Flashback: 9/11 ‘Mastermind’ Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Given U.S. Visa Weeks Before Terrorist Attacks

The mastermind and architect behind the September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorist attacks on the United States, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was able to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. weeks before the attacks.

Mohammed, known by federal officials as “KSM,” obtained a visa to enter the U.S. just six weeks before the massive Islamic terrorist attacks that he planned were carried out by 19 terrorists — all of whom were able to obtain U.S. visas as well.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States revealed in their 2004 report, two years after the 9/11 attacks murdered thousands of Americans and left hundreds of first responders dead, that KSM was able to obtain a U.S. visa under an alias in July 2001 despite having been indicted in January 1996 for his connections to a terrorist plot in the Phillippines.

In 1998, KSM was linked to the bombings on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and in 2000 was linked to the bombing on the USS Cole. KSM has been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility 2006 after being captured in March 2003 in Pakistan.

As Breitbart News reported, seven of the 19 terrorists who carried out KSM’s 9/11 attacks on the U.S. had at some point overstayed their visas but were never deported or detected by federal authorities.

Since the 9/11 attacks, more than 195,000 foreign nationals from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt — the countries  the 19 hijackers came from — have been imported to the U.S.