Happy Friday!
I’ll be traveling for the next week, and most of the month, so there won’t be many posts in August. I’ve really got to learn how to leverage AI to take over my blogging duties.
I will never forget where I was when I heard about the planes hitting the World Trade Center in New York. I had just logged in at the office and was talking with my boss when another associate said, “a plane just hit the World Trade Center.” I imagined a small plane like a Cessna. It wasn’t until a second plane hit that we knew something awful was happening.
That attack ended up killing nearly 3,000 people that day, most in the collapsed twin towers, including businessmen and business women, firefighters, police officers, medical personnel, and all those on the doomed flights. It is the single worst attack on the US homeland, ever.
I still, to this day, despise Osama bin Laden and his henchmen for what they did. I curse his name every September 11. As a Christian, I never gloated over his death because I believe that redemption is possible for everyone, no matter how evil they are. Plus, we’re told not to:
Do not gloat when your enemy falls;
when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice,
or the Lord will see and disapprove
and turn his wrath away from them.
— Proverbs 24:17-18
But since that door was closed with OBL’s assassination, it is hard not to think that he deserves every ounce of hell he gets.
So it is with some irritation that I read that the rest of the planners of that attack 23 years ago—especially the mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—have “negotiated” a plea agreement with the current administration.
The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and two other terrorists being held in Guantánamo Bay will be spared the death penalty under a deal with prosecutors, it was revealed Wednesday.
The announcement was a bitter pill to swallow for victims’ families who have anxiously awaited the conclusion of the case for nearly 24 years — many of whom felt death was the only appropriate punishment for the perpetrators of the heinous attacks.
A spokesperson for the Office of Military Commissions (OMC), which is prosecuting the case, confirmed it had entered into pre-trial agreements with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the accused principal architect of the al Qaeda attacks — and two alleged co-conspirators, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, all of whom have been held at the US military prison on the coast of Cuba since 2003.
This isn’t justice. Justice would have been standing them in front of a dirt embankment and shooting them after facing a military tribunal for the attack on our soil. I agree with John Hinderaker:
It is reasonable to blame the weak and borderline anti-American Biden administration for this travesty, and to be sure they deserve opprobrium. But the original fault goes back much further. The idea of treating these terrorists, whom we used military means to capture, as mere criminal defendants entitled to the panoply of criminal procedures available to Americans, including, at the end, plea bargaining, was a farce from the beginning. They should have been interrogated mercilessly and then shot, a long time ago. They deserved nothing more.
This is a slap in the face to not only those who survived the attack and to those who lost loved ones in the attack, but it’s also a slap in the face to all Americans. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. We don’t put up with that $#!+. But, as Hinderaker says, the “borderline anti-American Biden administration” is all about trashing our norms, not restoring them as he promised four years ago.
I strongly disagree with Hinderaker that they’re “borderline.” They’re all clearly anti-American as historic and traditional America is understood.
The plea deal is a tragic joke that isn’t funny. We live in an upside down world and it’s getting harder to believe it will improve any time soon.
But chin up. At least we can pretend, for now, that Trump will win and drain the swamp.
Have a good weekend, and a good week that follows.