A military appeals court has ruled against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s efforts to overturn plea agreements reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the September 11 attacks, a US official said.
The decision puts back on track agreements that would admit the guilt of the three men in one of the deadliest attacks on the United States in exchange for them being spared the possibility of the death penalty. Al-Qaeda attacks killed nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, and helped spur the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its War on Terror.
The Military Appeals Court issued its ruling on Monday evening, according to the US official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Military prosecutors and defense lawyers for Mohamed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached plea agreements after two years of government-approved negotiations. These deals were announced late last summer.
Supporters of the plea agreements see them as a way to resolve the legally turbulent case against the men on the US military commission at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The preliminary hearings for Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi have been taking place for more than a decade.
Much of the focus of the pretrial arguments was on how the torture of the men while in CIA custody in the first years after their arrest might taint the overall evidence in the case.
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Within days of news of the plea deal this summer, Austin issued a summary order saying he would invalidate it.
He cited the seriousness of the September 11 attacks when he said that as defense minister, he must decide which plea agreements would spare defendants the possibility of execution.
Defense lawyers said Austin had no legal authority to reject the decision that had already been approved by the Guantanamo court’s highest authority, and said the move amounted to unlawful interference in the case.
The military judge who heard the September 11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, agreed that Austin lacked standing to void the plea deals after they were underway. This led to the Ministry of Defense appealing to the Military Court of Appeal.
Austin now has the option to bring his efforts to have the plea deals rejected before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Separately, the Pentagon said it had returned one of the detainees who spent the longest period in the Guantanamo military prison, a Tunisian man whose transfer was approved by US authorities more than a decade ago.
Reda bin Saleh Al-Yazidi’s return to Tunisia leaves 26 men at Guantanamo. This is lower than the peak prison population of about 700 Muslim men who were detained abroad and transferred to prison in the years after the September 11 attacks.
The return of the Yazidi to his homeland leaves 14 men waiting to be transferred to other countries after US authorities waived any prosecution and cleared them of security risks.
The Biden administration, which has come under pressure from human rights groups to release the remaining Guantanamo detainees held without charge, transferred three more men this month. The United States says it is looking for suitable and stable countries ready to receive the remaining 14 countries.
The US military said in a statement that it worked with authorities in Tunisia for the “responsible transfer” of the Yazidis. He has been a prisoner at Guantanamo since 2002, when the United States began sending Muslim detainees who had been transferred abroad there.
Al-Yazidi is the last of dozens of Tunisian men who were detained at Guantanamo.
Of those who remain at Guantanamo, seven – including Muhammad and his co-defendants in the September 11 attacks – face active cases. The military commission convicted and sentenced two others out of a total of 26 people.
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
