On September 11, 2001, the "9/11 terrorist attacks" that shocked the world occurred, and now this event will turn 20 years old.
According to CNN local time reported on September 7, five suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was identified as the main mastermind behind the "9/11 incident," attended a pretrial hearing and reopened the trial at the U.S. military court at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba on the same day.
All five are accused of participating in the planning and execution of that year's 9/11 incident, and if convicted, they could all be sentenced to death. However, the first day of hearings was adjourned after less than 3 hours, and there are indications that the trial in this case will remain protracted.
NBC and BBC report that there are many reasons why the trial process has been slow, but the U.S. government has tortured these people or tried to cover up facts. The BBC also claimed that Khalid had suffered at least 183 "waterboarding", accompanied by other tortures.
Screenshot of CNN report
According to CNN, the pretrial hearing was the first appearance of the five defendants since February 2020, with the remaining four being Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali) and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.
Due to the covid-19 pandemic, the trial of these people was interrupted for nearly 20 months. On the day of the trial, all five of them wore cultural costumes provided by lawyers. Muhammad wears a Pashtun hat with a navy scarf wrapped around his head and shoulders and an orange-red beard that stands out, while one of his nephews, Ali, one of the suspects, wears a traditional grey hat from Pakistan's Sindh province, along with three others.
The US military released a sketch of the September 7 trial from the US media
According to Agence France-Presse, although the trial process was restarted, the follow-up process was rather slow, with the hearing adjourned after 2.5 hours on the first day of the hearing for "technical reasons", while the focus of the second day of the hearing was to conduct a "pre-examination" of the judge's background to determine whether there was any bias.
Agence France-Presse pointed out that there are indications that it may be a long time before these suspects actually get a trial result. After continuous postponement due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a series of personnel changes, the pre-trial of the case has entered its 9th year, and the judge has been moved to the 8th place. Currently, the new judge in charge of the case is Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall.
"Twenty years after 9/11, the mastermind Khalid is still awaiting trial. On September 8, local time, NBC issued such a question in the report.
Screenshot of the NBC report article
According to the report, former US President George W. Bush imprisoned the five suspects in Guantanamo 15 years ago, and there are many reasons for the slow progress of the trial work. According to the suspect's defense lawyer, the five suspects were detained and tortured by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before being transferred to Guantanamo, and the U.S. government is still trying to conceal it.
"The cover-up of torture is the reason why these people were taken to Guantanamo, and the continued cover-up of torture is also the reason why these people are still detained indefinitely at Guantanamo." James Connell, the suspect's defense lawyer, said the hearing in the case had been held for the 42nd time and that the five suspects had been transferred to Guantanamo for 15 years.
The BBC reported on September 6 that Khalid, who is believed to be the mastermind of the case, was targeted by Frank Pellegrino, an agent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), many years before the "9/11 incident". Pellegrino said that in the 1990s, the FBI wanted to sue Khalid.
Khalid was arrested in Pakistan in 2003, and just as Pellegrino tried to use his previous indictment to bring him to trial, Khalid disappeared. Khalid was reportedly taken to a "secret prison" by the CIA, which tried to use so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" to get Khalid to speak.
In its report, the BBC said Khalid had suffered at least 183 "waterboarding" (a torture method that made prisoners think they were drowning, in which prisoners were tied to a foot-high position, their faces covered with towels, and then poured water on their faces), as well as sleep deprivation, forced nudity and being told that their children would be killed. A senior CIA official at the time also said, "I want to know what he knows, and I want to know quickly." ”
Khalid's lawyer provided a photo of him personally from the US media
During that time, Khalid confessed to several conspiracies, but a report by the U.S. Senate later found that much of the intelligence was fabricated by Khalid.
According to reports, if the five suspects are eventually convicted of crimes, the heaviest may be sentenced to death. The New York Times argues that discussions about whether the death penalty can be imposed have greatly increased the complexity of the case and further slowed the process.
In addition, according to defense attorneys and other experts, the "confidentiality" of the case is also a big reason why it took so long. According to reports, on the day the trial process resumed on September 7, the families of the 2,976 victims of the "9/11 incident" sat behind thick soundproof glass to observe, and officials said that the voices they heard were transmitted after a 40-second delay, in order to prevent the defendants from blurting out and revealing confidential content.
Khalid is a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani who studied in the United States and was the third most important person in al-Qaida, second only to bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, who was identified by the United States as the main mastermind of the 9/11 incident.
This article is an exclusive manuscript of the Observer Network and may not be reproduced without authorization.