Time to Defeat the Legal Jihad Against 9/11 Families

        As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 nears, the biggest disgrace is that the attack’s evil mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has not been tried and sentenced to death.

        Blame the American Civil Liberties Union, in large part, for this injustice. The ACLU intervened at the start, insisting that the two military lawyers assigned to defend Mohammed and his codefendants “might not have death penalty experience” and were insufficient to battle “the full force of the U.S. government.” What a pity.

        The ACLU sent in its own team of expert capital defense lawyers, at a cost of millions of dollars. This team has been waging legal jihad year after year and getting away with it.

        The terrorists’ lawyers have strung out the military court proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, objecting that the defendants were not read their rights, and that waterboarding and other torture they endured at the hands of CIA agents prior to being incarcerated at Guantanamo invalidate even confessions they made years afterward.

        The real torture victims are the 9/11 families who have waited too long 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 deserve nothing like that. Nor do they deserve the rights of legitimate solders protected by the Geneva Conventions. Mohammed and his conspirators rejected the rules of war to massacre civilians without warning.

        But their lawyers, including Gary Sowards, who represented Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, have run circles around the military prosecutors year after year with pretrial motions and attempts to negotiate a plea deal that would take a death sentence off the table.

        Twenty-five years after the attack, justice is further out of reach than ever before. 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 during interrogations at Guantanamo will not be allowed in court. He said interrogators at Guantanamo failed to explicitly tell Mohammed that he had a right to be silent and to consult a lawyer, and 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 before incarceration at Guantanamo conditioned them to tell interrogators at Guantanamo 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 forms of torture were used soon after Mohammed’s arrest in 2003 in a desperate effort to learn whether other attacks on the U.S. were planned.

        As part of an unsuccessful plea deal, Mohammed signed a written statement in 2024 confessing that he planned and executed the 9/11 attacks “from A-to-Z.”

        Prosecutors also have a hard drive, seized during Mohammed’s arrest, that contains photographs of the 19 hijackers, as well as three letters from Osama bin Laden.

        Even so, Schrama essentially is excluding any confessions, making getting a conviction difficult. Prosecutors have not announced yet whether they will appeal the ruling. They should, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, the justices ruled 5-4 that terrorists being tried in military panels are entitled to the same due process protections as other defendants. That was a mistake.

        Justice Antonin Scalia, writing in dissent, cautioned the ruling imposes on military courts “an impossible task” at a time when “America is at war with radical Islamists.” The long, unproductive litigation against Mohammed and his codefendants proves Scalia was correct. Today the high court majority would likely see the foolishness of applying due process standards to foreign terrorists

        These four terrorists are guilty. They claimed credit for their deeds even before capture. They deserve to die.

        Yet last week, their attorneys made a bid to revive a tabled 2024 plea deal that would spare them from the death penalty. That would be a terrible injustice.

        Many people oppose the death penalty, and with good reason. But the 9/11 attacks amounted to a special kind of evil outside the normal moral order. As columnist Douglas Murray explains, though Israel has outlawed the death penalty, it will put to death any of the terrorists who slaughtered unarmed women and children during the Oct. 7 raid. The 9/11 attacks are comparable.

        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. That means the conviction and execution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his codefendants.

        Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and Chairman & Founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths at www.hospitalinfection.org. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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