On Friday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin rejected the plea deals reached earlier in the week with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his two accomplices in connection with the September 11 attacks, which would have allowed them to avoid the death penalty.
The three defendants are being held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Pentagon announced on Wednesday that plea agreements had been reached, but did not provide details about the terms. An American official indicated that the deals likely involved guilty pleas in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
However, on Friday, Secretary Austin issued an order stating that “given the importance” of the case, he had decided that the authority to make a decision on the plea deals should rest with him. He overturned the decision of the official appointed to oversee the Guantanamo war court, Susan Escallier, regarding the plea agreements.
Several families of September 11 victims harshly criticized the agreements, arguing that they excluded the possibility of full trials and death sentences.
Republicans immediately blamed President Joe Biden’s administration, although the White House stated it had no prior knowledge of the decision.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the most well-known detainee at Guantanamo Bay, which was established in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush to hold suspected foreign militants after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.
The highest number of detainees at the facility was 800. Today, 30 detainees remain at Guantanamo.
The plea agreements with the U.S. government for the September 11 attacks come more than 16 years after the start of the legal process against them related to Al-Qaeda’s attacks and more than 20 years after the attacks that resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and led to the U.S. initiating a war in Afghanistan that lasted for two decades. Plea deals were also reached with two other detainees: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.
