Military appeals court rules against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin effort to reject plea deals reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the 11/09 attacks, a US official said.
The decision puts back on track agreements under which the three men would plead guilty to one of the deadliest attacks on the United States in exchange for being spared the death penalty. Al-Qaida attacks killed nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, and helped spur the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its war against terrorism.
The military appeals court issued its ruling Monday evening, according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Military prosecutors and defense lawyers for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached a plea deal after two years of government-sanctioned negotiations. The deals were announced late last summer.
Supporters of the plea deals see it as a way to resolve the legally difficult trial against the U.S. military commission men at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Preliminary hearings in the trial of Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi have been underway for more than a decade.
Much of the pretrial debate has focused on how the torture inflicted on the men while they were held by the CIA in the first years after their detention can taint the overall evidence in the case.
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Days after the plea deal was announced this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was vacating them.
He cited the severity of the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that as defense secretary, he would have to decide on any plea deal that would spare the defendants the possibility of execution.
Defense lawyers said Austin had no legal authority to reject a decision already approved by the highest authority at the Guantanamo court and that the move amounted to illegal interference in the case.
The military judge hearing the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, had acknowledged that Austin did not have standing to reject plea negotiations once they were underway. This led to an appeal by the Ministry of Defense to the military appeals court.
Austin now has the opportunity to take his efforts to reject the plea agreements to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Furthermore, the Pentagon announced that it had repatriated one of the oldest detainees from the Guantanamo military prison, a Tunisian whose transfer the American authorities had approved more than ten years ago.
The return of Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi to Tunisia leaves 26 men in Guantanamo. That’s down from a peak population of about 700 Muslim men detained overseas and incarcerated in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Al-Yazidi’s repatriation leaves 14 men awaiting transfer to other countries after U.S. authorities dropped charges and cleared them of being a security risk.
The Biden administration, pressed by rights groups to release the last Guantanamo detainees held without charges, transferred three more men this month. The United States says it is looking for suitable, stable countries willing to host the remaining 14.
In a statement, the US military said it had worked with Tunisian authorities for the “responsible transfer” of al-Yazidi. He had been a prisoner at Guantanamo since 2002, when the United States began sending Muslim detainees there from overseas.
Al-Yazidi is the last of a dozen Tunisian men formerly held at Guantanamo.
Of those remaining at Guantanamo, seven – including Mohammed and his 9/11 co-defendants – face active cases. Two others, out of a total of 26, were found guilty and sentenced by the military commission.
© 2024 The Canadian Press