Attorney General Eric Holder made an “unannounced” visit with Assistant U.S. Attorneys in Manhattan yesterday about the planned prosecution there of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four additional 9/11 conspirators. Also yesterday, NBC New York spot polling indicated that 82% became furious when word leaked “a federal grand jury in New York is [secretly] now hearing evidence and testimony” as prosecutors seek a federal indictment of the five. Perhaps coincidentally, one 9/11 family member’s commentary appeared and offered, “In four years, America can hold Obama accountable.”
In total, federal prosecutions during the 1990s convicted two dozen for the first bombing of the World Trade Center, Landmark plot, and the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. Yet no U.S. official was held accountable for not preventing those attacks or the bombing of the Kobar Towers and the U.S.S. Cole. Instead, valuable intelligence reached Osama bin Laden about al Qaeda’s membership and organization and those trials inspired thousands off to the jihad in Afghanistan. Former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White has said it will take at least three years just to prepare a federal trial for the five 9/11 conspirators because prosecutors must review 538,000 pieces of evidence and more than a million documents.
This is far more than just about the fate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.