After almost a quarter of a century, a chapter of history closes with a plea bargain. The brain of the September 11 massacres, Khalid Sheikh Mohammedand two of his accomplices have agreed to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison, thus avoiding a trial at Guantanamo that could have resulted in a death sentence.
A senior Pentagon official has given the green light to the plea bargain of Mohammed and his two associates, Walid bin Attach and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who have been held for years at the prison base on the island of Cuba. Sources from the New York Times, which first reported the deal, explain that the agreement, reached by Osama bin Laden’s accomplices in 27 months of negotiations, will serve to give “a sense of closure and justice” to the families of the victims of al Qaeda’s massacres. However, the controversy was immediate: Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance called the plea deal “ridiculous” (“We need a president who kills terrorists, not who negotiates with them”), which also divided the victims’ families in their reactions: for some, fearful of not getting to the solution of the case alive, the agreement caused a sigh of relief, while other relatives, who were longing for the death sentence, were disappointed. “I’m angry,” Kathleen Vigiano, who lost her husband Joseph and brother-in-law John at the World Trade Center, both firefighters who died in the rescue effort, told the Times: “Those three killed 3,000 people and there are people who are still dying of cancer from the poisons released by the collapse of the Twin Towers.”
For Anthony Romero, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Mohammed, the agreement was instead “the right choice” and “the only practical solution after nearly two decades of legal action”. The agreement, which could be formalized in court as early as next week, avoids a trial that could have lasted 12 to 18 months and whose outcome, despite the enormity of the crime, was far from a foregone conclusion: over a decade of pre-trial hearings had in fact focused on the question of whether the torture to which the terrorists had been subjected – in Mohammed’s case 183 sessions of waterboarding – had contaminated the evidence against them. “In exchange for the abolition of the death penalty as a possible punishment, the three defendants have agreed to plead guilty to the crimes they are accused of, including the murder of 2,976 people”, reads a letter sent to the families of the victims by Rear Admiral Aaron Rugh, the head of the military commissions of inquiry into the massacres. An engineer who studied in the United States, 59-year-old Mohammed was accused of having the idea of hijacking planes to crash them into buildings and of having presented it in 1996 to Bin Laden, who gave the green light. Under the agreement, the terrorist has agreed to answer all the questions that the victims’ families want to ask him about the genesis and dynamics of the attacks: a process defined as “restorative justice” that should conclude by the end of the year.