Al Qaida returns to Manhattan

Washington When two planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad was sitting in an Internet cafe in Karachi, Pakistan, monitoring the attacks.

At first, Mohammad 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, Mohammad returned to a hideaway flat in the city. There, according to newly disclosed details from US officials, he and a number of associates, including Ramzi Binalshibh, Al Qaida's liaison with the September 11 hijackers, gathered to watch coverage on international news channels.

Through the night, the men embraced repeatedly in celebration, marvelling at their spectacular success.

More than eight years later, Mohammad, a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will soon be transferred to federal court in Manhattan, returning to a city that officials now say he visited as a tourist when he was 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 administration's 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 Mohammad in a bid to force him to divulge the intelligence that could now be invoked at his trial.

While at Guantanamo Bay, where he has been held since September 2006, Mohammad has said that he wants to be executed so he can die a martyr. It is unclear whether he will maintain that position in US District Court.

But his trial will probably chart the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, from the conspiracy's beginnings in the mountains of Afghanistan, where Mohammad proposed the plot in a meeting with Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden, to the dark recesses of the CIA's secret prisons, where he spent more than three years.

By all accounts, the spotlight during what would be the biggest terrorism trial in US history would provide Mohammad, a man of no small ego, with the kind of attention he craves.

A showman, he has revelled in a number of appearances at Guantanamo Bay, tossing self-aggrandising 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 ‘Cully' Stimson, who was deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs in the Bush administration. "The court will have to rein in his speechifying and keep the focus on his criminal behaviour."

The 9/11 Commission Report, discussing Mohammad's 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.

Vanity

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.

Mohammad, 44, was born in Kuwait, the third son of Pakistani immigrants, where his father became the imam of a mosque serving Pakistanis.

Mohammad 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 Yousuf — later convicted in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center — had torn down the Kuwaiti flag at their elementary school.

By 16, Mohammad had joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, and become "enamoured of violent jihad at youth camps in the desert", according to a detailed profile in the 9/11 Commission Report.

But like other leading September 11 conspirators such as Mohammad Atta, he looked to the West to further his education. After high school, he enrolled at Chowan College in North Carolina before transferring 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 Mohammad did not attract attention in the United States for any extremist beliefs. But a CIA document released this year said that Mohammad's "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".

Mohammad lost his driver's licence in North Carolina after he got into an accident while driving without insurance, according to a US official.

After college, Mohammad travelled to Pakistan, where one of his brothers worked for a Kuwaiti charity, and immersed himself in the world of the anti-Soviet mujahideen.

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 1998, however, after Al Qaida successfully bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Bin Laden finally approved what the group came to refer to as the "planes operation".

The 9/11 Commission Report notes: "This vision gives a better glimpse of his true ambitions. This is theatre, 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 Shaikh Mohammad wants," said Tom Malinowski, head of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch.

Mohammad 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."

If the suspects are found guilty, do you think the death penalty is appropriate?