Khalid Sheikh Mohammed/Archive1

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed/Archive1

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Arabic: خالد شيخ محمد‎; also transliterated as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and additionally known by at least fifty aliases) is currently in U.S. military custody in Guantánamo Bay for acts of terrorism, including mass murder of civilians, as he has been identified as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" by the 9/11 Commission Report. He was captured in Pakistan on March 2, 2003.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a member of Osama bin Laden's terrorist al-Qaeda organization; he led al-Qaeda's propaganda operations from around 1999 until late 2001. He is alleged to have confessed to a role in many of the most significant terrorist plots over the last twenty years, including the World Trade Center 1993 bombings, the Bojinka plot, an aborted 2002 attack on the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, the Bali nightclub bombings, the failed bombing of American Airlines Flight 63, the Millennium Plot, and the 2002 abduction and murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi, Pakistan.

In 2003 Mohammed was captured in hiding in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, by a combined force of members of the CIA and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of Pakistan, and transferred to U.S. CIA custody. In 2006 he was transferred to military custody and Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In March 2007, he confessed to a litany of events: masterminding the September 11 attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic Ocean, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various foiled attacks. He was charged in February 2008 with war crimes and murder by a U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay detention camp and faces the death penalty if convicted.

In Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the United States Supreme Court ruled that detainees had the right of access to US federal courts to challenge their detentions, and that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 were flawed. A revised Military Commissions Act was passed by Congress in 2009 to address court concerns.