Army an appeals court has ruled against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s attempt to throw out plea deals reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the 9/11 attacks, a US official said.
The decision puts back on track deals that would have seen 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. Almost 3,000 people were killed in Al-Qaeda attacks September 11, 2001and helped spur the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its war on terror.
The military appeals court announced its ruling on Monday night, according to a US official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Military prosecutors and defense lawyers for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attack, and two co-defendants reached a plea deal after two years of government-sanctioned negotiations. The contracts were announced at the end of last summer.
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Austin’s attempt to throw out the plea deals was rejected by a military appeals court. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Supporters of the plea deals see them as a way to resolve the legally problematic case against the men in the US military commission on Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The pre-trial hearings for Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been ongoing for more than a decade.
Much of the pre-trial arguments focused on the torture of the men while they were in the CIA custody in the first years after their detention can affect the overall evidence in the case.
Days after news of the plea deal broke this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was overturning them.
He cited the gravity of the 9/11 attacks, saying that as defense secretary he would have to decide on any plea deals that would spare defendants the possibility of execution.
Defense lawyers said Austin did not have the legal authority to reject the decision, which had already been approved by the Guantanamo court’s top court, and said the move amounted to illegal interference in the case.
The military judge hearing the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, agreed that Austin did not have standing to reject the settlements once they were underway. This triggered an appeal by the Ministry of Defense to the Military Court of Appeal.
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Courtroom drawing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Walid Bin Attash. (AP Photo/Janet Hamlin)
Austin now has the option to overturn the plea deals in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Separately, Pentagon announced that he had repatriated one of the longest-held prisoners at the Guantanamo military prison, a Tunisian who was approved for transfer by the US authorities more than ten years ago.
Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi’s return to Tunisia leaves 26 people in Guantanamo. That’s less than the peak population of about 700 Muslim men detained abroad and brought to prison in the years since the 9/11 attacks.
Al-Yazidi’s repatriation leaves 14 men awaiting transfer to other countries after US authorities dropped any prosecution and cleared them of security risks.
The Biden administration, under pressure from rights groups to release the remaining Guantanamo detainees without charge, transferred three more men this month. The US says it is looking for suitable and stable countries willing to host the remaining 14.
In a statement, the US military said it was working with authorities in Tunisia to “responsibly transfer” al-Yazidi. He had been a prisoner at Guantanamo since 2002, when the US began sending him Muslim prisoners taken abroad there.
Al-Yazidi is the last of a dozen Tunisians who were once held at Guantanamo.
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Of those remaining at Guantanamo, seven — including Mohammed and his 9/11 co-defendants — face active cases. Two of the 26 were convicted and sentenced by a military commission.
