The self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 attacks wrote to former president Barack Obama to tell him 9/11 was a direct result of American foreign policy and the deaths of innocent people it has caused.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s 18-page letter was addressed to “the head of the snake, Barack Obama,” leader of “the country of oppression and tyranny.”
Defense attorney David Nevin provided a copy of the letter, which has not yet been posted on the US military’s website for Guantanamo proceedings. He told AFP that Mohammed began writing it in 2014.
The letter is dated January 8, 2015, but reached the White House only two years later in the last days of Obama’s presidency, according to news reports, after a military judge ordered the Guantanamo prison camp where Mohammed is held to deliver it.
“It was not we who started the war against you in 9/11; it was you and your dictators in our land,” he wrote.
Listing many grievances over America’s “brutal and savage massacres” from Vietnam to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mohammed focused his rage on the plight of Palestinians and US support for Israel and the “occupier Jews.”
“Your hands are still wet with the blood of our brothers and sisters and children who were killed in Gaza,” he wrote in the opening paragraph. (AFP)