The alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks wrote a letter to President Barack Obama in 2015 saying the U.S. brought the terror attack upon itself as “the country of oppression and tyranny.”
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 51, is on trial at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and the letter he wrote had been suppressed as propaganda for two years before a military judge ordered it be delivered to Obama right before he finished his second term. The Miami Herald obtained and published the 18-page letter on Wednesday, along with a 50-page manuscript he wrote about death.
“It was not we who started the war against you in 9/11. It was you and your dictators in our land,” he wrote.
Mohammed mentioned Palestinians often in his letter, and accuses Obama of allowing violence on the part of Israel. “Your hands are still wet with the blood of our brothers and sisters and children who were killed in Gaza,” the letter states.
Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and has been held in Guantanamo since 2006. Among other interrogation techniques, he was waterboarded 183 times, and confessed to planning the attacks in 2007.
Obama’s office has not responded to the Herald about whether he has read the letter.
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Write to Julia Zorthian at julia.zorthian@time.com