NEW YORK – 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 once again demonstrated 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 to press their case that the United States is such a bully in the Middle East that even killing civilians was justified.
“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.
He is 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.”
Abu Ghaith, who was captured in Jordan last year, 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.”
Richard K. Betts, director of the International Security Policy program at Columbia University, said it was not surprising that Abu Ghaith would stick to his beliefs.
“Al-Qaida ideology sees the USA as corrupt, blasphemous, aggressive, and threatening to Muslims. What in his experience should convince him otherwise? That we give him three square meals a day and let him read the Quran?” he said in an email. “The USA has waged war intensively against his organization, al-Qaida, for more than a dozen years and killed his idol, Bin Laden. Whether or not he’s guilty of a crime under U.S. law may be unclear, but if conversion to sympathy with us is a requirement for acquittal, I imagine he’s cooked.”
