Because the government had charged him with a capital offense - "accomplice to murder" - he was entitled to a hearing before a jury that would sentence him.
At Khan's sentencing hearing, he recounted to his military jury the horrific tortures visited upon him by the CIA at one of its foreign black sites. The government presented no evidence to contradict Khan's testimony. This may have been the first time in American history where a criminal defendant claimed the government tortured him and the government did not challenge those claims.
At the end of the trial, the jury sentenced Khan to 26 years in jail, but seven of the eight jurors wrote to the judge asking that Khan be sentenced to time served. The stated reason for this unprecedented request for mercy from a military jury was Khan's torture. He was sentenced to time served and released.
Now, back to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He was tortured for four years during which the CIA and the military used the same techniques on him as they did on Khan. The government fears that Mohammed, who is now fluent in English, will be able to relate to his jury, and to the public and press at his trial, the horrors visited upon him by the government.
The government also fears Mohammed's articulation of a necessity defense, which would enable him and his expert witnesses to show all the wrongs the U.S. government committed upon innocents in the Middle East, going back to the CIA's overthrow of a popularly elected secular leader in Iran, during the Eisenhower administration.
Look at what George W. Bush has wrought! President Joe Biden has a 'Hobson's choice' - accept a plea with life imprisonment or permit a trial at which American foreign policy will be trashed.
Bush's unfathomable ignorance of the basic principles of law, his schoolyard determination to appear tough, and his willingness to torture and slaughter in order to divert the eyes of history from his own failure to see 9/11 coming, have brought about monumental injustices at his $10 billion Devil's Island.
Gitmo should be razed, Bush should be tried for war crimes, and the rule of law should be returned to all prosecutions.
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