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As a congressman, Walz cited Guantanamo Bay facility as 'serious obstacle to peace in the Middle East' ... Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was named Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick on Tuesday, pushed to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and move its terrorist captives into holding facilities in the United States. His position put him to the left of other prominent Minnesota Democrats like Amy Klobuchar, but Gitmo, Walz said, is a "serious obstacle to peace in the Middle East." As a House member representing Minnesota's First Congressional District, Walz voted against a 2009 measure that would have barred...

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was “surprised” by the announcement of a plea deal between a U.S. military commission and three accused plotters of the 9/11 attacks, a Pentagon spokesperson said Monday, adding that Austin wants to see the case go to trial Austin, who revoked the plea deal Friday, “was certainly surprised as we all were,” said deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh. “This is not something that the secretary was consulted on,” Singh told reporters at a Monday briefing. “We were not aware that the prosecution or defense would enter the terms of the plea agreement.” The Office of...

You might not know it—and Democrats would prefer you didn’t—but Joe Biden is still president, with 5½ months to go. Republicans would be foolish to overlook his agenda and substantial power to gild Kamala Harris’s path to the White House. Not that Mr. Biden will be giving many speeches on her behalf. His gifts will be transactional, the buying of constituencies. The latest example: Mr. Biden’s embrace this week of the most destructive assault on the Supreme Court since FDR’s court-packing scheme. Ms. Harris quickly signed on to Mr. Biden’s call for term limits and an “enforceable” ethics code, winning...

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the plea agreements for the 9/11 terrorist attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others and relieved the official in charge of military courts in Guantanamo Bay. The move puts the possibility of the death penalty back on the table for the trio. It was announced in a memorandum on Friday. On Wednesday, the Department of Defense reached a plea deal with Mohammed, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, three men accused of planning the attacks. The details of the deal weren't made public. This is a developing story. Check back for...

US Secretary of Defense revokes plea deal with 9/11 suspects.

The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and two other terrorists being held on Guantánamo Bay will be spared the death penalty under a deal with prosecutors, it was revealed Wednesday. The announcement came as a bitter pill to swallow for victims’ families who have anxiously awaited the conclusion of the case for nearly 24 years — many of whom felt death was the only appropriate punishment for the perpetrators of the heinous attacks. A spokesperson for the Office of Military Commissions (OMC), which is prosecuting the case, confirmed it had entered into pre-trial agreements with Khalid Sheikh...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The man accused of being the main plotter in al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has agreed to plead guilty, the Defense Department said Wednesday. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices in the attack are expected to enter the pleas at the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as soon as next week. The U.S. agreement with the men to enter into a plea agreement comes more than 16 years after their prosecution began for al-Qaeda’s attack, and more than 20 years after militants flew commandeered commercial airliners into buildings, killing nearly 3,000 people. Families of many of...

'A selection of documents and answers remain unclear.' Gov. Ron DeSantis visited New York City for the annual commemoration of the 9/11 terror attacks 22 years ago. And the Florida Governor and 2024 presidential candidate is calling on the current President to make public information that is currently classified about how those attacks came to happen. “And now, decades later, we as a nation still owe full transparency and accountability to these grieving families. Yet too many politicians have broken past promises to them, and that is wholly unacceptable,” DeSantis said. DeSantis called on President Joe Biden “to publicly commit...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The Pentagon has dropped charges against a Saudi at Guantanamo who was alleged to have been the so-called "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks, his U.S. military defense lawyer said Monday. Mohammed al-Qahtani was one of six men charged by the military in February with murder and war crimes for their alleged roles in the 2001 attacks. Authorities say al-Qahtani missed out on taking part in the attacks because he was denied entry to the U.S. by an immigration agent. But in reviewing the case, the convening authority for military commissions, Susan Crawford,...

While Americans were focused on a Chinese spy balloon making its way across the country, the Biden administration quietly released an al Qaeda terrorist radicalized by the September 11 attacks from Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon announced on Thursday that Majid Khan, 42, was moved to Belize after spending 16 years in CIA custody. Authorities have maintained he was a close personal ally of al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who helped deliver money and transport other senior terrorists. And under Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's plans, Khan would have attacked US gas stations and water reservoirs.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. military officials said Thursday they released and sent to Belize a onetime al-Qaida courier who had completed his sentence. The transfer of Majid Khan ended an imprisonment that included torture at clandestine CIA sites and 16 years at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Khan, a Pakistani citizen who grew up outside Baltimore, wound up in the Central American nation under a Biden administration agreement with that government. Khan’s lawyers said he should have been freed last February under a pretrial agreement. Khan, who is in his early 40s, said in a statement through his legal team...

U.S. military prosecutors are reportedly negotiating potential plea deals with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other conspirators imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. The plea deals may allow the five dependents to escape a potential death penalty, according to CBS. Mohammed is widely credited with being the architect of the 9/11 terror attacks. The other four defendants are Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Walid bin Attash and Ammar al-Baluchi. Attorneys for the defendants reportedly say they would be willing to enter a guilty plea in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, as well as for getting treatment...

Military prosecutors have begun plea negotiations at Guantanamo Bay with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a deal under which the defendants would admit guilt and prosecutors forgo pursuit of a death sentence, defense attorneys said. If successful, the negotiations could end a legal saga that has lasted nearly two decades, beginning with the capture in Pakistan of Mr. Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks. Mr. Mohammed and other detainees were allegedly tortured in overseas “black site” interrogation centers and were finally interned in the high-security prison at Guantanamo Bay,...

WASHINGTON, Aug 3: Five years after her mysterious disappearance in Karachi, the FBI has finally conceded that an MIT-trained Pakistani neuroscientist is alive and is in US custody in Afghanistan. Aafia Siddiqui, 36, disappeared with her three children while visiting her parents’ home in Karachi in March 2003, around the same time the FBI announced that it wanted to question her over her alleged links to Al Qaeda. Her family’s lawyer Elaine Whitfield Sharp said she believed recent media reports about Mrs Siddiqui’s incarceration increased pressure on the US and Pakistani authorities to divulge more information. “I don’t believe that...

The suspect in an apparent hostage situation at a Texas synagogue is identified as Muhammad Siddiqui by ABC News, which reports that he’s holding the rabbi of the congregation and three others hostage. Siddiqui claimed during the livestream to be the brother of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani national who was convicted in 2010 by a New York City Federal Court of attempting to kill US military personnel. She is currently serving an 86-year sentence at Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. ABC, citing a source at the scene, says Siddiqui is demanding his sister’s release.

The wreckage of TWA Flight 800 is set to be destroyed — nearly 25 years after the doomed aircraft crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. For the last two decades, the reconstructed Boeing 747 has been housed in a Virginia hangar and used by the National Transportation Safety Board as a training tool for accident investigators. But the federal agency on Monday announced it planned to decommission and destroy the wreckage, as its lease on the 30,000-square-foot Ashburn warehouse is set to expire.

The Chinese coronavirus pandemic has once again delayed the long-awaited death penalty trial of the self-professed 9/11 mastermind and his four co-conspirators held at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the judge handling the cases revealed recently. Justice remains elusive nearly two decades after the jihadis executed the attack that left about 3,000 people dead and over 6,000 injured, marking the deadliest assault on U.S. soil. U.S. officials charged the late Osama bin Laden’s close ally Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) alongside his nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, accused hijacking trainer Walid bin Attash, facilitator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and al-Qaeda money...

WASHINGTON - A U.S. customs inspector praised for keeping the 20th hijacker in the 9/11 plot from getting into the country told Congress yesterday that the "hostile" Saudi gave him the creeps and vowed, "I'll be back." Jose Melendez-Perez told the 9/11 Commission, the panel probing the attacks on America, that he was spooked enough by the man identified only as "Al-Qahtani" to put him on a plane out of Orlando after he arrived in the U.S. from London and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with a one-way ticket and $2,800 in cash. Al-Qahtani was dressed head-to-toe in black when he...

A military judge on Friday set Jan. 11, 2021, as the start of the joint death-penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four men charged with plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,976 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The date .... is the first time that a trial judge in the case actually set a start-of-trial date, despite requests by prosecutors since 2012... If the 2021 timeline holds, jury selection would start eight months before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. One major issue the judge has yet to resolve is...

A 2021 date has been established for the death-penalty trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men charged as the masterminds behind the September 11 attack in New York City. Colonel W. Shane Cohen of the Air Force announced on Friday that the trial is set for January 11, 2021. The case will take place at Camp Justice at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Cohen set the date so that a military jury could be selected, the New York Times reports.