The alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and two of his accomplices have agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence to avoid a trial that could have brought them the death penalty at Guantanamo, Cuba, prosecutors said Wednesday. The military prison at Guantanamo Bay, synonymous with some of the worst abuses of the United States in its war on terror, houses 22 years after its opening some 30 inmates, of the nearly 800 locked in its cells at the height of President George W. Bush’s offensive against Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. The vast majority of the inmates had nothing to do with the September 2001 attacks or Islamic terrorism.
A senior Pentagon official approved the deal for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi, Defense Department officials told the paper. The New York TimesThe inmates have been in U.S. custody since 2003, just over a year after President George W. Bush embarked on a crusade against “enemy combatants” that became America’s longest war, the nearly two-decade-long war in Afghanistan. The cases of Mohammed, bin Attash and al-Hawsawi had been languishing in pretrial proceedings for more than a decade over whether their torture in secret CIA prisons had tainted evidence by force.
News of the agreement came in a letter from the military commissions prosecutors to families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “In exchange for avoiding the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three defendants have agreed to plead guilty to all of the crimes charged, including the murder of the 2,976 individuals listed in the indictment,” said the letter, signed by Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions, and three attorneys on his team. The number of victims includes those at the World Trade Center and the foiled attacks on the Pentagon and the Capitol. The letter informed the families that the defendants would be able to present their pleas in open court next week.
The guilty plea averts what had been expected to be a 12- to 18-month trial or, alternatively, the possibility that the military judge would throw out confessions that were key to the government’s case. The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, had been hearing testimony this week and had more hearings scheduled for later this year to decide on that and other pretrial procedural issues.
Mohammed, a US-educated engineer and avowed jihadist, was accused of conceiving the idea of hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings. Prosecutors say he pitched the idea to bin Laden in 1996 and then helped train and direct some of the hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, the head of the pilot squadron. He and Hawsawi were captured together in Pakistan in March 2003 and held in secret CIA prisons until their transfer to the US naval base at Guantanamo in September 2006 for trial. By then, CIA interrogators had held them incommunicado and tortured them, including by subjecting Mohammed to 183 sessions of waterboarding, a practice that would frustrate years of efforts to bring them to trial. The transfer to Guantanamo deprived the inmates of the safeguards they would have been entitled to as prisoners on US soil. The inmates, many of whom had no ties to jihadism, were systematically subjected to other forms of torture, including beatings, extreme sleep deprivation and anal rape.
The three men will face a reduced trial, probably not before next year. Two of the five original defendants were not involved in the deal. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was charged with helping organize a hijacking cell in Hamburg, Germany, was declared unfit to stand trial because of mental illness, and his case was dropped. The fifth, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, was not involved in the plea deal and could be tried alone. He is Mohammed’s nephew and is accused, like Hawsawi, of helping the hijackers finance the attacks and arrange travel while working in the Persian Gulf.
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The deals had been under discussion since March 2022, but hit a major hurdle in September when the White House refused to approve the defendants’ requested conditions. The men wanted assurances that they would not serve their sentences in solitary confinement, as well as benefits in communications with their families and guarantees of legal assistance. Baluchi, in particular, also wanted a U.S. commitment to establish a special torture recovery treatment program for them in prison. The Democratic administration studied the request for more than a year and then declined to intervene.
The settlement comes amid the 51st round of pretrial hearings in the case since indictment in 2012. Mohammed and the others were last seen in court nearly two weeks ago, for testimony from a psychologist who had interrogated him and other CIA prisoners. Adm. Rugh and his colleagues wrote in their letter to the families that their decision to accept the plea after “12 years of pretrial litigation was not made lightly. However, it is our collective, reasoned, good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path toward finality and justice in this case.”
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