men charged in the September 11 attacks in a Manhattan courthouse just blocks from the World Trade Center site. Then-President Barack Obama, who had pledged to close the Guantanamo detention center, said Mohammed would face "the most exacting demands of justice."
Almost immediately, opposition arose. Some critics predicted Mohammed would use a trial as a platform to spread hateful views of America and its allies. Others cited security concerns, saying it could again make New York a terrorist target. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, called the plan unwise and said it showed "a lack of concern for the rights of the public." Plans for a civilian trial were dropped.
David Raskin, a Washington lawyer now in private practice who would have led the government's prosecution of Mohammed in New York if it hadn't been abandoned, said in an essay published in The Washington Post on Wednesday that he is confident a civilian trial would have ended with a conviction. The military commissions, on the other hand, "became a defense lawyer's dream," beset by "endless litigation over their legality and procedures. ... I predict there will never be a completed military commission trial for Mohammed and the other September 11 defendants," he said.
Beautiful. Just beautiful.