Maybe We Shouldn't Try KSM

by Richard Miniter Info

Richard Miniter, the author of Losing bin Laden and Shadow War, is writing a biography of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

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Newscom As the Obama administration swings back toward the idea of trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a military tribunal, Richard Miniter asks what’s to be gained from going to court at all.

So far the controversy over the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has been over where it will be held, instead of whether it should be held at all.

No one doubts KSM's guilt. By his own admission, he is the world's most lethal terrorist. When he became an operational commander of al Qaeda in 1996, the terror network quickly went from killing dozens to hundreds and then thousands of people. The targets became bigger (embassies, battleships, landmarks). After his capture in 2003, the death toll from al Qaeda terror fell to its earlier level. The 7/7 attacks in London, for example, claimed fewer than 60 lives. Al Qaeda has lost his boldness.

"The one public benefit of a civilian trial is that it would force the public to address some hard questions. Was KSM radicalized in the U.S. in the 1980s?"

"The one public benefit of a civilian trial is that it would force the public to address some hard questions. Was KSM radicalized in the U.S. in the 1980s?"

Inspired by the film, Independence Day—in which flying saucers destroy the White House, the Capitol, and various New York and Los Angeles landmarks—KSM developed the idea for the "planes operation"(the September 11 attacks). He trained the 9/11 hijackers and planned nearly every aspect of the atrocity. He planned and supervised the Bali bombing, which killed nearly 200, and talked Richard Reid into putting a bomb in his shoe. He was behind the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center which killed six and left a crater 40 feet wide and four stories deep. He has more failed plots than a James Bond villain: two assassination attempts on Pope John Paul II, a plot to murder President Clinton during a 1994 visit to the Philippines, an attempt to bomb Big Ben in London, and plans to collapse the Panama Canal and to simultaneously explode 10 U.S. airliners over the Pacific.

Any trial would give KSM a pulpit to the attack the U.S. government. He is fluent in English, charismatic, and, his college friends say, he knows how to perform for an audience. He enjoyed staging weekly skits after Friday prayers near their North Carolina campus. Fellow detainees say he is a gifted public speaker and a scene stealer. Nor is he a conventional Islamic radical. While building bombs in the Philippines, he often held meetings of his terror cell in Manila strip clubs (even once joining a stripper at the brass pole to show her how to wiggle provocatively). To woo a Filipina dentist, he phoned her and asked her to look out of her clinic window. There she spotted KSM in a rented helicopter holding up a banner that said "I love you." In any trial, he would be hard to pigeonhole and harder to control.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials say that a Manhattan-based trial would cost $200 million per year and pose an unacceptable risk to the public. While these arguments are popular (just ask the 9/11 families), they are pointless. A federal trial will be costly no matter where it is held. As for safety, critics of the New York trial should learn from terrorist trials held in India, Pakistan and elsewhere—where al Qaeda and other terrorist groups attacked not the courthouses, but virtually anything connected to the country holding the trial. U.S. embassies and the offices of American companies abroad would be the most likely targets, but the attacks could strike the homeland, too.

Al Qaeda could learn from Omar Ahmed Saeed Sheikh. The British-born radical was arrested in India in 1994 and convicted of kidnapping three British subjects and an American citizen. His terrorist comrades hijacked an Indian Airlines plane in 1999, flew it to Pakistan, and threatened to kill 155 passengers. To win the release of the hostages, the Indian government had to free Omar Sheikh and several other convicted terrorists linked to the Taliban. (Omar Sheikh later joined KSM in killing Daniel Pearl). The terror group did not attack the courthouse or the prison that held Sheikh. They realized that any target that would put pressure on the government that tried and convicted him would suffice. So the neighborhood surrounding the New York courthouse would not necessarily be the tartget. A hijacking in Kuala Lumpur or a bombing in Minnesota would be just as likely. If militants seized a large public school in the Midwest, as they did in Beslan, Russia, the hostage crisis would almost certainly force KSM's release. A trial anywhere would endanger Americans everywhere.