Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11th attacks, a man who called himself a “jackal” and who explained away the 3,000 victims of that day by saying “the language of war is victims.” At least that is what he has told American interrogators, and what he said at a closed hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after being held in secret prisons for close to four years.
On Dec. 8, 2008, Mr. Mohammed, along with four co-defendants, sent a note to a military judge at Guantánamo asking to confess and to plead guilty. Mr. Mohammed, an ethnic Baluchi, was born in Kuwait on April 24, 1965. He is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. After graduation from secondary school, he enrolled at Chowan College in Murfreesboro, N.C. and then transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He graduated in 1986, earning a degree in mechanical engineering.
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, his only involvement with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was conversations with Mr. Yousef, and some contributions to the conspirators. He traveled to the Philippines with Mr. Yousef in 1994 and worked on the Bojinka plot — a plan to explode 12 commercial jets over the Pacific. They also made plans to assassinate President Clinton on his November 1994 trip to Manila. The Bojinka plot fell apart and in 1995 Mr. Yousef was arrested in Pakistan.
Mr. Mohammed was indicted in the United States on charges stemming from the Manila plot, but he eluded the F.B.I. in Qatar in 1996. He fled to Afghanistan and met with Osama Bin Laden, where he proposed a plan to train pilots to crash 10 planes into targets in the United States. Mr. bin Laden was not persuaded but he asked Mr. Mohammed to join Al Qaeda, an offer he declined. After the 1998 African embassy bombings by Al Qaeda, however, he accepted Osama’s invitation to move to Afghanistan and pursue the 9/11 plan.
In addition to directing the 9/11 plot, Mr. Mohammed was involved in several other plans, according to the 9/11 report, including sending Dhiren Barot to the U.S. to check out targets in New York City, as well as plans for attacks in Israel, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia.
In October 2001, Mr. Mohammed became one of the 22 men on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists As an operations chief for Al Qaeda, he launched plots including a suicide hijacking over the Pacific and plans to blow up gas stations and bridges (according to Defense Department documents).
He was captured on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. For the next several years, Mr. Mohammed was held in secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency. In September 2006, Mr. Mohammed and 13 other “high value’’ Al Qaeda prisoners were transferred to the detention center in Guantánamo.
At a hearing held there released in March 2007, Mr. Mohammed took full credit for the 9/11 attacks and a number of other plots. He also asserted that he had personally decapitated Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The scope of his confessions led some human-rights advocates to wonder if they reflected the effect of his captivity and harsh interrogation. Other intelligence experts wondered if he were claiming so much to provide cover for former colleagues who might have been involved.
The Times reported on April 20, 2009, that a 2005 Justice Department internal memo said that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Mr. Mohammed. The Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.
The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Justice Department under the Bush administration declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture.
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