WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday announced a settlement agreement reached earlier this week for the accused mastermind of September 11, 2001 attacks and two other defendants, and reinstated their trial as a death penalty case.
The move comes two days after the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, announced that the official appointed to oversee the war court, retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, had approved plea agreements with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accused accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, in the attacks.
Letters sent to the families of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the Al-Qaeda attacks said the plea agreement stipulated that the three would receive a maximum of life in prison.
Austin wrote in an order released Friday night that he had decided “in light of the significance of the decision” that the authority to make a decision on whether to accept the plea agreements rested with him. He quashed Escallier’s approval.
Some families of the attack victims condemned the deal because it closed off any possibility of full trials and possible death sentences. Republicans were quick to blame the Biden administration for the deal, though the White House said after the announcement that it had no knowledge of it.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a member of the Armed Services Committee, had earlier on Friday condemned the settlement on social media as “disgraceful.” Cotton said he had introduced legislation that would require 9/11 suspects to face trial and allow for the death penalty.
Mohammed, who is seen by the US as the main conspirator in the attack that crashed hijacked passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, and the other two suspects were expected to formally enter their pleas under the deal next week.
The U.S. military commission overseeing the cases of five suspects in the September 11 attacks has been bogged down in preliminary hearings and other preliminary proceedings since 2008. The torture the suspects endured while in CIA custody has been among the challenges that have delayed the trials and left the prospect of full trials and verdicts uncertain, in part because of the inadmissibility of evidence related to the torture.
J. Wells Dixon, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented Guantanamo defendants and other detainees acquitted of wrongdoing, welcomed the settlements as the only viable way to resolve the long-stalled and legally fraught 9/11 cases.
Dixon accused Austin on Friday of “bowing to political pressure and pushing some of the victims’ families over an emotional cliff” by withdrawing the plea agreements.
Lawyers for both sides have been exploring a negotiated resolution to the case for about 1 1/2 years. President Joe Biden blocked a previously proposed settlement in the case last year, when he refused to provide requested presidential assurances that the men would not be held in solitary confinement and that they would be provided trauma treatment for the torture they endured while in CIA custody.
A fourth suspect in Guantanamo was still negotiating a possible plea deal.
The military commission last year found the fifth defendant mentally unfit to stand trial. A military medical panel cited post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis, and linked it to torture and solitary confinement during four years in CIA custody before transfer to Guantanamo.
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Associated Press editor Tara Copp contributed.
