By Peter Finn Washington Post Staff Writer
When two planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Sept. 11 2001 Khalid Sheik Mohammed was sitting in an Internet cafe in Karachi Pakistan monitoring the attacks. At first Mohammed later told CIA interrogators he was disappointed. He said that he expected the towers to crumble immediately and that he feared they might not fall at all. After the towers came down Mohammed returned to a hideaway flat in the city. There according to newly disclosed details from U.S. officials he and a number of associates including Ramzi Binalshibh al-Qaedas liaison with the Sept. 11 hijackers gathered to watch coverage on international news channels.
Through the night in Pakistan the men embraced repeatedly in celebration marveling at their spectacular success and the humbling of the American giant.
More than eight years later Mohammed a detainee at Guantanamo Bay Cuba will soon be transferred to federal court in Manhattan returning to a city that officials say he visited as a
tourist while a student in North Carolina in the 1980s. The man widely known as KSM will arrive in New York as the most striking symbol of the Obama administrations effort to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. He is also a central figure in the debate over harsh interrogation techniques which were used repeatedly on Mohammed in a bid to force him to divulge intelligence -- which can now be invoked at his trial.
While at Guantanamo Bay where he has been held since September 2006 Mohammed has said he wants to be executed so that he can die a martyr. It is unclear whether he will maintain that position in U.S. District Court. But his trial will probably chart the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath from the conspiracys beginnings in the mountains of Afghanistan where Mohammed proposed the plot in a meeting with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the dark recesses of the CIAs secret prisons where he spent more than three years.
I am the mastermind
By all accounts the spotlight during what would be the biggest terrorism trial in U.S. history would provide Mohammed a man of no small ego with the kind of attention he craves. A showman he has reveled in a number of appearances at Guantanamo Bay tossing self-aggrandizing broadsides from his perch at the front of a courtroom and then retreating into self-satisfied smiles.
I know him well and if he gets his way in federal court it will be a circus said Charles D. Cully Stimson who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in the Bush administration. The court will have to rein in his speechifying and keep the focus on his criminal behavior.
The 9/11 Commission Report discussing Mohammeds terrorist ambitions called him a self-cast star.
I am the mastermind of 9/11 not Osama bin Laden he said in one court hearing.
His vanity has also surfaced. He once complained that a courtroom sketch artist had drawn his nose too big. The rendering of the proboscis was adjusted.
Mohammed 44 was born in Kuwait the third son of Pakistani immigrants drawn to the oil-rich emirate where his father became the imam of a mosque serving Pakistanis. Mohammed said he was a radical from a young age asserting in a statement he gave to the CIA after his capture that he and nephew Ramzi Yousef -- convicted in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center -- had torn down the Kuwaiti flag at their elementary school.
By 16 Mohammed had joined the Muslim Brotherhood an Islamist group and become enamored of violent jihad at youth camps in the desert according to a detailed profile in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Life in America
But like other leading Sept. 11 conspirators such as Mohamed Atta he looked to the West to further his education. After high school he enrolled at Chowan College (now University) in North Carolina. He transferred after one semester to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986.
The 9/11 Commission Report said Mohammed did not attract attention in the United States for any extremist beliefs. But a CIA document released this year said Mohammeds limited and negative experiences in the United States -- which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills -- almost certainly propelled him on his path to become a terrorist.
Mohammed lost his drivers license in North Carolina after he got into an accident while driving without insurance according to a U.S. official. He was later arrested in Kentucky and spent a night in jail for unpaid tickets and for driving with a revoked license.
He told the CIA his contacts with Americans confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country according to the agency document. Later at Guantanamo Bay he told one person who had contact with him that in all his time in the United States he had never touched an American not even to shake hands.
Conspiracys beginning
After college Mohammed traveled to Pakistan where one of his brothers worked for a Kuwaiti charity and immersed himself in the world of the anti-Soviet mujaheddin.
In 1996 when he described his plot for a direct attack on the United States using aircraft as weapons bin Laden listened but did not immediately commit according to the 9/11 Commission Report. In late 1998 after al-Qaeda succeeded in bombing the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania bin Laden finally approved what the group came to refer to as the planes operation.
Under Mohammeds original plan for Sept. 11 10 aircraft were to be hijacked. He was to have been aboard the only one not to crash and after killing the male passengers he was to deliver a speech condemning U.S. support for Israel as well as the Philippines and governments in the Arab world.
The 9/11 Commission Report notes: This vision gives a better glimpse of his true ambitions. This is theater a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star -- the superterrorist.
To be treated as a common criminal is the last thing Khalid Sheik Mohammed wants said Tom Malinowski head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. It disintegrates the warrior mystique that al-Qaeda promotes to sustain itself -- a mystique that a military trial would have reinforced.
CIAs preeminent source
Mohammed was captured on March 1 2003 at a safe house in Rawalpindi a garrison town near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. The photograph that flashed across the world after the
arrest was of a slovenly overweight man. When Mohammed an avid reader of press reports about him later saw it he was furious.
He was quickly whisked out of Pakistan to a CIA black site. Mohammed who was waterboarded 183 times in his first month in captivity said he lied to his interrogators or told them what he thought they already knew to stop the torment. In time he also cooperated with the CIA and became what the agency described as the preeminent source on al-Qaeda.
Defenders of Bush administration interrogation policies have pointed to the intelligence Mohammed provided to justify the use of methods such as waterboarding. Others including some CIA officials say that there is no proof of cause and effect and that the voluminous material amassed from Mohammed could have been acquired without coercion specifically through the measured exploitation of his extraordinary ego.
The braggadocio visible in his courtroom outbursts also led Mohammed to agree to lecture CIA agents in a classroom setting while in custody. But his time in prison has been marked by moments of despair according to officials familiar with his detention. Those moments include the time he was given photographs of his children two of whom were captured with him but now live in Iran with his wife.
He has spent most of his time at Guantanamo Bay in prayer or reading in his cell. The routine has been broken only by visits to the gym where he likes to jog in small circles or conversations in the yard with the detainee in the adjoining space.
Mohammed has said he is impatient to end the legal process.
This is what I wish: to be a martyr for a long time he said last year. I will God willing have this.
