Friday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin overrode a plea agreement that was reached earlier in the week for the accused mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks along with two other defendants and reinstated them as death penalty cases.
Austin’s move comes two days after the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military commission announced the official appointed to oversee the war court, retired Brigadier General Susan Escallier, had reached plea deals with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two of his accused accomplices in the attacks, Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Walid al-Hawsawi.
Letters sent to families of the almost 3,000 individuals murdered in the al-Qaida attacks said the stipulation of the plea agreement stated the three would, at the most, serve life sentences.
In an order released Friday evening, Austin wrote that “in light of the significance of the decision,” he had decided the authority to decide on the acceptance of the plea agreements was his. He then nullified Escallier’s approval.
Some attack victims’ families condemned the deal for cutting off any possibility of possible death penalties from full trials. The GOP was quick to fault the Biden administration for the agreement, although after the decision was announced, the administration said it did not know of it.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, an Armed Services Committee member, had condemned the plea deal earlier on social media Friday as “disgraceful.” Cotton said he had introduced legislation that would mandate the 9/11 defendants go to trial with the possibility of the death penalty.
Mohammed, described by the United States as the main plotter behind the attack that crashed hijacked passenger planes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and a field in Pennsylvania, and the additional two defendants had been predicted to formally enter their pleas under the deals as soon as next week.
9/11 case has been stuck in pre-trial hearings and court actions since 2008
The U.S. military commission tasked with overseeing the cases of five defendants in the September 11 attacks has been stuck in preliminary court action and pre-trial hearings since 2008.
The treatment the defendants underwent while in CIA custody has been among the many challenges slowing cases and left the prospect of complete trials and verdicts still uncertain, partly because of the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture.
Staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, J. Wells Dixon, who has represented defendants at Guantanamo as well as additional detainees there cleared of any wrongdoing, had welcomed the plea bargains as the only valid way to bring the legally fraught and long-stalled 9/11 cases to resolution.
On Friday, Dixon accused Austin of “bowing to political pressure and pushing some victim family members over an emotional cliff” by withdrawing the plea deals.
Attorneys for the two sides have been investigating a negotiated resolution to the case for around 1 ½ years. President Joe Biden earlier blocked a recommended plea deal bargain in the case last year when he refused to proffer requested presidential guarantees that the men would be provided trauma care for the torture they underwent while in CIA custody and be spared solitary confinement.
A fourth September 11 defendant at Guantanamo had still been negotiating on a potential plea agreement.
Last year, the military commission ruled the fifth defendant to be mentally unfit to stand trial. A military medical panel cited psychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder and linked it to solitary confinement and torture in four years in CIA custody before being transferred to Guantanamo.
