DECEMBER 31, 2024:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A military appeals court has ruled against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s effort to throw out the plea deals reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the 9/11 attacks, a U.S. official said.
The decision puts back on track the agreements that would have the three men plead guilty to one of the deadliest attacks on the United States in exchange for being spared the possibility of the death penalty. The attacks by al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and helped spur U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its war on terror.
The military appeals court released its ruling Monday night (Dec. 30, 2024), according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Military prosecutors and defense attorneys for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached the plea agreements after two years of government-approved negotiations. The deals were announced late last summer.
Supporters of the plea agreements see them as a way of resolving the legally troubled case against the men at the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Pretrial hearings for Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been underway for more than a decade.
Much of the focus of pretrial arguments has been on how torture of the men while in CIA custody in the first years after their detention may taint the overall evidence in the case.
Within days of news of the plea deal this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullifying them.
He cited the gravity of the 9/11 attacks in saying that as defense secretary, he should decide on any plea agreements that would spare the defendants the possibility of execution.
Defense lawyers said Austin had no legal authority to reject a decision already approved by the Guantanamo court’s top authority and said the move amounted to unlawful interference in the case.
The military judge hearing the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, had agreed that Austin lacked standing to throw out the plea bargains after they were underway. That had set up the Defense Department’s appeal to the military appeals court.
Austin now has the option of taking his effort to throw out the plea deals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Separately, the Pentagon said it had repatriated one of the longest-held detainees at the Guantanamo military prison, a Tunisian man who U.S. authorities approved for transfer more than a decade ago.
Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi’s return to Tunisia leaves 26 men at Guantanamo. That’s down from a peak population of about 700 Muslim men detained abroad and brought to the prison in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Al-Yazidi’s repatriation leaves 14 men awaiting transfer to other countries after U.S. authorities waived any prosecution and cleared them as security risks.
The Biden administration, pressed by rights groups to free remaining Guantanamo detainees held without charge, transferred out three other men this month. The U.S. says it is searching for suitable and stable countries willing to receive the remaining 14.
In a statement, the U.S. military said it had worked with authorities in Tunisia for the “responsible transfer” of al-Yazidi. He had been a prisoner at Guantanamo since 2002, when the U.S. began sending Muslim detainees taken abroad there.
Al-Yazidi is the last of a dozen Tunisian men once held at Guantanamo.
Of those remaining at Guantanamo, seven — including Mohammed and his 9/11 co-defendants — face active cases. Two others of the 26 total have been convicted and sentenced by the military commission.
NOVEMBER 8, 2024:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A defense official says the Defense Department will appeal a military judge’s ruling that plea agreements struck by the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and two of his co-defendants are valid. The judge’s ruling this past week had voided Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s order to throw out the deals. The judge concluded that the plea agreements were valid and he granted the three motions to enter guilty pleas. The defense official says the U.S. will also seek a postponement of any hearing on the pleas. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss legal matters.
NOVEMBER 7, 2024:
WASHINGTON (AP) — A military judge has ruled that plea agreements struck by alleged Sept. 11, 2001) mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants are valid. A government official says the decision voided an order by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to throw out the deals. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision by Air Force Col. Matthew McCall hasn’t yet been posted publicly or officially announced. The plea agreements would spare Mohammed and the others the risk of the death penalty in exchange for guilty pleas. They spurred immediate political blowback by Republican lawmakers and others when announced in late July. The Pentagon says it’s reviewing the judge’s decision.
AUGUST 17, 2023:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The suspected architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and his fellow defendants may never face the death penalty under plea agreements now under consideration to bring an end to their more than decadelong prosecution, the Pentagon and FBI have advised families of some of the thousands killed.
The notice, made in a letter that was sent to several of the families and obtained by The Associated Press, comes 1 1/2 years after military prosecutors and defense lawyers began exploring a negotiated resolution to the case.
The prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others held at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been troubled by repeated delays and legal disputes, especially over the legal ramifications of the interrogation under torture that the men initially underwent while in CIA custody. No trial date has been set.
“The Office of the Chief Prosecutor has been negotiating and is considering entering into pre-trial agreements,” or PTAs, the letter said. It told the families that while no plea agreement “has been finalized, and may never be finalized, it is possible that a PTA in this case would remove the possibility of the death penalty.”
Some relatives of the nearly 3,000 people killed outright in the terror attacks expressed outrage over the prospect of ending the case short of a verdict. The military prosecutors pledged to take their views into consideration and present them to the military authorities who would make the final decision on accepting any plea agreement.
The letter, dated Aug. 1, 2023, was received by at least some of the family members only this week. It asks them to respond by Monday (Aug. 21, 2023) to the FBI’s victim services division with any comments or questions about the possibility of such a plea agreement. The FBI had no comment Wednesday on the letter.
On Sept. 11, 2001, conspirators from the al-Qaida militant group seized control of jets to use them as passenger-filled missiles, hitting New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon near Washington. A fourth plane was headed for Washington but crashed in Pennsylvania after crew members and passengers tried to storm the cockpit.
It was Mohammed who presented the very idea of such an attack on the United States to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, and who received authorization from bin Laden to craft what became the 9/11 attacks, the United States’ 9/11 Commission concluded. The four other defendants are alleged to have supported the hijackers in various ways.
The attacks led to the U.S. “war on terror,” which included U.S. invasions and prolonged wars in Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was based, and in Iraq, which had no connection with the attacks.
Jim Riches, who lost his firefighter son Jimmy in 9/11, went to Guantanamo for pretrial hearings in 2009. He remains deeply frustrated that the case remains unresolved 14 years later. He said he laughed bitterly when he opened the government’s letter Monday.
“How can you have any faith in it?” Riches asked. The update “gives us a little hope,” he said, but justice still seems far off.
“No matter how many letters they send, until I see it, I won’t believe it,” said Riches, a retired deputy fire chief in New York City. He said he initially was open to the use of military tribunals but now feels that the process is failing and that the 9/11 defendants should be tried in civilian court.
The Obama administration at one point sought to do so, but the idea was shelved because of opposition from some victims’ relatives and members of Congress and city officials’ concerns about security costs. As the 22nd anniversary of the attacks approaches, “those guys are still alive. Our children are dead,” Riches said.
Other family members — part of a network of 9/11 families that has pushed for answers and accountability over the years — said they would insist that any plea agreement allow their lawyers to question the defendants on the extent of any Saudi official involvement in 9/11. Saudi Arabia denies involvement by senior Saudi officials.
It’s about “holding people responsible, and they’re taking that away with this plea,” said Peter Brady, whose father was killed in the attack. He received the letter this week.
The case “needs to go through the legal process,” not be settled in a plea deal, Brady said.
The 9/11 hearings have been on hold while military officials examine whether one of the defendants is competent to stand trial. Hearings are set to resume Sept. 18.
The five defendants were captured at various times and places in 2002 and 2003 and sent to Guantanamo for trial in 2006.
The case has played out with a changing series of defense lawyers and judges, all grappling with the legalities and logistics of the military trial. Much of the hearings have been mired in litigation over how much of the testimony should be considered inadmissible by the torture that defendants underwent in early CIA custody, including the waterboarding of Mohammed 183 times.
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