WASHINGTON: The man accused of masterminding the Sept 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices, held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, have agreed to plead guilty, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

The Pentagon did not elaborate on the plea deals. A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the plea deals almost certainly involved guilty pleas in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.

The official said the terms of the agreement had not been publicly disclosed, but acknowledged a plea for a life sentence was possible.

Mohammed is the most well-known inmate at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, which was set up in 2002 by then-US president George W. Bush to house foreign militant suspects following the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Deals take the death penalty off the table

Its population grew to a peak of about 800 inmates before it started to shrink. There are 30 inmates today.

Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they’re known, killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.

His interrogations have long been the subject of scrutiny. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” said that Mohammed had been waterboarded at least 183 times.

Plea deals were also reached by two other detainees: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, according to a Pentagon statement.

The three men were initially charged jointly and arraigned on June 5, 2008, and then were again charged jointly and arraigned a second time on May 5, 2012, the Pentagon statement said.

US Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell condemned the plea deals.

“The only thing worse than negotiating with terrorists is negotiating with them after they are in custody,” McConnell said in a statement, accusing the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden of “cowardice in the face of terror”.

The mastermind

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has dedicated his life to plotting against the West.

Regarded as one of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted and intelligent lieutenants, Mohammed, also known as “KSM”, was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.

He then spent three years in secret CIA prisons before arriving in 2006 at the US navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nearly 20 years later, he and two accomplices have reached a deal with prosecutors, which will reportedly see them avoid a death penalty trial.

Mohammed was known as “mukhtar” (the chosen one) or “the brain” in extremist circles, but mocked as “KFC” for his love of fried chicken, biographers say.

An “arrogant,” “very proud” man of small stature, Mohammed also had a reputation for being short-tempered.

Now around 60 years old, the trained engineer was involved in a string of major plots against the United States, where he attended university and attained an engineering degree.

His deadliest was the 9/11 operation. He claims to have helped in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and to have personally beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

KSM was born in the mid-1960s to a Pakistani family living in Kuwait, but his roots lie in Balochistan. He says he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an anti-Zionist activist group, when he was 16, beginning a life-long infatuation with jihad.

In 1983, Mohammed moved to the United States for his studies and stayed with a “small group” of Arabs from Kuwait, biographer Richard Miniter said.

“KSM’s limited and negative experience in the United States — which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills — almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist,” a US intelligence summary said.

In 1987, he travelled to Afghanistan and fought alongside Mujahideen against the Soviet invasion. He stayed in Afghanistan until 1992, and then headed to Bosnia and Herzegovina to fight with Muslim fighters against the Serbs, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

It was not until a botched 1995 plot to blow up US airliners over the Pacific, known as Operation Bojinka, that he achieved notoriety. He had earlier helped finance the 1993 World Trade Center bombing hatched by his nephew Ramzi Youssef that killed six people and wounded more than 1,000 others.

Mohammed fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, but they did not forge a close relationship until 10 years later, at which point Mohammed began plotting what would later become the September 11, 200,1 attacks.

Published in Dawn, August 2nd, 2024