Two Decades Later, 9/11 Self-Professed Mastermind Awaits Trial

NEW YORK (AP) — Hours before dawn on March 1, 2003, the U.S. scored its most thrilling victory yet against the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks — the capture of a disheveled Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, hauled away by intelligence agents from a hideout in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

The global manhunt for al-Qaida’s No. 3 leader had taken 18 months. But America’s attempt to bring him to justice, in a legal sense, has taken much, much longer. Critics say it has become one of the war on terror’s greatest failures.

As Sunday’s 21st anniversary of the terror attacks approaches, Mohammed and four other men accused of 9/11-related crimes still sit in a U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, their planned trials before a military tribunal endlessly postponed.

The latest setback came last month when pretrial hearings scheduled for early fall were canceled. The delay was one more in a string of disappointments for relatives of the nearly 3,000 victims of the attack. They’ve long hoped that a trial would bring closure and perhaps resolve unanswered questions.

“Now, I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” said Gordon Haberman, whose 25-year-old daughter Andrea died after a hijacked plane crashed into the the World Trade Center, a floor above her office.

He’s traveled to Guantanamo four times from his home in West Bend, Wisconsin, to watch the legal proceedings in person, only to leave frustrated.

“It’s important to me that America finally gets to the truth about what happened, how it was done,” said Haberman. “I personally want to see this go to trial.”

If convicted at trial, Mohammed could face the death penalty.

David Kelley, a former U.S. attorney in New York who co-chaired the Justice Department’s nationwide investigation into the attacks, called the delays and failure to prosecute “an awful tragedy for the families of the victims.”

He called the effort to put Mohammed on trial before a military tribunal, rather than in the regular U.S. court system, “a tremendous failure” that was “as offensive to our Constitution as to our rule of law.”

“It’s a tremendous blemish on the country’s history,” he said.

The difficulty in holding a trial for Mohammed and other Guantanamo prisoners is partly rooted in what the U.S. did with him after his 2003 capture.

Mohammed and his co-defendants were initially held in secret prisons abroad. Hungry for information that might lead to the capture of other al-Qaida figures, CIA operatives subjected them to enhanced interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture, human rights groups say. Mohammed was waterboarded — made to feel that he was drowning — 183 times.

The torture allegations led to concerns that the U.S. might have ruined its chance to put Mohammed on trial in a civilian court.

Mohammed, at his tribunal hearing, conceded in a written statement that he swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, that he was on al-Qaida’s council and that he served as operational director for bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up and execution of the Sept. 11 plot “from A to Z.”

According to the statement, he also took credit for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; an attempt to down U.S. jetliners using bombs hidden in shoes; the bombing of a gathering place in Indonesia; and plans for a second wave of attacks after the 2001 attacks targeting landmarks like the Sears Tower in Chicago and Manhattan’s Empire State Building.

He also claimed credit for other planned attacks, including assassination attempts against then-President Bill Clinton in 1994 or 1995 and an assassination plot against Pope John Paul II at about the same time, the statement said.

Mohammed’s nearly two decades in legal limbo differs from the fate of his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people, injured 1,000 others and left a crater in the parking garage beneath the twin towers.

Yousef is serving life in prison after being convicted at two separate civilian trials. He was also captured in Pakistan, in 1995, but was brought to the United States for trial.