A military judge threw out a confession 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed made in 2007 for his upcoming trial. AP See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google A quarter-century after 9/11, the attack’s evil mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, still hasn’t been tried and sentenced to death — because America’s own justice system has been turned against us.
Blame the American Civil Liberties Union, in large part, for this travesty.
The ACLU intervened at the start, insisting that the two military lawyers assigned to defend Mohammed and his co-defendants “might not have death penalty experience” and were unprepared to battle “the full force of the US government.”
The ACLU sent in its own team of expert capital defense lawyers, at a cost of millions of dollars.
Ever since, this team has been waging legal jihad — and it’s still getting away with it.
The terrorists’ lawyers have strung out the military court proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, objecting that the defendants weren’t read their rights and were wrongly subjected to CIA waterboarding and other torture.
The real torture victims are the 9/11 families, still waiting for justice and closure.
From the start, the ACLU insisted that foreign terrorists deserve the same due-process rights and presumption of innocence as any American.
Wrong: These animals don’t deserve the protections of our Constitution.
Nor do they deserve the rights of legitimate soldiers under the Geneva Convention; Mohammed and his underlings rejected the rules of war to massacre civilians without warning.
But their lawyers — including Gary Sowards, who once defended Unabomber Ted Kaczynski — have repeatedly run circles around military prosecutors with endless pretrial motions and multiple attempts to negotiate a plea deal that takes a death sentence off the table.
Now, 25 years after the attack, justice is further out of reach than ever.
The latest blow came last Friday, when Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, the fifth military judge to preside in the case, issued a lopsided ruling that gives the terrorists’ lawyers everything they want.
Two days after setting a June 2028 trial date — obviously feeling no urgency to provide justice – Schrama ruled that the terrorists’ confessions and other evidence acquired at Guantanamo will not be allowed in court.
He said interrogators failed to explicitly tell Mohammed that he had a right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer, or that what he told them could be used against him at trial.
More outrageous, Schrama ruled that the torture and isolation the terrorists endured at the hands of CIA agents prior to their arrival at Guantanamo conditioned them to tell interrogators there anything they wanted to hear.
Sowards said Schrama’s ruling “serves as a civics lesson for why the government shouldn’t engage in such shameful conduct.”
Nonsense. Waterboarding and other methods were used soon after Mohammed’s arrest in 2003 in a desperate effort to learn whether other attacks on the US were planned.
He admitted his role to the FBI in 2007 — and then, in 2024, Mohammed signed a written statement as part of an unsuccessful plea deal in which he confessed to planning and executing the 9-11 attacks “from A to Z.”
Prosecutors also have a hard drive seized during Mohammed’s arrest, which contains photographs of the19 hijackers and three letters from Osama bin Laden.
Even so, Schrama essentially is excluding any confessions — making a conviction much more difficult.
Prosecutors have not yet announced whether they will appeal the ruling.
They should — all the way to the US Supreme Court.
It’s time to correct the high court’s long-ago 2008 error in Boumediene v. Bush, when the justices ruled 5-4 that terrorists being tried in military panels are entitled to the same due-process protections as a defendant in any American courtroom.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing in dissent, cautioned that the ruling imposed “an impossible task” on military courts at a time when “America is at war with radical Islamists.”
The long, unproductive litigation against Mohammed and his co-defendants proves Scalia’s point — and today’s Supreme Court majority would likely see the foolishness of applying due-process standards to foreign terrorists
They claimed credit for their deeds even before capture.
Yet last week, their attorneys made a bid to revive the tabled 2024 plea deal that would spare them from the death penalty.
Many Americans oppose the death penalty, for sound reasons.
But 9/11 amounted to a special kind of evil, outside the normal moral order.
Israel has outlawed the death penalty — but as Douglas Murray points out, it’s making an exception for the terrorists who slaughtered unarmed women and children on Oct. 7.
We who value freedom and decency must demand justice for the victims of the worst crime ever committed against American civilians.
We cannot accept less than the conviction and execution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.
