"MAMDANI'S SICK MOVE AT 9/11 CEREMONY: Demand His Immediate Removal!"
Mamdani’s 9/11 Pen Handoff to Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem Sparks Backlash as Old Guantánamo Case Returns to Spotlight
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to have a ceremonial pen from a 9/11 executive-order signing passed to chief counsel Ramzi Kassem has angered some victims’ relatives and Republican officials because Kassem once represented Guantánamo detainee Ahmed al-Darbi. The controversy is rooted in real history, but the evidence supports a narrower conclusion than some of the most explosive political claims now surrounding it.
September 15, 2026
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism over a brief but highly symbolic moment at City Hall after signing two executive orders ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The orders themselves were designed to honor 9/11 victims, first responders, survivors, city workers and families while updating New York City’s emergency-preparedness system. But the political controversy that followed was driven not by the text of the orders, but by what happened after Mamdani signed them.
Video from the September 4 ceremony shows Mamdani handing the ceremonial pen to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and quietly asking her to pass it along. Tisch then gave the pen to Ramzi Kassem, the mayor’s chief counsel.
Kassem’s presence immediately drew attention because of his long legal career representing clients in national-security and Guantánamo Bay cases, including Saudi detainee Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al-Darbi.
Al-Darbi pleaded guilty before a U.S. military commission in February 2014 to terrorism-related offenses involving his role in plans to attack civilian shipping, including conduct tied to the October 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker MV Limburg off Yemen.
The bombing killed one civilian crew member and injured others. Military-commission records state that al-Darbi pleaded guilty to offenses including attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, hazarding a vessel, terrorism, attempted hazarding of a vessel and attempted terrorism.
Al-Darbi also had a direct family connection to the September 11 attacks. His sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
That link gave critics an immediate argument: a ceremonial item connected to a 9/11 remembrance event had been passed to an attorney whose former client was an al-Qaeda member and brother-in-law of one of the Pentagon hijackers.
The criticism came quickly from relatives of victims and Republican members of the New York City Council.
Dennis Warchola, whose brother Michael Warchola, a firefighter with Ladder 5, was killed in the North Tower, questioned why someone with Kassem’s legal history would receive the pen from a ceremony focused on September 11 remembrance.
Council Member Joann Ariola called the move “breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful,” arguing that the anniversary should center on the victims, responders and families rather than generate controversy over one of the mayor’s senior aides.
Retired NYPD detective Michael Alcazar also criticized the symbolism and told the New York Post that he believed the handoff had been calculated. No public evidence has emerged proving that Mamdani intended the gesture as a political statement about terrorism, Guantánamo Bay or Kassem’s former clients.
That distinction is crucial because the video establishes that Mamdani deliberately asked for the pen to be passed to Kassem, but it does not establish the mayor’s motive.
City Hall has offered a more routine explanation.
The mayor’s office said Kassem attended the event because he is chief counsel to the mayor and City Hall and because his office helped draft the two executive orders. Official city records independently confirm that Kassem holds that position and regularly advises the administration on legal matters.
Kassem was also listed among senior officials associated with Mamdani’s administration at the ceremony. The official event transcript focused overwhelmingly on remembrance, emergency planning and the responsibilities of city agencies.
Mamdani’s first executive order established September 11 as an annual Citywide Day of Remembrance and Service.
The order directs the mayor’s office and city agencies to honor those killed in the attacks, first responders who died that day, responders and recovery workers who later died from 9/11-related illnesses, survivors and affected families.
It also provides for citywide moments of silence and encourages agencies to organize memorial observances and volunteer service.
The second executive order updated New York City’s continuity-of-operations framework, replacing rules dating to 2007 and creating a new Continuity and Mission Assurance Team.
That interagency group is designed to coordinate emergency preparedness across city government and help ensure that essential services continue during crises such as terrorist attacks, severe weather, infrastructure failures, blackouts or other major disruptions.
Mamdani described the two orders as part of the same obligation.
In his remarks, he said “Never forget” should mean more than remembering the dead in the abstract. He argued that honoring September 11 also requires preparing the city to withstand future emergencies and preserving the spirit of public service that emerged after the attacks.
The controversy therefore centers on symbolism, not on an executive order that diminished or excused the September 11 attacks.
The most difficult part of the story is Kassem’s legal background.
Kassem is a professor of law at the City University of New York and the founding director of the CLEAR Clinic, a legal program focused on civil rights, national security, immigration and the consequences of post-9/11 enforcement policies.
His CUNY biography says he has litigated in federal courts, immigration courts, the U.S. Supreme Court and military commissions at Guantánamo Bay. He has represented detainees and other clients in cases involving wartime detention, constitutional law, immigration, profiling and national-security investigations.
He also served as a senior policy adviser at the White House from 2022 to 2024 before later becoming Mamdani’s chief counsel.
Kassem’s representation of al-Darbi was substantial. Public reporting and military-commission records show that he served as al-Darbi’s lead defense counsel from 2008.
That representation continued through al-Darbi’s guilty plea, sentencing process and eventual transfer from Guantánamo Bay to Saudi Arabia.
The al-Darbi case itself is more complicated than the shorthand often used in political coverage.
Al-Darbi was an admitted al-Qaeda member and pleaded guilty to serious terrorism-related crimes. But he was already in U.S. custody when the MV Limburg was actually bombed in October 2002. His guilty plea concerned his prior role in planning, preparation and support connected to maritime terrorist operations.
As part of his plea agreement, al-Darbi also became a major cooperating witness for U.S. authorities.
When he was transferred to Saudi Arabia in 2018, The Washington Post reported that, according to Kassem, al-Darbi had participated in more than 600 interviews with American officials and provided eight days of sworn testimony as a cooperating witness.
The Pentagon confirmed that al-Darbi had complied with the terms of his plea agreement before his transfer to Saudi custody to serve the remainder of his sentence.
That cooperation does not erase al-Darbi’s crimes or the seriousness of his admitted conduct. It does, however, provide important context for Kassem’s role.
Kassem was acting as defense counsel in an adversarial legal system. Representing a person accused of terrorism does not mean the attorney endorses the client’s ideology, crimes or political beliefs.
That principle applies far beyond Guantánamo Bay.
American defense lawyers routinely represent defendants accused of murder, terrorism, espionage, organized crime and other serious offenses. The legal system depends on representation even for defendants whose alleged or admitted conduct is widely condemned.
The controversy becomes more precise when that principle is separated from the ceremonial question.
Critics do not need to argue that Kassem personally supports terrorism in order to object to the pen handoff. Their stronger argument is that City Hall should have anticipated the emotional impact of giving a symbolic 9/11 item to a senior aide whose most famous former client was an al-Qaeda detainee with a family link to one of the hijackers.
For relatives who lost loved ones on September 11, that symbolism can be deeply personal regardless of the professional distinction between a lawyer and a client.
At the same time, critics weaken their case when they imply that legal representation itself makes Kassem responsible for al-Darbi’s conduct or sympathetic to al-Qaeda.
There is no evidence supporting that conclusion.
It is also important to describe al-Darbi’s relationship to September 11 accurately.
He was not one of the 9/11 hijackers and was not prosecuted for taking part in the September 11 attacks. His connection was familial: his sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers aboard Flight 77.
Al-Darbi’s own conviction related to later terrorism plots involving shipping in the Middle East, especially the MV Limburg attack.
Those distinctions matter because the pen controversy has spread rapidly through partisan media and social platforms, where descriptions can become more dramatic as they are repeated.
The basic factual chain is strong enough without exaggeration.
Mamdani signed executive orders dealing with September 11 remembrance and emergency preparedness.
He intentionally asked that the signing pen be passed to Ramzi Kassem.
Kassem helped draft the orders as chief counsel and has a long record in national-security and Guantánamo litigation.
One of Kassem’s most prominent former clients, Ahmed al-Darbi, pleaded guilty to terrorism-related offenses and was the brother-in-law of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar.
Those facts created the controversy.
What the public record does not establish is that Mamdani selected Kassem in order to insult 9/11 families, defend terrorism or make an ideological statement.
The mayor’s critics have also placed the pen episode in a broader political battle over Mamdani’s participation in the 25th anniversary commemorations.
In the days after the signing ceremony, relatives of some 9/11 victims and other critics delivered a petition to City Hall asking Mamdani not to attend the Ground Zero memorial ceremony.
The petition gathered more than 100,000 signatures and cited several complaints about the mayor, including his appointment of Kassem.
Former FDNY Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, who led the department during the September 11 attacks, also criticized the City Hall signing ceremony and urged Mamdani to stay away from the anniversary memorial.
Mamdani did not accept those demands.
He attended the official Ground Zero commemoration as mayor and continued participating in other anniversary events.
His administration also released more than 170,000 pages of city records concerning air quality, health concerns and government decision-making after the September 11 attacks, following years of pressure from 9/11 health advocates.
That document release became one of the administration’s most substantial actions connected to the anniversary because it opened a large archive dealing with the long-term health consequences faced by first responders, workers, residents and others exposed to toxic dust.
The wider record therefore makes the political story more complicated than a single pen.
Mamdani’s administration used the anniversary to create an annual remembrance program, modernize continuity planning and release long-sought 9/11 records.
At the same time, the decision to give the ceremonial signing pen to Kassem produced a predictable backlash that overwhelmed much of the intended message.
That is ultimately a political judgment problem rather than a hidden constitutional or legal controversy.
A mayor controls the symbolism of an official event. In a ceremony centered on an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people and permanently changed New York, small gestures can carry unusually heavy meaning.
Even if Kassem received the pen simply because his office helped draft the orders, the administration can still be criticized for failing to anticipate how his Guantánamo history would be received by some victims’ families.
But criticism of the decision should not erase the core principle that defense counsel are not morally or legally identified with their clients.
The same U.S. government that prosecuted al-Darbi also recognized his right to counsel, accepted his guilty plea and used his cooperation in other national-security cases.
Kassem’s job was to represent his client within that system.
The strongest fact-based assessment therefore sits between the competing partisan narratives.
The pen handoff was real and deliberate.
The history connecting Kassem to al-Darbi is real.
Al-Darbi’s crimes and his family relationship to a 9/11 hijacker are also real.
The outrage from some victims’ relatives and political officials is genuine and understandable in the context of a 9/11 commemoration.
But there is no evidence that the gesture proves Mamdani or Kassem endorses terrorism, and there is no verified evidence that the mayor intended the handoff as a coded political message.
The controversy is best understood as a clash between professional legal history and public symbolism.
For City Hall, Kassem was the chief lawyer whose office helped produce the executive orders.
For some families and critics, he was the attorney most closely associated in the public imagination with a convicted al-Qaeda detainee connected by marriage to one of the September 11 hijackers.
Those two descriptions refer to the same person, but they carry radically different meanings.
The political mistake, if one believes there was one, was allowing that conflict to become the defining image of a ceremony designed to emphasize remembrance and preparedness.
As New York moves beyond the 25th anniversary, the substantive policies created by the executive orders will continue long after the ceremonial pen disappears from the headlines.
The Day of Remembrance and Service will return each September 11. City agencies will update and test their continuity plans. The new preparedness team will be responsible for coordinating essential services during emergencies.
The pen controversy, however, is likely to remain part of Mamdani’s political record because it compressed a far larger debate about September 11, terrorism, due process, Muslim political leadership, victims’ memory and the role of defense lawyers into a single visual moment.
That moment can fairly be criticized as insensitive.
What it cannot fairly establish on its own is ideological sympathy with terrorism.
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The evidence supports a controversy over judgment and symbolism — not proof of the more explosive motives now being assigned to it.
