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.

The CIA is so known for its unabashed secrecy that, when it joined Twitter in 2014, its first tweet was: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” This non-response response is known as a “Glomar,” and while the intelligence community likes to poke fun at how often they invoke it, this inane phrase has allowed the CIA to skirt meaningful transparency and accountability for decades.

In 1966, over the Johnson administration’s opposition, Congress enacted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), giving all of us the right to ask the government for documents and have the government respond, as it believed such access was a prerequisite to a functioning democracy. Soon after FOIA was passed, a Soviet nuclear submarine went missing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and the CIA took an early opportunity to undermine this new law.

Connell v. CIA – FOIA Lawsuit Seeking Records About CIA “Operational Control” Over a Detention Facility at Guantánamo Bay

The CIA has refused to disclose whether it has records about its operational control over Camp VII, a detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. Given...

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

The Soviet Union and the United States raced to locate the missing sub and extract the intelligence likely inside. But first, the U.S. needed to build a ship that could actually extract the sub once it was found — and the government wanted no one to know about it. The CIA contracted this mission out to Howard Hughes, a billionaire with little concern for government transparency, who told the media that the purpose of the ship (named the Hughes Glomar Explorer) was to extract manganese nodules from the ocean floor. Six years later, in 1974, the extraction began. Unfortunately for the U.S., the extracted sub broke into pieces and what the government most wanted was lost: the ship’s code machine and two nuclear missiles. Details of this secret, bungled extraction started to leak, inaccuracies and half-truths swirled, and people rushed to file FOIA requests hoping to answer the many outstanding questions.

Worried about the geopolitical consequences, and obsessed with controlling information about its activities, the CIA came up with a novel way to keep the mission secret without telling an all-out lie. The agency decided it would refuse to confirm or deny whether records about the Glomar Explorer’s mission existed, despite the mounting public evidence that they did. And so the “Glomar response” was born. And, in the case of the Glomar Explorer, it worked: Historians claim many documents remain hidden to this day.

Extraordinary Rendition

The ACLU works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the...

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Unfortunately, in the decades since the submarine debacle, and especially in the post-9/11 era, we’ve repeatedly seen the CIA use the Glomar response to evade responsibility. They have used it to claim they could not say whether they had information about the government’s use of drones to carry out lethal strikes overseas, and when asked about legal justifications for the verified extrajudicial killing of three U.S. citizens. They’ve even used it to side-step questions about whether they’ve spied on Congress.

We’re even seeing state agencies attempt to use the CIA’s non-response to circumvent local public records requests. For example, in 2017, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a public records request seeking documents regarding the NYPD’s monitoring of protesters’ social media activity and cell phones. The NYPD initially responded with a blanket statement that it could “neither confirm nor deny” whether such records existed, saying that even revealing the existence of records could harm national security. A New York court rejected this argument and ordered the NYPD to respond to the request in full.

And the CIA’s penchant for secrecy continues to expand, with the agency using Glomar to obstruct attempts to obtain records that would publicly shine a light on the agency’s failures and abuse, even when that abuse is well documented by the CIA itself and other sources.

Take, for instance, the CIA’s torture program. After the 9/11 attacks, the agency abducted dozens of Muslim men and boys, held them incommunicado, brutally tortured them, and denied the due process in sites around the globe. Once the program was exposed, 14 of the government’s “high-value detainees” were taken to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, and detained at a notorious facility known as “Camp VII.” Attorney James G. Connell III, who represents Ammar al Baluchi, one of the men subjected to the CIA torture program and sent to Camp VII, filed a FOIA request with the CIA seeking information about the agency’s “operational control” over the facility. That “operational control” is hardly a secret: it was highlighted in the Senate Torture Report and in CIA and military commissions documents. But instead of processing Mr. Connell’s request, the agency issued what it called a “partial” Glomar response, producing three records, withholding a fourth in its entirety, and refusing to confirm or deny whether any other responsive records exist.

Given the extensive public record about the CIA’s connection to Camp VII, its refusal to acknowledge that it has responsive records both violates the law and defies common sense. That’s why we’re representing Mr. Connell in his appeal in federal court. To uphold its response, the CIA must demonstrate that it is logical or plausible that it has no responsive records in light of the entire record. That’s simply not possible here. We know this because there is an overwhelming amount of public evidence about Camp VII — from the Senate Torture Report, to court documents from the Guantánamo proceedings, to other documents the CIA itself released — that has left no doubt of CIA involvement. And yet, the CIA continues to avoid its legal obligations under FOIA through gaslighting and Glomar.

Connell v. CIA offers a real chance to not only break the CIA’s bad habit of using Glomar to evade transparency and accountability, but also issue a warning to other government agencies that hope to follow in the CIA’s footsteps by leaning into excessive secrecy.