“An enormous amount of debris began to fall out of the South Tower,” recalls Gary Smiley, who was then a 38-year-old paramedic with FDNY Battalion 31. “People running out of buildings toward us were getting hit with stuff and killed. I remember one guy who ran up to me and he was holding onto a leg. I thought, My God, he’s holding his own leg. He was screaming ‘Help me! Help me!’ He was holding somebody else’s leg. I’ll never forget that guy. He was just standing there with this entire leg in his arms.”

Smiley continued: “And you know, when I got burned on my back, it was a human arm that hit me, and it was on fire. … It was unbelievable, an absolute nightmare at that point — bodies everywhere, people falling out of the building.”

This was but one gruesome account of thousands, but it serves as a reminder, just as the title of the book from which I pulled it: Never Forget.

Unfortunately, though, it seems like many of us have forgotten. As we noted yesterday, the man behind the 9/11 atrocity, and two of his jihadi accomplices, reached a plea deal with the federal government — a plea deal that will allow all three of them to permanently avoid the only real justice befitting the monstrousness of their crime: the death penalty.

According to a Department of Defense press release:

The Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Escallier, has entered into pretrial agreements with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case. The specific terms and conditions of the pretrial agreements are not available to the public at this time.

The three accused, along with Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, were initially charged jointly and arraigned on June 5, 2008, and then were again charged jointly and arraigned a second time on May 5, 2012, in connection with their alleged roles in the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States.

But, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board observes, “Our guess is that most Americans, upon learning of this plea deal with KSM and his associates, aren’t asking about its terms. They’re wondering why more than two decades after the deadliest terror attack on America, he’s still alive.”

Shaikh Mohammad, or KSM as he’s come to be known, was captured by U.S. forces in Pakistan in March of 2003 and has been held at Guantanamo Bay ever since. And it seemed at the time of his capture that this could only end in one way. But, as CBS News reports, “Their cases have faced years of legal delays over whether the evidence extracted during their interrogations was admissible in court.” According to The New York Times, he and his two fellow cutthroats “have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. … Prosecutors said the deal was meant to bring some 'finality and justice’ to the case.”

We wonder, though: How do the families of the nearly 3,000 Americans who died there in Manhattan and at the Pentagon and in that field in Shanksville feel about this “finality and justice”?

As our Mark Alexander notes, “These terrorists should have been executed 20 years ago.”

Indeed, the absurdity of not being able to administer the ultimate sanction to the mastermind of a plot that caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 American citizens and wrecked the lives of countless others points to a fundamental failure of our nation’s criminal justice system. If we can’t execute KSM, then who on earth can we execute?

Asked on Fox News this morning whether he believed, as Kamala Harris does, that “justice” has been served in the form of plea deals with the U.S. government, White House spokesmouth John Kirby dodged the question with bureaucratic gobbledygook: “This was a decision made by an independent military convening authority inside the military commissions process. The White House was not aware that the deal was in the works. In fact, we weren’t even aware that it had been inked until just a couple of days ago. The president has asked his national security team to discuss, as appropriate, with Department of Defense officials, uh, this particular arrangement, um, and to try and get a little more information on it.”

“I feel like I was kicked in the balls,” said retired police officer Jim Smith. Smith’s wife, Moira, as the New York Post notes, was the only female NYPD cop killed that day.

As her widowed husband added, “The prosecution and families have waited for 23 years to have our day in court to put on the record what these animals did to our loved ones.”

UPDATE: In a remarkable walk-back, the deal that spared these three murdering jihadists the death penalty was revoked on Friday by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In his brief memo, Austin relieved the official in charge of the original deal, writing, “Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”