Chilling letter by alleged 9/11 mastermind to Obama surfaces
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind September 11 and many other terrorist attacks, sent a missive to the former US President accusing his country of responsibility for 9/11: ‘Your hands are still wet with the blood of our brothers and sisters and children who were killed in Gaza.’
The alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks in New York told former US President Barack Obama that the US brought the 2001 terrorist attack on itself, adding that he would be happy to meet Bin Laden if executed.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wrote the chilling 18-page letter, dated January 2015, but it wasn’t sent to the White House until a military judge ordered for it to be delivered just days before Obama left office last month.
Officials at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, where Mohammed is a detainee, had refused to deliver the letter because it could be considered propaganda.
The letter was addressed to Obama and described him as “the head of the snake” and president of “the country of oppression and tyranny.”
“It was not we who started the war against you in 9/11. It was you and your dictators in our land,” Mohammed, 51, wrote in the missive. One section even asked: “Why Did 9/11 Happen? And Why May it Happen Again?,” before detailing the "crimes" since Israel's birth.
“The war crimes perpetrated in Palestine since 1948, and those taking place in Gaza today, are the clearest indication of why 9/11 happened, and why it may happen again in the future,” he offered as an answer to the question.
“I will be happy to be alone in my cell to worship Allah for the rest of my life and repent to Him all my sins and misdeeds,” the letter continued.
“And if your court sentences me to death, I will be even happier to meet Allah and the prophets and see my best friends whom you killed unjustly all around the world and to see Sheik Osama bin Laden.”
The letter also listed a number of US overseas interventions including in Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iran and Iraq to justify the 9/11 attacks, and condemned Obama for the operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.
He called Obama “a smart attorney, well acquainted with human rights” and lamented the fact that he “can kill his enemy without trial and throw his dead body into the sea instead of giving him to his family or respecting him enough as a human being to bury him."
The content of Mohammed's letter to Obama were sent first to the Miami Herald newspaper and then to the Associated Press. It is doubtful Obama had the chance to read it since it arrived at the White House only days before he departed from the Oval Office.
US Marine Corps Major Derek Poteet, lead military defense counsel for Mohammed, said that his client started writing the accusatory letter following the killings of Palestinians during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, also known as Operation Protective Edge.
Mohammed has been held at the prison at Guantanamo Bay since 2006 after being captured in Pakistan in 2003.
In March 2007, after four years in captivity, including six months of detention where he allegedly underwent waterboarding torture at Guantanamo Bay, Mohammed confessed to masterminding the September 11 attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various other foiled attacks.
"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," Mohammed said in a statement read during a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
He also said that he personally decapitated the Jewish-American Journalist Daniel Pearl with his "blessed right hand", and in his first public showing in 2008 during a legal hearing he quoted passages from the Quaran and said he will happily become a martyr for his role in the September 11 attacks.
A year later he released a statement where he called the attacks "A noble victory."
Mohammed is currently awaiting his death-penalty trial at Guantanamo Bay.
