National Security

Guantanamo: 9/11 victim's son renders aid to accused plotter's lawyer

By Carol Rosenberg - Miami Herald

February 25, 2015 09:19 AM

Robert Mathai, whose father died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, spoke with reporters Feb. 12, 2015, after the conclusion of a hearing at Guantanamo. Two days later, he rendered aid to a member of the defense team for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
Robert Mathai, whose father died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, spoke with reporters Feb. 12, 2015, after the conclusion of a hearing at Guantanamo. Two days later, he rendered aid to a member of the defense team for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. U.S. Army
Robert Mathai, whose father died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, spoke with reporters Feb. 12, 2015, after the conclusion of a hearing at Guantanamo. Two days later, he rendered aid to a member of the defense team for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. U.S. Army

When an attorney for the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks suddenly collapsed on a recent war court airplane shuttle, only one passenger was equipped to offer emergency care — a young man whose father was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He turned first responder without hesitation.

“I didn’t really do anything super impressive, just obtained vitals and tried to figure out what was going on, and gave oxygen,” said Tufts University senior Robert Mathai, 21, who checked the man’s pulse, talked to him and tended to him for about an hour before landing at Andrews Air Force Base and handing him off to an ambulance crew on Feb. 14.

That’s what first responders do — as they did that dark day in New York City when Mathai’s dad Joseph, a tech executive, died in the terror attacks among nearly 3,000 people, many of them first responders.

The attorney, Army Capt. Brian Nicholson, 33, is fine and back at work as part of the death-penalty defense team of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man who once boasted that he was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks “from A to Z.”RelatedRobert Mathai, whose father was killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, talks to journalists on Feb. 12, 2015 at the conclusion of 9/11 case pretrial hearing. His mother Teresa is at his side.

Still the extraordinary inflight rescue sprung from the sorrow of Sept. 11, illustrates the close proximity of the different players in the on-again, off-again war court proceedings: How in just one week people who start off as strangers become familiar during their journeys to the crude compound called Camp Justice.

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