September 7, 2023

"President Biden has rejected a list of proposed conditions sought by the five men who are accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks..."

"... in exchange for pleading guilty and receiving a maximum punishment of life in prison, according to two administration officials....  The case has been bogged down in pretrial proceedings in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for more than a decade.... In talks with prosecutors, defense lawyers said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind, and four other defendants wanted certain accommodations, including assurances they would not serve their sentences in solitary confinement and could instead continue to eat and pray communally — as they do now as detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The prisoners also sought a civilian-run program to treat sleep disorders, brain injuries, gastrointestinal damage or other health problems they attribute to the agency’s brutal interrogation methods during their three to four years in C.I.A. custody before their transfer to Guantánamo Bay in 2006...."

"... Mr. Biden took no position on the general notion that a plea deal could eliminate the possibility of death sentences...."

41 comments:

Mr Wibble said...

Just take them out and shoot them. Enough of this farce.

TreeJoe said...

These prisoners are not nation state sponsored. They are not POW nor considered under Geneva.

20 years of imprisonment is ridiculous. At a certain point a nation must act like a nation. Either there is value to us in keeping them alive, or trading them, or there is not and ending them is the just thing to do for the nation.

If we can kill by drone people on the street in another country because we believe they are enemies or the state (which is an awful program), then keeping indefinitely confirmed enemies who have acted against the US makes no sense.

Tina Trent said...

Still asking: why isn't 9/11 counted, and taught, as a religious and nationality based hate crime? In the textbook I was supposed to use to teach in a Florida community college, it was described merely as a moment for Americans to recognize the world around them, as if we needed some lesson measured in annihilated lives.

Designating it "hate" would clarify things. So would executing these animals.

tim in vermont said...

That's harsh, these guys were working for our own CIA in "pretext manufacturing."

Naah, JKLOL. I am sure that our saintly CIA knew nothing about this plan being hatched in a country where we ran an insurgency against the Soviets, and funded and manned by our allies, the Saudis. The idea that a Pearl Harbor style attack could be used to put America on a war footing again, like in the old days, never occurred to anybody. That's sick!

Just because we used it to justify invasions of former Soviet client states, that was just good luck.

But there is a saying. The first time a guy gets lemons and makes lemonade, you figure he's lucky, but when it happens over and over again, you have to figure that he's running a lemonade stand.

Rusty said...

Get em front of the Jan 6 commitee. Thay'll be hanging from a gallows by noon.

Dave Begley said...

Go ahead. Make a deal. That deal would seal Joe’s fate.

Sleep disorders? Poor babies.

ga6 said...

Kalid and Co the victims of the US election cycle.

R C Belaire said...

Huh. I thought Obama was going to close Gitmo. Must have heard that wrong.

rehajm said...

How is it this is an obligation for the President to micro manage?

...remind me just what the fuck is the constructive thing our judicial system is doing?

rehajm said...

I bet I'm not alone in reading the headline and momentarily processing this as part of the political persecution of Americans by the Democrats...

rwnutjob said...

Summary execution years ago.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Very telling that he has proposed any deal for the most infamous terrorists in America yet no merciful gestures toward J6 rioters or his immediate predecessor. What a Dick! The only reason he rejected the sweetheart deal now is because it’s getting too close to the ’24 election.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

You are absolutely not alone, rehjam.

tommyesq said...

Put them in a helicopter, hover at the height of the World Trade Center building, and push them out. Broadcast it around the world for deterrence.

Jamie said...

Without reading any other comments - well, good. I'm not going to assume he did this out of conviction, as I don't think he has any of that, but it's good that he did it for whatever reason (Election 2024, for instance).

rrsafety said...

Seems like a reasonable deal to move this forward.

Narayanan said...

Just take them out and shoot them. Enough of this farce.
========
why nto give them Epstein option?

Mark said...

Why is the president interfering in this judicial process at all?

Mark said...

I'll remind people that KSM et al. already pleaded guilty without conditions during the Obama years. And Obama's team refused to go along.

Deep State Reformer said...


Yah. The Nuremberg convicts from the Third Reich (esp. the political ones) were in the same situation in the 1970s with the war being over 20-30 years, why were they still being held? One poster already said shoot them or let him go, which is about the only option. Messy business doling out justice on the battlefield. Best just not to take captives if they are not Geneva Convention defined POWs. Trade them for your own captives like Obama did is one option perhaps.

Yancey Ward said...

Put them in an automated plane, fly them around for an hour, then crash the plane into a cliff face.

It is embarrassing that these guys are still alive 22 years later consuming our tax dollars when they should have been tried and executed 20 years ago. For fuck's sake, it only took 6 years to execute Timothy McVeigh and 3 years to do the same to Saddam Hussein.

Yancey Ward said...

Had these five been 5 Proud Boys, they would have been dead for at least the last 15 years, not praying together in a prison.

Yancey Ward said...

And I am just going to call bullshit on the idea that Biden made any decision here at all. This is his political handlers trying to make it look like Biden is some kind of tough guy. The entire story reeks of manufactured.

jim said...

Hey, more proof that Biden runs the DOJ.

Jupiter said...

Just so you know, these guys had little or nothing to do with 9-11. They are the Muslim equivalents of Lee Harvey Oswald. Take a look at the video of WTC 7 collapsing into its own footprint by controlled demolition. Go ahead, take a look. It's readily available on the internet. Look at the videos of the BBC announcing WTC 7 had fallen, an hour before it did. You can actually see the building in the background, behind the talking torso. It was a hoax. The whole thing was a set-up. An insurance fraud and a Reichstag fire, rolled into one.

Go ahead, stop calling me a liar and a lunatic and watch the fucking videos.

William said...

Biden wants to keep open the precedent of waterboarding and solitary confinement at Gitmo. The Gang of 21 have not yet been sentenced for their 1/6 crimes. Those 1/6 crimes were far worse than 9/11 or 12/7. The only crime in American history that even approached it was Watergate. Cruel and unusual crimes demand cruel and unusual punishments.

Bob Boyd said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rabel said...

From the ABC News write up of this:

"Ultimately, it will not be the president's decision to determine if there is a pre-trial agreement or what an appropriate sentence would be. Rather, that falls to the Office of the Convening Authority for the Office of Military Commissions, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that handles cases in the military court of law."

Is this just the Times clumsily trying to generate a positive headline for Biden? If this proceeding is in military court is this not unlawful command influence (if it happened)?

Paul said...

In truth it's Obama rejecting the proposal... Biden is on permanent vacation.

RMc said...

health problems they attribute to the agency’s brutal interrogation methods during their three to four years in C.I.A. custody

I'm guessing having a jumbo jet crashing into you is pretty brutal, too.

I am reminded of a line in the animated fantasy movie "Wizards": "I got things planned for you, where it'll take 20 years to kill you, and you'll be screaming for mercy in the first five seconds."

Jim at said...

Jupiter Truther has entered the chat.

You know, the one thing you nutjobs can never answer is HOW they managed to wire those three buildings for a controlled demolition without anybody knowing.

Or do you have videos for that, too?

Political Junkie said...

After SOB Joe wins reelection, he will pardon all 5 of those scumbags.

Iman said...

Throw all the SOBs off a tall building.

Rusty said...

Jupiter.
No.
Once the foundation of one of the towers was compromised the foundations of the others were compromised as well. The whole complex was a honeycomb of underground parking structures. Once one or two floors collapsed it was a chain reaction as the floors benieth couldn't carry the weight.

Big Mike said...

Burying them alive in pig manure seems appropriate. The 8th Amendment doesn’t apply to foreign terrorists, does it?

@Jupiter, if steel doesn’t lose its tensile strength under conditions of high heat, how the f**k were medieval blacksmiths able to make horse shoes?

Rusty said...

The transition temperature when the crystal lattice in steel breaks down is somewhere around 1300-1400 deg F. I think. It may vary somewhat for different types of steels but they are in that range.
I don't know if the massive elevator shaft was load bearing or not. It probaly was given the size of the buildings. Once the mass of compressed alum. weighing thousand of pounds slammed into it the upper floors were doomed. That is not to mention they thousands of gallons of A1 jet fuel poering out of ruptured fuel tanks. You'll have noticed that the jet engines being made of stainless steel and titanium went completely through the buildings.
I recall the solidarity of the American people over 9/11. Nothing could bring us down. Then came Joe Biden.

Leland said...

Wow, people still believe in 9-11 conspiracies. Sad.

Ok Jupiter, I watched the video, interesting how upper floors began collapsing long before the entire building collapsed. I mean you can watch the AC towers collapse from the roof well before the building comes fully down. Looks just like any other building engulfed in fire collapsing. Maybe you should watch the NIST video on the collapse.

Jupiter said...

"Looks just like any other building engulfed in fire collapsing. Maybe you should watch the NIST video on the collapse."

Maybe you should post a link to one of those numerous videos of buildings collapsing due to fire. In the entire history of steel-framed buildings, exactly three have "collapsed due to fire". All three on 9-11. Steel-framed buildings have burned for twelve hours or more, without collapsing. Any videos you have seen of steel-framed buildings collapsing have been controlled demolitions. Including the three on 9-11.

Jupiter said...

"I don't know if the massive elevator shaft was load bearing or not."

The information isn't hard to find if you're interested. The entire central framer of the building was a massive box of steel. The outer shell was also a massive box of steel. That building was immensely strong. The possibility that an airplane might hit it was certainly considered during its design (a B-25 hit the Empire State building during WWII. I'm sure you all remember the newsreels of that catastrophic building collapse?). But earthquake was actually a much bigger concern. Heck, wind loading was a bigger concern. "Thousands of pounds of aluminum"? Yeah, right. That and someone emptied a wastebasket. The building just wasn't designed with emptying wastebaskets in mind.

Tina Trent said...

Jupiter, no matter what you believe, the terrorists colluded, right? So let's agree to start by executing them, and when you dig up enough "proof" of a domestic conspirancy, let's execute the conspirators.

Agreed?

Old and slow said...

Tell us about how the Jews were responsible Jupiter. We all know that's where you really want to go.