US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has overturned a plea deal reached earlier this week for the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two other defendants, reinstating them as death-penalty cases.
“Today, Secretary Austin signed a memo reserving for himself the specific authority to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the 9/11 military commission cases. In addition, as the superior convening authority, the Secretary has also withdrawn from the pre-trial agreements that were signed in those cases,” the US Defense Department said in a statement.
The move came days after a US military commission announced that the official appointed to oversee the war court had reached plea deals with Khalid Sheikh and two accused accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the al-Qaida attacks condemned the deal for cutting off any possibility of full trials and possible death penalties. On Friday, the Pentagon said the plea deals had been entered into but did not elaborate on details.
Austin’s Memo
Austin wrote in an order released Friday night that “in light of the significance of the decision,” he had decided that the authority to make a decision on accepting the plea agreements was his. He nullified Escallier’s approval. “Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements…,” Austin wrote in a memo.
Mohammed, whom the US describes as the plotter of the attack that crashed hijacked passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, and the other two defendants had been expected to formally enter their pleas under the deal as soon as next week. The military commission overseeing the cases of five defendants in the Sept. 11 attacks has been stuck in pre-trial hearings and other preliminary court action since 2008.
Many Republican lawmakers, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, strongly criticiSed the plea deals. Mohammed is the most well known inmate at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, which was set up in 2002 by then-U.S. President George W. Bush to house foreign militant suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they’re known, killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
(With agency inputs)
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