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."
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