US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked the sentence reduction agreement reached by the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and two accomplices in exchange for pleading guilty, and put back on the table the death penalty they face in the trial that the three men sought to avoid by confessing. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and his two accomplices, who helped him with financing and logistics, have languished since 2003 in the military prison of Guantanamo (Cuba) in a legal limbo that the agreement announced on Wednesday seemed to have put an end to.
The Pentagon said earlier that day that a plea deal had been reached, but gave no further details. A U.S. official on condition of anonymity said the plea deal was to avoid trial and accept a life sentence in exchange for pleading guilty. But on Friday, Austin relieved Brigadier General Susan Escallier, who oversees the Guantanamo war tribunal and who has been tasked with reaching pretrial agreements and who negotiated and closed the plea deal with the defendants, and took on the case himself. “In light of the importance of the decision to enter into pretrial agreements with the defendants, I have determined that responsibility for that decision should rest with me,” Austin wrote in a memo released by the Pentagon late Friday afternoon. Austin has left responsibility for the remaining cases to Escallier.
Escallier’s approval of the deal reached by prosecutors and defendants over two years of negotiations appeared to resolve the case, which had been stuck in pretrial hearings since 2012. Austin was traveling abroad and returned to the United States later in the day. By then, prosecutors in the case had informed relatives of those killed in the attacks of the decision, some of whom expressed disappointment and anger that the death penalty had been ruled out. Many Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, also criticized the deal.
Mohammed, a US-educated engineer, is the best-known inmate at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, set up in 2002 by then-US President George W Bush to house suspected “foreign fighters” following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the US into a two-decade war in Afghanistan. Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to hijack commercial passenger jets and crash them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The two other detainees, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, signed up to the deal.
The case has been mired for more than a decade in pre-trial proceedings centering on the question of whether torture in secret CIA prisons had tainted evidence against him because it was obtained by force. Guantanamo is synonymous with some of the worst U.S. abuses in its war on terror, launched by Republican George W. Bush against Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network.
The men are accused of being the organizers of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On that day, 19 men hijacked four commercial airplanes: two of them were crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, another into the Pentagon, outside Washington; and another, in a field in Pennsylvania. In addition to the conspiracy charge, they have been accused of committing murder in violation of the law of war, of attacking civilians and of terrorism.
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According to prosecutors, Mohammed came up with the idea of hijacking planes and crashing them into strategic buildings. Prosecutors say he presented the idea to Osama bin Laden in 1996, and then helped train and direct some of the hijackers, a task facilitated by the other two defendants with fundraising and logistics.
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