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WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday reversed a plea agreement reached earlier this week. Accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001 attacks and two other defendants, reinstating their death penalty cases.
Just two days ago, the military commission at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, announced that retired Brigadier General Susan Escallier, who oversees the war tribunal, had approved a plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two alleged co-conspirators in the attack, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
Letters sent to nearly 3,000 families of victims Al-Qaeda attacks It said the plea agreement stipulates that the three men could serve a maximum of life in prison.
Austin wrote in the order: On Friday night, he announced that “given the importance of this sentence,” he decided he had the power to decide whether to accept the plea deal. He rescinded Escallier’s approval.
Some families of victims of the attacks decried the deal as cutting off any possibility of a full trial and possible death penalty. Republicans quickly blamed the Biden administration for the deal, though the White House said it had no knowledge of it after it was announced.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, denounced the plea deal as “shameful” on social media early Friday. Cotton said he has introduced legislation that would require 9/11 defendants to be tried and potentially face the death penalty.
Mohammed, who was described by the United States as the mastermind of the attacks that hijacked airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, and two other defendants are expected to enter formal guilty pleas as early as next week under the agreement.
The U.S. military commission overseeing the case of five defendants in the Sept. 11 attacks has been bogged down in pretrial hearings and other preliminary court action since 2008. Torture of the defendants in CIA custody is one of the challenges that has slowed the case and left prospects for a full trial and verdict unclear, in part because evidence related to the torture has been dismissed.
J. Wells Dixon, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented Guantánamo defendants and other exonerated prisoners, welcomed the plea bargain as the only viable way to resolve the long-standing, legally fraught 9/11 cases.
Dickson on Friday accused Austin of “bowing to political pressure and rescinding his plea agreement, leaving some of the victims’ families on an emotional cliff.”
Lawyers for both sides have been exploring a negotiated settlement of the case for about a year and a half. President Biden has blocked A plea agreement was offered in the case earlier last year. When he refused to provide the requested presidential assurances that the men would not be held in solitary confinement and provided trauma care for the torture they had endured while in CIA custody.
A fourth 9/11 suspect at Guantanamo Bay is still negotiating a possible plea deal.
A fifth defendant was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial by a military commission last year. A military medical panel noted that the defendant suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis, linking it to torture and solitary confinement during four years in CIA detention before being transferred to Guantánamo.
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