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March 4th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
What is already being described as the “trial of the century” moved
a significant step closer last week when a former accomplice of Mohammed
struck a plea deal with military prosecutors at Guantánamo to testify
against his one-time boss.
Majid Khan, 32, a Pakistani educated in the US, admitted that he was
hand-picked by Mohammed to lead a post-9/11 wave of attacks on US soil –
including a plot to blow up underground fuel storage tanks and poison water
reservoirs Khan said he also worked for Mohammed on other terror projects,
delivering $50,000 to fund the car bombing of a Jakarta hotel that killed 11
people in 2003 and a plan to assassinate then Pakistani President Pervez
Musharraf.
Col Morris Davis, a former chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo, said that
striking deals with operatives such as Khan to build a case against Mohammed
was similar to the use of Mafia supergrasses to bring down crime dons.
“It’s like a Mob case where you want to start at the bottom and make
deals with the smaller fish so that you can work your way up the food chain
and get the top guys,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
For more than a decade, America has struggled with how to bring to justice the
Islamic radicals who conducted a wave of terror attacks across the globe in
the early years of this century – most infamously, the Sept 2001 strikes on
New York and Washington.
In the process, the administration of George W Bush created the Guantánamo Bay
complex and a network of clandestine CIA prisons across the world, ran “ghost”
rendition flights that secretly moved detainees between those “dark
sites”, and authorised “enhanced interrogation techniques”
such as waterboarding that were widely denounced as torture elsewhere.
There were senior Bush officials who saw no need for any trials, preferring
indefinite detention of “bad guys”. In the end, a cumbersome and
controversial system of military commissions was established to prosecute
terror suspects accused of committing war crimes as enemy combatants, but
the troubled legal process almost ground to a halt.
Then just a week after taking office and with great fanfare, President Obama
signed an executive order to close Guantánamo, meeting a campaign promise to
put suspects on trial in federal courts. His justice officials outlined
plans to try Mohammed and four co-accused in lower Manhattan, only a few
streets from the Ground Zero site where the World Trade Centre once stood.
But that pledge imploded after Republicans in Congress blocked the transfer of
the terror suspects to the US amid fears for the security concerns of
staging such high-profile trials in America.
Mr Obama is now determined to prosecute Mohammed and his co-conspirators under
the military tribunal system he once denounced as an affront to American
traditions of justice. And as Osama bin Laden is now dead, that means
perhaps the world’s most notorious living mass killer will finally face
justice.
Born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents in 1964 or 1965 (reports differ), Mohammed
joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager, studied mechanical engineering
in the US at a North Carolina agriculture college and cut his teeth as a
jihadist in Afghanistan fighting Soviet forces. It was also there in 1987
that he first met a Saudi radical called Osama bin Laden.
Terror and targeting the Twin Towers was something of a family affair as his
Mohammed’s nephew Ramzi Yousef parked the 1993 World Trade Centre truck bomb
that killed six.
The two teamed up a year later for an unsuccessful plot to blow up multiple
planes flying between the US and Asia. But Mohammed had hit on theme and
after he returned to Afghanistan in 1996, he renewed his links with bin
Laden and outlined his a plan that would develop into the quadruple
hijackings of 2001.
In late 1998 or early 1999, bin Laden approved the project and Mohammed took
part in the selection of targets and helped arrange for the hijackers to
travel to America where the cell leaders to took flying simulator lessons
before seizing the planes on Sept 11.
Buoyed by the spectacular success of the plot, Mohammed took on the role of
chief al-Qaeda terror strategist with a global reach. He dispatched Richard
Reid, the British “shoe bomber”, to try and blow up a plane from
Paris to Miami, and coordinated terror plots in Pakistan and Bali.
In perhaps his most grisly operation, he has admitted beheading Daniel Pearl,
an American journalist captured while investigating the al-Qaeda network in
Karachi. The FBI has since used photographic analysis to match a bulging
vein in Mohammed’s hand with the hooded figure filmed conducting the
decapitation in the video released by the killers.
The hunt for Mohammed, renowned for a lavish lifestyle and multiple aliases,
obsessed the US intelligence establishment which feared that he could stage
another attack on the scale of 9/11.
But for nearly 18 months, the trail was cold in the search for al-Qaeda’s
hierarchy. Then came the breakthrough when he was captured in March 2003 in
Rawalpindi after a tip-off from an informant who was rewarded with a $25
million bounty and a new life and identity in the US.
Home for Mohammed now is a steamy tropical 45-sq-mile pocket of US military
territory in communist Cuba, leased by Washington after the end of the
Spanish-American War in 1903.
The remaining 171 detainees at Guantánamo spend several hours a days in the
Caribbean sun, receive Arabic newspapers and DVD and eat an exclusively
halal Middle Eastern diet, with dates, olive oil and honey provided daily
and pita bread baked on site. The shelves of an extensive library are lined
with Islamic works and a new $750,000 football field has just been
completed.
But for Mohammed, it seems the focus on the base will soon be Camp Justice,
where a hangar-like aluminium courtroom is reached through a maze of
walkways lined by dark-mesh fences and barbed wire and secured by US
military guards. A complex of air-conditioned trailers and tents provide
accommodation for the lawyers, witnesses, media and observers who attend the
hearings.
His case will be heard by a presiding officer, a military lawyer who is the
equivalent of a judge, and a panel of at least four other US officers who
act as a jury. Mohammed will be represented by a tribunal-appointed military
defence lawyer, assisted by a US civilian attorney, expected to be David
Nevin, who has worked on death penalty cases since 1981.
Journalists and observers will watch proceedings from behind bullet-proof
glass, or via a live-stream at a US military intelligence base in Virginia,
following a noise and video feed, which can be cut if classified information
is brought up.
The initial confessions by Mohammed were collected by waterboarding –
testimony that the Obama administration has ruled inadmissible as it was
coerced.
But KSM, as he is commonly known, has also repeatedly made clear that he wants
to claim credit for his actions in plotting the Sept 11 attacks. “I was
responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said, according to
Pentagon transcripts of a close-door hearing in 2007.
Nonetheless, the tribunal needs testimony untainted by allegations of torture.
So as chief prosecutor when Mohammed and other “high value detainees”
were brought to Guantánamo in 2006, Col Davis put together “clean
teams” of FBI and military law enforcement agents to re-interview
detainees.
“The evidence before then had been collected from what the US government
called enhanced interrogation techniques and what most of the world calls
torture. I had honestly believed that we were committed to free and fair
trials, but there were people above me who disagreed,” Col Davis said.
He quit in 2007 when he was instructed by a superior to use evidence gained
from enhanced interrogation techniques on the grounds, in the words of his
superior, that “America does not torture people”.
Like Mr Obama, he would have preferred to have seen Mohammed and his cohorts
tried in a civilian court. “It’s important that KSM is held accountable
for his actions and it is important the world sees that he is held
accountable. The trouble for the US is that the perception of the Guantánamo
and the military commissions is so tainted in the eyes of many.”
But after suffering a humiliating rebuff to his attempts to close Guantánamo
and put Mohammed on trial in New York, the prospect of an election year
conviction has a clear political appeal for the president.
Mr Obama has already ordered the operations that killed bin Laden and Anwar
al-Awlaki, the US-born radical Yemeni preacher. By prosecuting the man who
hatched the 9/11 plot, he would further undermine Republican attempts to
portray him as weak on national security.
What is certain is that Mohammed will also seize the opportunity to deliver
his own poisonous message, as he did at an arraignment hearing in 2008.
President Bush was waging a “crusader war”, he declared, and the
proceedings against him were “an inquisition, not a trial. After
torturing, they transfer us to inquisition-land in Guantánamo.”
But there may be one point of agreement – the verdict and sentence. For he was
warned at that hearing that he faces execution if convicted.
In broken English, he replied: “Yes, this is what I wish, to be a martyr
for a long time.”
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