Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who said he masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama published Wednesday that the United States brought the attacks upon itself.
“It was not we who started the war against you in 9/11; it was you and your dictators in our land,” Mohammed wrote in the letter published on Wednesday by the Miami Herald.
The letter is dated Jan. 8, 2015, but was not delivered to the White House until days before Obama left office, according to the report.
Mohammed’s death-penalty defense attorney, David Nevin, said that his client wrote the letter “in the context of violence in Gaza and the occupied territories,” as quoted by the Miami Herald.
Prison officials refused to deliver the letter to the White House, and prosecutors argued that it should be suppressed as propaganda, according to the report. An Army judge eventually ruled that Obama could receive it and that the letter could be released to the public a month later, after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Per its report, the Miami Herald obtained the document from Mohammed’s lawyers after the expiration of a judicially ordered 30-day review period given so that the prison at Guantanamo Bay could remove sensitive information from the letter.
Mohammed, the self-admitted architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was held in CIA “black site” prisons outside the United States before he was transferred to detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He was tortured with 183 waterboarding sessions while in U.S. custody.
