The evil genius behind the 2001 murder of 3,000 people, mostly Americans, in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania grinned with vulpine amusement as he arrived in court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this week.
It’s been nearly 20 years since Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s massacre of innocents sparked a “war on terrorism,” but, with savage irony, it is less than a month since America’s defeat in that conflict was made plain by President Joe Biden’s incompetence and helter-skelter retreat. The Taliban, who harbored Osama bin Laden and the rest of KSM’s al Qaeda pals, has reconquered Afghanistan and humiliated the United States, supposedly the world’s preeminent power.
KSM chatted with fellow terrorists in court and even waved to the Washington Examiner’s reporter in the press gallery. He was much older but slimmer and fitter than the angry, disheveled thug pictured in his well-known mugshot. He sported a long dyed-red beard, which is presumably all the rage among Islamist killers.
He certainly didn’t look like a man who feared that justice was finally about to catch up with him. He did not tremble at the possibility that he’d run out of legal niceties for America to agonize over. Procedure and the rule of law matter — that’s one of many important differences between us and our enemy — but justice delayed is justice denied, and it has been denied to the families of those that KSM slew and denied to this nation, which he permanently damaged with his attack.
It is unconscionable that such a monster should be able to yuk it up with his barbaric brethren just a week before our hapless commander in chief makes his tin-eared speech celebrating the end of the war that after two decades, we’ve just lost.
While KSM sits safely in the Caribbean, hundreds or thousands of Americans and green card holders are stranded in Kabul, left to the tender mercies of KSM’s Taliban benefactors, whose style of government is to hang people from captured American helicopters to terrorize citizens into submission on the ground below.
And who is in this grim government? The interior minister, in charge of domestic security, is Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the Haqqani Network, a terrorist on the FBI’s most-wanted list. The federal government is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to his arrest. (Hey, Joe, you can find him in Kabul. Can I have the money now?) Who else is in charge in Afghanistan? Apparently, 4 out of the 5 terrorists released by President Barack Obama in exchange for the deserter Bowe Bergdahl in 2014 are also seated as members of the Kabul high command.
The State Department is negotiating to get our people out of the horror in which we left them. But the wheels of bureaucracy grind exceeding slow, like the wheels of justice, and we learn that flights filled with terrified evacuees were stopped from taking off from Kabul airport because U.S. officialdom would not give them permission to land either in America or at U.S. military bases elsewhere.
The justification offered by White House press secretary Jen Psaki and others is that “we don’t have an assessment of the manifest,” which is an opaque way of admitting they don’t know who is on the flights. Lacking any control of boarding, etc., America has no way to be sure, for example, that a handful of terrorists is not secreted among genuine evacuees and intent on a suicide mission at Ramstein Air Base or some other hub of our national security.
While the State Department’s position is, in a narrow sense, understandable — and it’s working to resolve impediments, says Secretary of State Antony Blinken — the big picture is of the shameful absurdity of America having to rely on the goodwill of an enemy it’s been at war with for 20 years and whose complete dishonesty is made apparent by lies every day.
We in America, and even more those benighted people praying to get out of the Taliban hellhole, are in this dire predicament because Biden abandoned his responsibilities as both our commander in chief and as leader of the free world. He did so in the cynical calculation that he could boast next week, on Sept. 11, that he’s ended the war and that voters would forgive and forget the debacle he created, the stain he put on American honor, and the irreparable damage he has inflicted on our leadership and respect worldwide.
No wonder KSM was all smiles this week as Islamists everywhere luxuriated in the knowledge that America is beaten and now led by a government willing to snatch cheap ersatz political victories at the cost of seismic strategic defeats.
