Last week, the Defense Department announced that they had reached a plea deal with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the deals had been revoked. This came after tremendous public backlash from the families of victims, politicians, and first responders. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Last week, the Defense Department announced that they had reached a plea deal with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the deal is revoked. This came after tremendous backlash from the families of the victims, politicians and first responders. I’ve got Farron Cousins to talk about it. This has had to end like this. Thank God somebody said, are you freaking kidding me? You know this plea deal, it’s another story, we talk about all the time about how the Department of Justice, and here it’s Department of Defense and the Department of Justice working together, always take the least, the path of least resistance. That’s what happened here. Thank goodness Austin was there to say, hell no. No, this isn’t going to happen. We’re in an election year. He was appointed by Biden, we’re in an election year. How’s it gonna look for the White House to say, yeah, you killed 3000 people, but we’re gonna give you a break.
Farron Cousins: You’ve learned your lesson.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It’s been going on for 20 years to begin with, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Okay. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Guantanamo Bay, and again, 20 plus years, this guy has been held there. We know who he is. We know what he’s done. This prosecution should have happened before George W. Bush even left office.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, of course.
Farron Cousins: But it didn’t. It didn’t happen under Obama. It didn’t happen under Trump. And now finally it could happen under Biden, and they say, oh, no, let’s just do a plea deal. We’re tired. We don’t want to do this. It’s too difficult. Oh, there could be issues with the torture part of it and then we can’t admit this evidence. You don’t even need any of that. We know what happened here.
Mike Papantonio: Can I tell you, these heads would already be rolling had it been reversed, had they been in Saudi Arabia where they came from, it would’ve already been over. 20 years these people have had a chance to live, breathe, eat. 3000 family members, they don’t. You know? And so we now have, but to me, I just, I almost can’t get my arms around it sometimes when I watch the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense here too. You had, what was her name? She, the general, that said, hey, we’re gonna.
Farron Cousins: Susan K. Escallier.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Susan K. Escallier has been overseeing this whole thing. Right. She’s been doing it for years, apparently. And she finally says, eh, it’s a lot of work. We don’t really want to do this. And she tries to blame it on the idea, well, if we do this, this is gonna cause the potential, additional terrorism activity. We heard that 20 years ago, Susan. So, as I look at this story, there is zero, zero way to justify what they’re doing. It’s not the torture. There’s been plenty of cases they’ve overcome that already where people have received the death penalty. But thank God Austin said, hell no. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And he removed that general immediately too, said, you’re done overseeing any of this, but what a huge political miscalculation here. I mean, we are in the middle of a contentious election that’s already been thrown into turmoil four or five times in the last month alone. And then to come out with this in the middle of the week and say, hey, look at this great thing we did. This man’s gonna live until a ripe old age.
Mike Papantonio: They’re already doing it.
Farron Cousins: That is dumb.
Mike Papantonio: They’re already doing it. They’re hanging this around Biden and Harris. This is just another Democratic leadership idea.
Farron Cousins: Soft on crime.
Mike Papantonio: Soft on crime. We don’t have to kill these people who killed 3000 people. Hell, they’d already be dead and probably not even buried if they were in the Saudi Arabia. Thank goodness for what Austin did here. It just took courage and some common sense.
Suspicious Activity: That it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least 800. Plaintiffs allege that the defendants provided money and medical goods to terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Jaysh al-Adl. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business. They knew about what was going on for a decade. They absolutely, absolutely no question about it knew that HSBC was washing money. They had every reason to understand it was for terrorism and it was for drug cartels. Took no action whatsoever.
These banks are involved, their accounts are connected, and they’re using them to mask the transactions. The more complicated they can make the transactions, the more distance they could put between the bad guys and a seemingly legitimate purpose of these funds. They pay $1.9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve made. And nobody goes to prison. These CEOs, these bankers that made this decision, they’re safe at home. They know what they’ve done. They know it’s resulted in the death of Americans, contractors and soldiers, not just hundreds but thousands. And we look the other way because they don’t look like criminals. The die cast, the people that are responsible for it, are on Wall Street. And they don’t look like criminals. It’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, is this, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do.
