WASHINGTON, 16 March 2007 — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, confessed at a military hearing held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Saturday, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon.
Claiming responsibility for more than 3,200 deaths, Khalid told the secret hearing he was behind a total of 31 terror plots.
Khalid, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003, made his astonishing claims of multiple terror plots at a hearing in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon released the 26-page transcript of the closed-door proceedings on Wednesday night.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” Khalid said in a rambling statement in halting English. He also confessed to preparing a “second wave” of attacks after 9/11 with bombings of skyscrapers in New York, Chicago, California and Washington.
Khalid, 41, described himself as Osama Bin Laden’s operations director for the Sept. 11 attacks and Al-Qaeda’s military operational commander for “all foreign operations around the world.”
He claimed to have been “responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Richard Reid’s attempt to ignite a shoe bomb on an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean in December 2001, and the October 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia.
Khalid also said he plotted to assassinate several former presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and Pope John Paul II. Some plots he claimed to plan, including the attempt on Carter, were previously unknown.
And he claimed he beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl. “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl,” Khalid said through a personal representative, according to the transcript of the closed hearing. “For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”
Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002. Khalid has long been considered a prime suspect in the case.
The Pentagon released a first version of the transcript on Wednesday evening but withheld sections on Pearl’s killing as it first wanted to make the reporter’s family aware of the statement, Department of Defense spokesman Bryan Whitman said. The part on Pearl was made available yesterday.
In another part of the transcript, Khalid speaks about the killing and says it was not an Al-Qaeda operation. “It’s like beheading Daniel Pearl. It’s not related to Al-Qaeda,” the transcript quotes him as saying.
Khalid, known as KSM among government officials, was last seen haggard after his capture in March 2003, when he was photographed in a dingy white T-shirt. He disappeared for more than three years into a secret detention system run by the CIA.
In his first public statements since his capture, his radical ideology and self-confidence came through. He expressed regret for taking the lives of children and said Islam doesn’t give a “green light” to killing. Yet he found room for exceptions. “The language of the war is victims,” he said.
Khalid likened Al-Qaeda’s struggle to that of colonial America’s struggles in the American Revolutionary War, and he drew parallels between Bin Laden and George Washington.
It is not clear how many of Khalid’s expansive claims are true. Analysts say that despite his statements, it is unclear how much involvement he could have had in the 31 separate attacks he listed.
