Khalid came up with the idea of flying fully-fueled jetliners packed with people into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and either the Capitol or White House. Osama liked the idea, okayed it, and the plan was initiated in Afghan training camps and, unnoticed by the FBI, flight schools in the U.S.

We don't know for sure the third target. Upon learning of the other planes' fates via cellphone, the brave passengers and crew of United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco forcibly hijacked their plane back. It crashed in Pennsylvania in an immense recovering field of former strip mines, literally destroying everyone onboard. 

It's now a national memorial.

The prosecutions have been hobbled by lengthy legal and internal disputes over many things, often including the ramifications of using evidence obtained from the terrorists in fearful early post-9/11 days by, let's say, forcible means.

The plea agreements, as reported by the Associated Press, have been in the works for 18 months but have yet to be completed. 

So, there's still hope, with a presidential election coming up, that the Pentagon and Biden Administration will come to their senses before setting up Khalid and his four cronies in air-conditioned, high-security cells with healthy food and cable TV for the rest of their detestable lives. 

Do you suppose any politician would make an issue over the current White House occupant sparing the lives of five al Qaeda operatives who helped murder some 3,000 innocent U.S. residents on that sunny September morning?

Or any of the 832,000 U.S. military personnel who risked their lives in Afghanistan, or any families of the 2,465 American troops who came home in coffins, or any of the 1,149 allied personnel who died there too.

Unless a future president trades Khalid for some kidnapped Americans, as Barack Obama did without calling it the ransom that it was. Earlier this year, Biden traded a senior Russian spy to Moscow for an imprisoned WNBA player. And there's still an American Wall Street Journal reporter imprisoned in Russia.

Terrorist kidnappings and ransoms are a risky, messy business that a president named Thomas Jefferson sought to end in 1801 by sending in the Marines to wipe out the Barbery Pirates on "the shores of Tripoli."

Here are my thoughts:

This week's column examined the points and strategies of this week's first GOP primary debate and what's at stake, fortunately without the presence of Donald Trump. He says he'll duck all the primary debates because he is so far ahead of the other candidates. They will gladly take his forfeited time and talk it out. 

Creating a scene and controversy someplace else will also help Trump avoid any tough questioning about his mounting legal challenges and financial resources declining by the millions because of legal expenses.

It will be interesting to hear his excuses in a couple of weeks when the polls that Trump often boasts about show one or two contenders breaking out of the pack after such national TV exposure in front of millions.

The most recent audio commentary took on Joe Biden's latest "deal" with Iran. What is it with the comedy team of Obama-Biden that they're so eager to do generous deals with the world's largest national supporter of terrorism? And Iran always seems to get the long end of the stick?

Another outrage, which I've so far left to my skilled RedState colleagues, is the obviously declining mental and physical condition of our vacationing commander in chief.

Fresh off a lengthy summer vacay at the beach in Delaware, where he had no comment and slept in the shade while Maui burned, Biden and the Mrs. began another week off in Lake Tahoe at the borrowed home of another Democrat billionaire.

They interrupted that for 11 hours of Air Force One flight time on a day-trip from Nevada-to-Hawaii-to-Nevada intended to make up for President Empathy's initial lack of sympathy. 

Unfortunately, Biden looked awful and spoke worse. With hundreds still missing in the ashes, many of them children and likely never to be recovered, Biden shared one of his familiar stretchers. 

It's about how he nearly lost his entire house and wife in what was actually a 20-minute kitchen fire years ago. That "blaze" also likely threatened the numerous classified documents he was keeping there illegally. Donald Trump has been charged for doing similarly.

As Maui fire survivors began to recount their recent horrors to the president, Joe Biden was so moved that he appeared to nod off.  

Biden also told the crowd, whose members had lost everything, that he understood their pain because he once walked on hot sand without sandals. Biden wants to continue his "work" like this until January 2029.

And no one does anything about this naked Emperor except admire the neat outfit he's not wearing.