Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other Al Qaeda members behind the 9/11 attacks pleaded guilty to 2,976 counts of murder, U.S. military prosecutors revealed in a letter to 9/11 victim families on Wednesday. In exchange, the 9/11 plotters will escape the death penalty. The letter called the plea deal "the best path to finality and justice in this case."

Mohammed and his accomplices were first taken into U.S. custody in 2003. There was little doubt of their guilt; Mohammed admitted to plotting the attacks to a TV reporter a year before his capture. So why was a plea deal in a shadowy military court more than twenty years later the best that the U.S. government could do?

It was a self-inflicted problem. Rather than letting law enforcement handle a massacre on American soil, President George W. Bush had the suspects rounded up into secretive torture prisons, forever tainting the evidence. No court would admit torture-derived confessions—and any statement made after the torture could also be challenged by lawyers. After all, several known innocents have also confessed under torture.  

When the Obama administration tried to put Mohammed on trial in New York, the scene of his crime, politicians from both parties helped stir up public outrage. Congress passed a bipartisan law preventing Al Qaeda suspects from being moved to the U.S. mainland. Instead, Mohammed and other defendants were tried by a Guantanamo Bay military tribunal that delivered neither fairness and transparency nor swift justice. It was the worst of all worlds.

The relatives of many victims felt blindsided by the plea deal.

"There's a sense of betrayal amongst the 9/11 family members right now," Brett Eagleson, president of the nonprofit 9/11 Justice, told SpyTalk, a Substack focused on national security. "We weren't consulted in any way on what was going to be happening down in Guantanamo."

The 9/11 plotters' guilty plea was one of many missed opportunities for closure on the War on Terror. After killing Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration could have declared victory and begun the process of moving on. Instead, he promised endless war.

"His death does not mark the end of our effort," President Barack Obama said in his announcement of bin Laden's death. "There is no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must—and we will—remain vigilant at home and abroad."

This "vigilance abroad" meant war against an ever-shifting alphabet soup of Islamist rebels, most of whom had nothing to do with 9/11 and some of whom didn't exist when the War on Terror began. The American public was left confused about what they were even fighting for or against. As Rep. Sara Jacobs (D–Calif.) pointed out at a hearing last year, even the list of groups that the U.S. government considers to be "Al Qaeda affiliates" is classified.

Meanwhile, the constant feeling of siege corroded American domestic politics. Counterterrorism became an excuse to militarize the police. Obama-era defenses of drone strikes were recycled into anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Concerns about "radicalization" and "extremism" were used to push for online censorship.

"The same tools that destabilized foreign countries were bound to destabilize America," wrote journalist Spencer Ackerman in his 2020 book, Reign of Terror. "Experiencing neither peace nor victory for such a sustained period was a volatile condition for millions of people."

All the while, it was easy to forget that the people who sparked all this fear to begin with—the perpetrators of 9/11—were either dead or behind bars.

Perhaps Bush and Obama's decisions are understandable, if not excusable, because the trauma of 9/11 was still so raw. But those decisions prevented this wound from ever healing. Two decades on, the closest thing to "finality and justice" is a sad, quiet compromise.

The post The 9/11 Plotters Should Have Been Found Guilty in a Real Court appeared first on Reason.com.

This week has been especially chaotic for the Middle East. On Saturday, a Lebanese rocket killed 12 children and youth at a soccer game in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. (The victims were Syrian citizens with Israeli residency.) On Tuesday night, Israel took revenge for the rocket by killing Fuad Shukr, a commander in the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah, along with two children.

A few hours later, a bomb killed Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas' political bureau and the lead negotiator with Israel, while he was visiting Tehran for the Iranian president's inauguration. Israel is widely believed to be the culprit. Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah have both promised to take revenge.

The same night that Shukr and Haniyeh were killed, U.S. warplanes rained down fire on an Iraqi militia base, killing four pro-Iranian fighters. An anonymous U.S. official told reporters that the militiamen were launching an attack drone that "posed a threat" to U.S. and allied forces. It was not clear whether the Iraqi drone was really aimed at U.S. troops—or Israel.

Soon it may not matter. The Biden administration affirmed again on Wednesday that it will help defend Israel in case of a conflict with Lebanon or Iran, as it did during clashes this April. And the administration has hinted before that it will get involved directly if Israel faces military setbacks in Lebanon. Israeli leaders may have been betting on exactly that outcome.

Unnamed "sources in the security establishment" told The Jerusalem Post that they could have assassinated Haniyeh in Qatar, where he usually lives. Instead, those sources explained, "the choice to carry out the assassination in the heart of Tehran was precisely because Haniyeh was under Iranian security responsibility, which placed Iran at the heart of the world's focus as a host, director, and supplier of terrorism."

In other words, killing Haniyeh was possibly meant to turn the Israel-Hamas war into an international crisis involving Iran and Israel's allies.

Months before the October 2023 attacks, Israeli policy makers had gamed out an Israeli strike leading to a U.S.-Iranian war. The Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank close to the Israeli government, ran a simulation in July 2023 that was eerily similar to the current escalation. The scenario began with an Israeli assassination campaign in Tehran, which provoked Hezbollah and Iraqi militias into attacking Israel and ended with direct U.S. attacks on Iran.

"Former top political and military leaders from Israel, the United States and a number of European countries took part in the simulation," reported the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

For years before that, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders had been demanding U.S. support for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. It's not hard to understand why. Khamenei has called Israel a cancerous tumor that needs to be excised, and Israeli leaders have in turn said that Iran is the head of an evil octopus, which must be cut off.

The attacks on October 7, 2023, by Hamas seemed to confirm the Israeli perception. Whatever role Iran did or didn't have in planning the attacks—the U.S. government believes that Iranian leaders were just as surprised as everyone else—Iran's allies immediately jumped into the fray, attacking Israel in the name of the Palestinian cause.

And plenty of American politicians want conflict for their own reasons. Immediately after the October 7 attacks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) had called for bombing Iran whether or not there was evidence that Iran was behind the attacks. On Wednesday, he claimed to have intelligence that "Iran will, in the coming weeks or months, possess a nuclear weapon" and introduced a bill calling for war with Iran.

A conflict with Iran also helps Netanyahu alleviate some of the domestic political pressure on him. Before the October 7 attacks, he was facing protests over his proposal to defang the Israeli Supreme Court. And instead of rallying Israelis around Netanyahu, the attacks galvanized opposition, as many Israelis blamed Netanyahu for the security lapse and the failure to rescue hostages.

This week, those tensions exploded into an outright mutiny. After months of international pressure regarding the treatment of inmates at the Sde Teiman prison, Israeli military police began a probe into one of the most egregious cases. Nine soldiers had allegedly raped a Palestinian prisoner so hard that he was sent to the hospital with a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, and broken ribs.

Police detained some of the accused soldiers, and Israeli nationalists accused the government of betraying its troops. Nationalist rioters, including members of parliament, stormed both Sde Teiman and the Beit Lid military courts in support of the accused rapists. The army was forced to pull three battalions away from the Palestinian territories to guard the courthouse.

Killing Shukr and Haniyeh, then, was a good political bet for Netanyahu. At the very least, Netanyahu got to drown out headlines about the Sde Teiman riot with a dashing military victory. And if Iran hits back hard enough, then Israel may be able to get the world's superpower to fight Israel's greatest enemy.

But a full-on U.S.-Iran war would be a disaster for the region and for Americans. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie warned The New Yorker in December 2021 that Iran has missile "overmatch in the theatre—the ability to overwhelm" U.S. air defenses. American troops would face attacks in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and a few well-placed Iranian strikes on Tel Aviv or Abu Dhabi could do serious damage to the world economy.

It would be a disaster of the Biden administration's own making. Soon after the October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden embraced the "bear hug" theory of diplomacy. By giving Israel public reassurances and unlimited military support, the theory went, Biden would earn enough goodwill from Israelis to keep their war contained and eventually broker an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire.

Instead, the bear hug has turned out to be a sleepwalk. Netanyahu has taken U.S. support as a license to continue expanding the conflict. And the Biden administration seems to be at a loss for words about the latest escalation. Asked what impact the assassination of one side's chief negotiator would have on ceasefire negotiations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken played dumb.

"Well, I've seen the reports, and what I can tell you is this: First, this is something we were not aware of or involved in," Blinken told Channel News Asia. "It's very hard to speculate, and I've learned never to speculate, on the impact one event may have on something else. So I can't tell you what this means."

The post Will Biden Sleepwalk Into a War With Iran? appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden came into office promising to get American troops out of "forever wars." Tonight, in his State of the Union address, he offered a vision of indefinite U.S. involvement in conflicts around the world.

In April 2021, speaking about the war in Afghanistan, the president railed against those who believe that "withdrawal would damage America's credibility and weaken America's influence in the world. I believe the exact opposite is true." Tonight, Biden attacked skeptics who "want us to walk away from our leadership in the world."

He began his speech with a plea for more U.S. military aid to Ukraine, arguing that "the free world is at risk, emboldening others who would do us harm to do what they wish." Later, Biden announced sweeping plans for U.S. involvement in Gaza.

While the U.S. military will build a new port in Gaza to deliver food to Palestinians—and, the president promised, "no U.S. boots will be on the ground"—the Biden administration will continue to arm the Israeli military campaign that Biden said "has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined." 

The Biden administration has transferred weapons to Israel at the American taxpayer's expense, and is providing targeting intelligence to the Israeli military. "Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran," Biden added, touting his airstrikes on Yemen.

That air campaign has thrown a wrench into Yemen's peace talks—which, ironically, the Biden administration brokered a couple years before.

Biden positioned himself as a peace dove during the 2020 presidential debates, and one of his first major decisions in office was to go through with a long-planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. "It's time to end the forever war," the president announced in an April 2021 speech, rejecting an "approach where U.S. exit is tied to conditions on the ground."

"We have to have clear answers to the following questions: Just what conditions require to—be required to allow us to depart?" he asked in that speech. "By what means and how long would it take to achieve them, if they could be achieved at all? And at what additional cost in lives and treasure?"

Today, Biden answered those questions: The wars will continue for the foreseeable future.

The post Biden Touts More Forever Wars, Breaking His 2021 Promises appeared first on Reason.com.