Bin Laden associates show no remorse in statements
In public statements a week apart, al-Qaida’s self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind and a Kuwaiti imam who met with Osama bin Laden in a cave soon after the attacks demonstrated that time hasn’t softened their anti-American views.
If anything, Khalid Sheik Mohammed — in new writings from his Guantanamo Bay cell — and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith — on trial in Manhattan federal court — are using courtroom theater, intentionally or not, to press their case that the United States is such a bully in the Middle East that even killing civilians was justified.
“The entire trial is frozen in time, if you think about it,” said Karen J. Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law who was one of the few people in the Manhattan courtroom Thursday when the surprise announcement was made that Abu Ghaith would testify. “Because the trial is focused on the moment of 9/11, it makes everybody seem like they’re frozen in the time of 9/11.”
Mohammed’s words emerged a week ago in a written statement responding to more than 400 questions from defense lawyers in their failed bid to win the court’s permission to have him testify on behalf of Abu Ghaith, who is on trial on charges that he conspired to kill Americans and aid al-Qaida after the terrorist attacks.
Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan in 2003, boasted that Afghanistan under Taliban leadership “was the first Islamic state that treated all Muslim men equally, whether they be Chinese, Indian, Chechnyan, Arabs, or Westerners.” There was no mention of women.
He claimed the U.S. closed some embassies and canceled some joint military maneuvers in Jordan because of publicity he orchestrated while in charge of al-Qaida’s media wing.
“All this was not in vain because, while the enemy has capabilities that we do not possess, we have the same mental capacity Allah gave to all; and while they use their muscles, we use our minds,” Mohammed wrote.
Mohammed remains devoted to bin Laden, killed in a 2011 U.S. attack, saying the al-Qaida founder was “very wise in every order he gave us.”
A judge ruled jurors at Abu Ghaith’s ongoing trial won’t see Mohammed’s statement. But they received a lesson in jihad from the defendant, who took the unusual step of taking the witness stand and described in detail how bin Laden summoned him to his mountain hideout in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks and enlisted him as the terror group’s mouthpiece.
Abu Ghaith, who was captured in Jordan last year, showed none of the arrogance and air of invincibility that he displayed on videos distributed worldwide after the attacks. But he also didn’t back down from his support of bin Laden immediately after the attacks or his motivation, saying he sought “to deliver a message, a message I believed in.”
And he said the message justifying the attacks came from the premise that “oppression, if it befalls any nation, any people, any category of people, that category must revolt at some point. … And what happened was a result, as I understand, a natural result for the oppression that befell Muslims.”
