My latest in PJ Media:
Just days before the 20th anniversary of their murderous handiwork, a military tribunal in Guantánamo Bay on Tuesday resumed the much-interrupted and multiply postponed trial of five masterminds of the 9/11 jihad attacks: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and Mustafa al Hawsawi. It’s understandable if you thought these men had been tried, convicted, and sentenced long ago; after all, it has been two decades since their crime. What has taken so long?
The trial was supposed to begin, finally, on January 11 of this year, but last September it was announced that it was once again being postponed, this time, predictably enough, because of covid. Yet as Newsweek reported Tuesday, “Despite the reading being presented over nine years ago, the case has not moved past the pretrial phase, facing a number of delays over the years.
But the main reason why has it taken nearly twenty years for these jihadis to face justice is because of one man: Barack Hussein Obama. According to Newsweek, “The men were formally charges [sic] in June of 2008. By that time, former President Barack Obama was close to taking office, having come off a campaign during which he promised to close Guantánamo. That led to a temporary suspension of the trial.”
After that, Obama’s self-described “wingman,” then-Attorney General Eric Holder, “decided that the trial should be in New York but was met with strong opposition.” This was based on the assumption that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others were defendants in what was essentially an ordinary criminal case, rather than combatants involved in planning an act of war against the United States; the Obama administration was in the process of denying, on an institutional basis, that there even was such a thing as a global jihad.
Trying these men in civilian court would have been a continuation of the U.S. government policy of treating jihadis as if they were individual criminals, rather than soldiers in a larger war effort. The U.S. government has been extremely reluctant to admit that such a war exists, and so their policy has been to try jihadis in civilian courts.
If the U.S. had had this policy in 1943, it never would have admitted that it was at war with Germany, and would have tried every captured German soldier as if he were a criminal who had broken the law as a “lone wolf,” separately from all the others who did the same thing, and with no mention of the Nazi ideology that underlay it all. If the Allies had approached World War II the way the West has dealt with the jihad threat since 9/11, newspapers would have been filled with accounts of how masses of armed Germans had swarmed into Warsaw and Paris and Amsterdam and the rest, while authorities were trying to determine the motive of each one.
There is more. Read the rest here.
mortimer says
Clearly, 9-11 was an act of war and Saudi Arabia’s spy establishment was working with them. I believe that is the reason why they were not tried.
gravenimage says
9/11 Masterminds Finally Go on Trial—20 Years After the Attack
…………..
Justice delayed is justice denied.
OLD GUY says
If he were an American in the hands of the terrorist he would have been executed as soon as they caught him. In America the lawyers have to make their millions off the cases by drawing them out for years. To be followed by years of appeals after the conviction of this creep. COME ON MAN.
Infidel says
It’s more than just Obama: there’s no reason this trial couldn’t have started before 2008. Problem was the turf wars b/w the FBI and the Pentagon, as well as SCOTUS nosing in on the legality of enemy combatants having the same rights as people within the US under US jurisdiction. All that, backed up by the ACLU, was what helped prolong this.
Which is why I suggested yesterday in another thread: take no prisoners!
Walter Sieruk says
That al Qaeda jihadist who “mastermind” of the September 11, 2001 those jihad mass murder attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammad , had confidently declared “We will win because Americans don’t realize …we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.” That arrogant boast of by KSM should serve as a reminder that we, as Americans, need to and should stand firm ,with great fortitude, in this War of Idea’s and struggle against the jihadist who are always busy scheming to engage in mad Islamic quest by the means of the stealth jihad and the violent jihad violent . In other words, the jihadists means the conquest for supreme power and control of Islam over the West,, either by hook or by crook.
Therefore ,all good Americans should maintain a strong vigilant fortitude against Islamic strategies , savagely and tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson had, so well, explained “Fortitude…teaches us to meet and surmount difficulties; not to fly from them.”
Walter Sieruk says
Obviously KSM is no longer free to further scheme other jihad plots for mass murder and destruction.
Still there are still other jihadist chiefs around as on the loose ,as KSM, who are engaged in Islamic scheming to have their jihadist /stooges future Islamic terrorist attack against Americans and America..
Therefore , we ,as Americans , should not live in fear or be afraid to go to difference place and do different things ,yet even though we should feel no fear we should keep aware of our surrounding and be alert for anything that seems not to look quite right. As in “What’s wrong with this picture?” Then if something questionable is seen then it’s important to go and tell the right person about it. As example, In NY.NY a tee-shirt vendor saw some smoke come out of a parked van and so he went and informed as police officer about it. As it has been said “If you see something, say something.” To put this in another way, the wise words of Thomas Jefferson apply more now more than those words of wisdom did in his own time. For Mr. Jefferson declared “Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.”