United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has revoked plea deals reached with the man accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001, attacks and two accomplices, just two days after the announcement of an agreement that reportedly would have taken the death penalty off the table.
The deals, which involved the man regarded as one of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were revoked on Friday after angering some relatives of the victims.
Austin also relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees the Pentagon’s Guantanamo war court, of her authority to enter into pre-trial agreements in the case and took on the responsibility himself.
“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused … responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Austin said in a memorandum addressed to Escallier.
“I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024 in the above-referenced case,” the memo said.
The Pentagon announced the plea deals on Wednesday but did not elaborate on details.
The New York Times reported Mohammed and the accomplices, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi, had agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy in exchange for a life sentence, instead of facing a trial that could lead to their executions.
Mohammed is the best-known inmate at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which was set up in 2002 by then-US President George W Bush following the attacks.
He is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they are known, killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the US into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
The cases against them have been bogged down in pre-trial manoeuvrings for years while the accused remained held at Guantanamo Bay.
Much of the legal jousting has focused on whether they could be tried fairly after having undergone methodical torture at the hands of the CIA in the years after 9/11.
J Wells Dixon, a staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented defendants at Guantanamo as well as other detainees there who have been cleared of any wrongdoing, had welcomed the plea bargains as the only feasible way to resolve the long-stalled and legally fraught 9/11 cases.
On Friday, Dixon accused Austin of “bowing to political pressure and pushing some victim family members over an emotional cliff” by rescinding the plea deals.
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