The US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, has made a decision to revoke a plea deal for the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with two other defendants. This decision reinstates them as death penalty cases. The plea deal had been in place for a short period of time, 16 years after the prosecution of the three men began.
Susan Escallier, who oversees the war court proceedings, had signed the deal with Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi. The defense lawyers had requested life sentences for the men in exchange for their guilty pleas. However, Secretary Austin argued in a memo that the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused should rest with him as the superior convening authority.
Some families of the victims expressed disappointment over the revoked plea deal, as they saw it as a missed opportunity for a full trial that could have led to death sentences. Terry Kay Rockefeller, who lost her sister in the 9/11 attacks, mentioned that although she would have preferred a trial without tortured defendants, the plea deal was a way to achieve verdicts and finality.
The original plea deal had faced criticism from Republican lawmakers such as Mitch McConnell and JD Vance, as well as from New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who accused the Biden-Harris administration of betraying the American people. J Wells Dixon, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, had initially welcomed the plea bargains as a way to resolve the long-stalled 9/11 cases. However, he criticized Secretary Austin for rescinding the deals, accusing him of bowing to political pressure and causing emotional distress to some victim family members.
President Joe Biden had previously blocked a proposed plea bargain in the case by refusing to offer guarantees that the defendants would be spared solitary confinement and provided with trauma care for the torture they endured in CIA custody. The president and vice-president were reported to have had no involvement in Secretary Austin’s decision to revoke the controversial deal.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, was expected to formally enter his plea under the deal. The attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people and led to a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan, have been a central point of the US military commission’s work. The cases of the five defendants involved in the attacks have been stuck in pre-trial hearings since 2008, partly due to the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture they experienced while in CIA custody.
It remains to be seen how the revocation of the plea deal will impact the ongoing legal proceedings and the quest for justice for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.
