9/11 Masterminds Finally Go on Trial—20 Years After the Attack

My latest in PJ Media:

Just days before the 20^th 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.