Our Planet Climate and Geopolitics
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, and two of his accomplices have agreed to plead guilty to murder and conspiracy charges and receive a life sentence rather than go to trial and potentially face the death penalty, says the NYT. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been in US custody since 2003; but pretrial proceedings at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba had stalled over whether their torture in CIA prisons had contaminated the evidence against them. A 2014 Senate report said that Mohammed had been waterboarded at least 183 times. Prosecutors said in a letter to the families of the 2,976 people killed in the attacks that they believed the deal was the best route to “finality and justice”. But Terry Strada, who lost her husband Tom, described it as a “gut-punch”.
