Senior Scholar Analyzes Al Qaeda's Death Wish
What can we learn from the guilty plea by five Guantánamo detainees to charges from the 9/11 attacks? Walter Reich discusses their request for martyrdom.
Wilson Center Senior Scholar Walter Reich published an opinion piece Monday on Middle East Strategy at Harvard, about the decision by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantánamo detainees to plead guilty to the charge that they coordinated the September 11 attacks. Reich stresses that Al Qaeda's main aim is to mobilize the Muslim world and recruit new followers by using whatever stage it can commandeer to make an ideological statement. He emphasizes that, as in the attacks of September 11, Al Qaeda's method is to turn the power of America against itself—-the power of its technology, its symbols, and its vaunted institutions.
"In the case of the World Trade Center, American power consisted of prominent buildings that symbolized the financial might of a corrupt America," Reich writes. "In the case of Guantánamo, American power consists of detention facilities that symbolize the legal system of a corrupt America, which would be destroyed by forcing that system to turn its inmates into martyrs."
