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Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the sixth of August.
I'm emma, i'm lucy. Last week there was a surprising new chapter in a very long story. The man who has admitted to being the architect of the nine to eleven attacks and two of his alleged accomplices agreed to a plea deal in order to avoid the death penalty. The men would plead guilty to charges of murder. But then over the weekend, the White House intervened. In today's deep dive, we'll explain the lead up to the historic plea deal and how it was overturned. But first the headlines.
The ASX two hundred, which includes Australia's two hundred biggest publicly listed companies, dropped by nearly four percent on Monday. That's the worst single day drop since the early stages of COVID in May twenty twenty. It's the second consecutive day of uncertainty after markets closed two point one percent behind on Friday. It follows weaker than expected job stata out of the US, which prompted global fears of a looming recession, plunging global markets by over one hundred billion
dollars in a single day of trading. Japan's stock market is amongst the hardest hit, with the index that tracks the two hundred and twenty five biggest companies in Japan, the NIKEY two two five, plunging twelve point four percent in its worst ever day. Here in Australia, the RBA will announce their monthly decision on interest rates later today.
Fewer than six percent of species caught in New South Wales shark nets over the summer where target white and tiger sharks. In New South Wales, shark nets are used at over fifty beaches from September until the end of April. An annual report from the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries this week shows that of two hundred and fifty five animals caught in mashing, including ninety rays, twenty nine turtles, six dolphins and one whale, thirty six percent
were released alive. The nets caught fifteen animals from target species, including twelve white sharks and three tiger sharks. The remaining animals were from other species of sharks, including gray nurses which are endangered. Last week, the state government announced it will remove the nets a month early next year on thirty one March twenty twenty five, to increase protections for marine species.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organization that's AZO has raised the national terrorism threat level from possible to probable. Speaking alongside AZO chief Mike Burgess and Attorney General Mark Dreyfus yesterday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanezi said the decision followed advice from governments around the world who are quote concerned about youth and online radicalization and the rise of a new mixed ideoligeez. Albanzi reassured Australians that probable does not mean inevitable, nor
does it mean there's an imminent threat. It comes after the terror level was downgraded for the first time in eight years in November twenty twenty two.
And today's good news nearly twenty thousand guns have been surrendered to the WA government during the first five months of its voluntary gun buyback program. It comes ahead of new legislation in the state to limit the number of guns a person can lawfully own. Licensed gun owners can receive up to one thousand dollars if they hand in their weapon at any WA police station, under a scheme set to wrap up at the end of this month.
Other changes include regular mandatory health assessments for gun owners and compulsory training for all prospective gun license holders.
Lucy, there have been some pretty remarkable developments in recent days surrounding the man who said he's responsible for the nine to eleven attack. Now, this story has been going on so long that when we brought it up with the Daily OS team, we learned that some of them weren't even born when nine to eleven happened in two thousand and one. So given that humbling fact, maybe we need to start at the beginning here.
Well, I mean, whether or not you even consider nine to eleven the beginning of this story is kind of a matter for historians, but we have to start somewhere, so we'll start there. On eleven September two thousand and one, terrorists from the Islamist extremist group Al Qaeda hijacked four commercial US flights. Two were deliberately crashed into New York's World Trade Center aka the Twin Towers, killing around three
thousand people. One of the planes crashed into the US Department of Defense in Virginia aka the Pentagon, killing one hundred and eighty four people, and then passengers and crew successfully diverted the fourth plane from its planned target, the US capital of Washington, DC. It crashed in a field in pennsylv killing everyone on board.
That's flight ninety three that some people might have heard about or seen that movie, But it's really hard to imagine how the two thousands might have gone if this didn't happen. You know, nine to eleven is so deeply ingrained in the minds of every country in the world. I'm sure it's fair to say it's impacted national and global security. It changed the way we bored a plane. It changed the way that aviation worked around the world.
Exactly. That day is kind of like you can call it an inflection point where everything that came after was different to everything that came before. The US, especially where these attacks happened, developed a kind of with US or against US relationship to the rest of the world. I think it's fair to say. In the wake of the attacks, then new President George W. Bush signed new US military
powers into law. That legislation gave officials the protections to use quote all necessary and appropriate force against any person, organization, or country found to be irresponsible for these attacks.
And of course, as you mentioned, that inflection point of nine to eleven and these new legislative powers for US officials and military and law enforcement, that takes us to the next decades of war in the Middle East and Central Asia exactly.
So, the Bush administration declared the Global War on Terror, the US went to war with Afghanistan and then Iraq. Several other countries, including Australia, followed suit. Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency, so that's the US's intelligence agency for external threats, the FBI being internal cases. The CIA led a decade long man hunt for al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US forces in Pakistan in twenty eleven.
Dozens of others were arrested during this time over suspected ties to the terrorist group of whom is kind of the man of the hour, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who will call KSM. He's really the man at the center of the past week's developments.
So that is a very broad overview to kind of get us up to speed everything we need to know about these latest developments. What can you tell me about KSM, the man at the center of this.
He was a senior leader in al Qaeda. He was captured by the CIA in Pakistan in two thousand and three, and two of his alleged accomplices, Whalid bin Attash and Mustafa al Hasawi, were also arrested in two thousand and three. They were then transferred to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay three years later in two thousand and six, and they've been there ever since.
Guantanamo Bay, of course, is in Cuba. I think it's probably the kind of place that comes up in news coverage or when we're talking historically about nine to eleven, but not everyone might actually understand what it is, what its purpose is, What do we need to know about Guantanamo Bay.
Guantanamo Bay is a prison that was set up in the wake of nine to eleven. It's held around eight hundred detainees over its lifetime, and about thirty are still there, some of whom have never been charged with a crime. At the Guantanamo complex, there's also a court to try people charged with mostly crimes relating to nine to eleven, but that is something that will come back to later. Human rights groups including Amnesty International, have raised concerns over
the ongoing detention of several prisoners without fair trials. In two thousand and seven, while in detention at Guantanamo, KSM admitted to authorities that he was the architect of the nine to eleven attacks.
So two thousand and one, nine to eleven, KSM is captured, in two thousand and three, held in Guantanamo, and he admits to his involvement in the attacks to authorities in two thousand and seven, How do we get to twenty to a plea deal, a pre trial agreement, but no movement in the meantime? What happened in those middle years?
There's a crucial element we haven't touched on yet, and that is how the CIA got information out of KSM and other people it arrested. In the years after nine to eleven. The CIA created a program which it called enhanced Interrogation Techniques. This has later been described as torture.
So what do we know about the actual capture of KSM and the years between that capture and the kind of confession In two thousand and.
Seven, in the weeks after KSM was captured by the CIA, and I'm really just going to focus on KSM, but you can safely extend what I'm talking about to many of the other people who were captured by the CAA during this time. So, in short, he was tortured for a period of a few weeks that we're aware of
that we have documentation to support. During this time, he was awake for seven and a half days at a stretch, and was waterboarded one hundred and eighty three times over the course of two weeks in what internal CIA documents described as quote, a series of near drownings. For those who don't know, waterboarding is a form of torture that simulates drowning, where a person has water poured on their face, into their nose and mouth while they're unable to move.
Intelligence agencies like the CIA, you know, global spy agencies from anywhere in the world are not traditionally forthcoming or transparent about their activities, particularly as it relates to terrorism terror suspects, that being such a sensitive area of security concern. So how do we know all of this about the CIA?
The reason we know all of this is because of a report released in twenty fourteen by the US Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees the CIA. In fact, what we know is from the report's executs summary, the only section that's been made public, and parts of it are redacted, literally have black lines drawn through them. It's about seven
hundred pages long. I've gone through all of this because the Senate report, which gives us the information about KSM being tortured, also found that under these circumstances, the information he gave the CIA was in many cases one hundred percent false. At one point he admitted he quote simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear.
The report puts it pretty simply, quote the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information.
Okay, So with what we gleamed from that report, the idea that KSM's confession to being this so called mastermind of nine to eleven is then called into question because of the circumstances under which he gave that information. Up now it's for a trial to determine his guilt. So has that report influenced these proceedings.
It's been one factor for sure. International criminal cases are already really lengthy proceedings, and even assuming the CIA arrests KSM in two thousand and three, takes him straight to Guantanamo and tries him. It still might have taken several years to reach a trial, let alone a judgment on the three thousand murders that he and his alleged accomplices
are charged with. But torture has been a serious complicating factor, and the US government has been trying to proceed to a trial but has had difficulty working out how evidence given after he endured torture should be interpreted in court.
A trial date was actually set and then delayed due to COVID, and in March twenty twenty two, discussions began to possibly avoid a trial by having KSM, Wilid bin Attash, and Mustafa al Hasawi plead guilty and be sentenced to life in prison rather than the death penalty.
So last week we had a development on those discussions.
What happened, So those discussions came to fruition when it was announced that this plea deal had been agreed to and in a letter to families of nine to eleven victims, the Pentagon confirmed the prisoners would plead guilty and be sentenced to life in jail.
So when this broke last week. It was a really significant headline, the idea that these suspects who have been in detention for twenty plus years, had reached a deal, reached an agreement with US officials, but then the White House intervened. It seems like the government wasn't as involved in this plea deal as maybe we thought. So who was behind the workings of that agreement and why was it scrapped?
In terms of the workings of the agreement, there are the US government prosecutors representing the people of the United States, and then there are the defense attorneys for or the men involved. Then, in terms of Guantanamo Bay itself and the court there that I mentioned earlier, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, had delegated oversight of the proceedings to a military lawyer called Susan Escalia. That doesn't mean she was the judge. There's actually been several judges because
this has dragged on so long. But she was kind of the managing director of all the cases ongoing at Guantanamo, and she had the power to sign off on plea deals and decide whether the death sentence could be applied. The New York Times has previously reported that President Joe Biden and his administration, of which Lloyd Austin is a part, have been hesitant to approve a plea deal because there
are so many different opinions on how this should proceed. Now, Austin has intervened in Escalier's decision, saying the responsibility to accept a plea deal is so big in this case that he, as a Secretary of Defense, should be the only one to sign off on it, kind of walking back that responsibility that he'd given her. White House representatives have also said they didn't know this was going to be announced ahead of time.
So you have this military lawyer who is assigned essentially this job at Guantanamo Bay to manage proceedings of the detainees still held there, the thirty detainees there, those powers she's been given by the US Secretary of Defense, and she makes a decision about KSM and his accomplices in terms of this plea deal, But that is then backflipped.
Do you think that that is because of the response to this deal when it was announced that there was just so much pushback, like do we feel an actual mistake has been made here in the process or rather that it is more about how the American people have responded. Given the sensitivities of this story, particularly in the hearts of Americans.
It's complicated, and I would say that the response hasn't been one sided. Certainly, several Republicans, including Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, said that this plea deal shouldn't have been allowed to go ahead, and one support group of nine to eleven families has said these men should
face the death penalty. However, they're not a monolith, and there is at least one other nine to eleven support group who have been in favor of the plea deal going through, basically saying this is making the best out of a really bad scenario and kind of bringing it to a close after all this time.
Yeah, I'm sure after twenty something years that for many of those families the idea of reaching a kind of peaceful end to all of this uncertainty could be desirable. But what does this mean for the case now the plea deal's been scrapped, So what happens.
It's honestly still kind of unclear. The New York Times has reported that those pre trial proceedings that have been going on since at least twenty twelve will continue. Lloyd Austin's order also means it's likely the death penalty is now still available, but it's still not clear when an actual trial for these attacks from two thousand and one
will actually happen. We've gone now from a strong likelihood that this was going to come to some kind of conclusion this year, back to the open ended timeline that existed until last week.
Wow, Lucy, an incredibly complex timeline. Thank you so much for taking us through it. As always, we will keep you updated on this one as we find out more. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked it and if you learn something from it, please feel free to share it with a friend. Don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you are listening to the podcast or if you're watching us over on our YouTube. We'll be back again tomorrow, but until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Madden and I'm a proud Adunda bungelung Caalcuttin woman from Gadigo Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gatgirl Piece and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.