Yesterday, the US Justice Department announced a plea deal* with the masterminds of the terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 innocent souls on September 11th, 2001. In exchange for the guilty pleas, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi will avoid the death penalty they so richly deserve. Instead, they will live out the rest of their days in - as one 9/11 surviving family member calls it - the "Gitmo Country Club".
* UPDATE: Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin has revoked the plea deal.
Here's what Mark had to say about the potential for a plea deal almost two years ago (plus a bonus bit at the end re "red waves"):
At SteynOnline we no longer observe the 9/11 anniversary, for reasons I outlined last year:
The war is lost, at home and abroad. On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam's strictures on freedom of expression and the like. The decade-and-a-half since the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been one long remorseless surrender on core western liberties. When a school teacher gets beheaded in the street, there is no outrage at the act, just a mild regret that he should have been foolish enough to provoke his own fate. Even the milder jests from the immediate post-9/11 era - the cartoon of the woman trying on new burqas in the changing room and wondering, 'Does my bomb look big in this?' - would not be published today:
In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies. The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the ChiCom-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.
As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 - and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.
I thought I could not despise the men who brought us to this pretty pass any more than I do. But here ya go:
CBS News has confirmed military prosecutors and defense attorneys are negotiating potential plea deals that could take the death penalty off the table for the five defendants accused in the 9/11 attacks.
That would be the hairy-backed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four marginally less hirsute co-conspirators. So, after two decades of leisurely legal jousting back and forth, this is how it ends. Don't worry, the plea deals are premised on the quintet being given "substantial sentences" - which one assumes means something less than life without the possibility of parole, else why not say so? In addition, the men will receive "treatment for alleged torture they experienced while in CIA custody".
Oh, really? How about financial compensation?
Gotta hand it to KSM: He fought the law, and he won. He was captured in Rawalpindi on March 1st 2003, which is nineteen-and-a-half years ago - or twice as long as the First and Second World Wars combined.
~If you were about to roll your eyes and sneer "Is there nothing this sclerotic pseudo-republic can do?", hey, not so fast. Per MSNBC's finest:
September 11 was a terrorist attack.
January 6 was a terrorist attack...
Both were attacks on America.
And we must seek justice for the latter as we did for the former.
Er, are you sure you got that the right way round? In the time it takes KSM's lawyers to file a motion of reconsideration of their motion to continue the scheduling conference to schedule the reconsideration of their previous motion to continue, the January 6th "terrorists" have been banged up in solitary, railroaded into copping a plea, and led off to the Big House. It would no longer surprise me if the men who plotted the murder of the 2,977 good souls lost that day were out and strolling the boulevards of Jalalabad long before the 1/6 "insurrectionists" are freed.
~That's the number by the way, the combined dead of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Flight 93: 2,977. So a lot of Americans were surprised when one of their citizen-representatives, Pramila Jayapal (Democrat of Washington State) tweeted out:
Today we remember the 2,996 people who were killed on 9/11 and all those who lost their lives while serving our country in the forever wars that followed.
How do you get to 2,996? Well, you take 2,977 and you add in the nineteen hijackers.
Boy, you should have heard the right-wing commentariat pile on to that disgusting moral equivalist Ms Jayapal. Fortunately, we have rock-ribbed colossus Kevin McCarthy, Republican House leader, to set the record straight:
We can never forget - not just the 2,996 souls we lost on 9/11 - but also the first responders who ran into the buildings...
~There's been so much talk about the imminent "Red Wave" that it's easy to forget Mr McCarthy is not yet Speaker but merely Speaker-Designate. As for that incoming GOP tsunami, Democrats now purport to be spooked by all the polls showing them ahead:
Even as Democrats spent a week or more spinning a 'there's no red wave coming' message to try and tout their strength and popularity among voters, the party of President Biden is quietly fretting that their candidates are...in the lead?
Those worries are, evidently, based on polls showing Democrat midterm candidates up over GOP opponents in place where polls showed Hillary Clinton leading against Trump in 2016 — and we all know how that turned out — as well as in places surveys incorrectly showed Biden running up leads in places he wasn't actually winning.
So what do you think this is?
2016, when Trump won against the odds and the polls?
Or another 2020, with Dems and their allies arranging the landscape to make the early hours of Wednesday morning look plausible?
It's not all civilizational collapse and endless litigation at SteynOnline - please join us later today for the next episode of Mark's spectacular narration of "Bulldog Drummond" by Sapper.
On Saturday, Mark returns to Serenade Radio at noon Eastern Time/ 5pm British Summer Time for a brand-new edition of Mark Steyn's On The Town.
And, of course Rick McGinnis will be back here at SteynOnline with his weekly film review.
Thinking about joining the next Mark Steyn Cruise? We will set sail from Barcelona, Spain on April 6th, 2025 and make our way to Southampton, England with stops in Lisbon and Porto (Portugal) and La Coruna, Spain along with many returning special guests plus new guests - including our friend and former GB News colleague Dan Wootton. I was able to tour our new ship - the Celebrity Apex - recently and was blown away by the amazing features: a much-improved dining experience, state of the art theatre, beautiful gathering spots and more modern cabins. Celebrity is rolling out the red carpet to welcome our group from around the world with special packages just for us.... We hope to see you on board!
