9/11 Mastermind Says He Wants to Die; Gitmo Trial May Be His Chance

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, shortly after his capture in 2003. Photo: AP

A year after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the United States has another opportunity on the horizon to take down a major terrorist figure, albeit in a much different way. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, will finally begin a military commission for the murders of 3,000 Americans at Guantanamo Bay on Saturday morning, when he'll appear at a Guantanamo Bay courtroom for his belated arraignment. But even as the U.S. boasts about the justice its reformed military trials will dispense, those trials might ironically give the man known as KSM the conclusion he sees as a final victory: death.

It's been a long time since KSM was last in court. In 2008, during an arraignment for a commission that ultimately got cancelled, he quickly pled guilty to multiple murder counts. 'This is what I want,' he told the court, in English. 'I'm looking to be martyr for long time.'

That case was interrupted for a variety of procedural reasons, and KSM never got his chance. In the intervening years, Congress and the Obama administration reformed the controversial military trials ' making it easier to seek capital punishment, by providing detainees with so-called 'learned counsel' lawyers specifically skilled at death-penalty cases, which makes such sentences less likely to be reversed on appeal. Last month, after flipping a key detainee to testify against KSM, the government brought charges against KSM and four alleged accomplices for the 9/11 plot. 'If convicted,' the Defense Department clarified, 'the five accused could be sentenced to death.'

However much the commission procedures have changed, KSM's ambitions probably haven't. 'He wants to die because it fits into his massively egotistical narrative,' says Josh Meyer, author of the recent book The Hunt for KSM. 'He's like Napoleon. Wasting away in a cell is not his style. Going out in a bang of glory is.'

That calculation means that the 12 U.S. military officers who will decide if a convicted KSM lives or dies will face more than a narrow legal choice. They'll also, however unfairly for the them, have the burden of a policy choice. Should KSM be put to death, it might simultaneously provide a measure of closure for the families of his victims and allow al-Qaida's remaining acolytes to portray him as a martyr.

That burden has weighed on military lawyers for years. Some think that KSM's chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, should forego seeking the death penalty.

'The worst thing we could do to KSM is to keep him alive for as long as possible while making him totally irrelevant,' says retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, one of Martins' predecessors as chief commissions prosecutor. 'Not mattering matters more to him than dying. I'd hate to see us give him what he wants.'

That ultimate decision is likely to be a very long time in coming. Even if KSM pleads guilty on Saturday, his lawyers will doubtlessly pursue a number of procedural gambits to tie the commission up ahead of the abbreviated trial that will precede sentencing. If his lawyers enter what's called a reserved plea, they'll start filing motions to exclude evidence ahead of trial that will mean months, if not years, before the trial can actually begin. Pentagon officials talk of a process that, whatever happens on Saturday at Guantanamo Bay, will not be resolved in 2012.

But before a sentence is handed down, KSM wants something else: a soapbox. He's after 'an opportunity to tell the world, again, what he thinks, why he did it, how he's really the good guy and a commanding general on par with George Washington, leading an insurgent army fighting the oppressive forces of tyranny and evil,' Meyer says. His lawyers have an incentive to stopping any such outburst ' it will alienate the panel of officers who will decide KSM's fate ' and the judge in the commission, Army Col. James A. Pohl, has wide latitude to shut him up.

But even if KSM gets either his soapbox or the martyrdom he seeks, the global terrorist movement may not be so captivated. 'This generation of al-Qaida supporters generally know that he played an important role in 9/11, but since al-Qaida never profiled him in their videos, there's no in-depth knowledge about the man nor does the global movement hold strong feelings of solidarity with his plight, as they do with men like the Blind Sheikh or Abu Qatada,' says Jarret Brachman, author of Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice.

'I would anticipate that a death sentence would provoke a flurry of the predictable 'we will avenge his death' statements from across the al-Qaida world,' Brachman adds, 'but I don't foresee it being a very meaningful or enduring rallying flag for al-Qaida.'

Being forgotten might be the biggest fear for KSM, a well-known narcissist. His original idea for 9/11 wasn't to knock down the World Trade Center. It was to hijack a plane, land it on a U.S. runway, and then emerge to deliver a diatribe about the perfidies of U.S. foreign policy.

'We used to joke that we should charge all of his co-accused as death penalty eligible, but not him, just to piss him off,' says Morris. 'The thought that others are more significant than he is and deserve death, but not him, would annoy KSM to no end.'