A US military judge at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, set hearings in early January for alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants to plead guilty in exchange for life imprisonment despite Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s efforts to thwart plea agreements. .
The move Wednesday by Judge Matthew McCall, an Air Force colonel, in the government’s long-running trial into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, signals a deepening battle over the independence of the military commission at the U.S. Navy base. United. Guantanamo.
McCall has tentatively scheduled the guilty plea hearings over two weeks starting on January 6, and Muhammad – the defendant accused of using commercial aircraft to launch the attacks – is expected to enter his plea first, if Austin’s efforts to stop him fail.
Austin is seeking to annul the agreements for Mohammed and his fellow defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi, which would put more than 20 years of government prosecutorial efforts back on track for a trial that carries the risk of the death penalty.
While government prosecutors negotiated plea deals under the auspices of the Defense Department over more than two years, receiving the required approval this summer from the senior official overseeing prosecutions at Guantanamo, the deals drew angry condemnation from Sens. Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton and other prominent leaders. Republicans when the news broke.
Within days, Austin issued an order canceling the deals, saying the seriousness of the September 11 attacks meant that any decision about waiving the possibility of executing the defendants would have to be made by him.
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Defense lawyers argued that Austin had no legal standing to intervene and that his move amounted to outside interference that could cast doubt on the legal legitimacy of the proceedings at Guantanamo.
U.S. officials created a hybrid military commission, governed by a mix of civilian and military laws and rules, to try people captured in what the George W. Bush administration called the “War on Terror” after the September 11 attacks.
The Al Qaeda attack was among the most damaging and deadly attacks on the United States in its history. The hijackers took over four passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while the fourth plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
McCaul ruled last week that Austin lacked any legal basis to reject plea deals and that his intervention came too late because it came after the senior Guantanamo official agreed to make them valid.
McCall’s ruling also confirmed that the government and senior authority at Guantanamo agreed to clauses in the plea deals for Muhammad and another defendant that prevent authorities from seeking potential death sentences again even if the plea deals are later ignored for some reason. The provisions appear to be written in advance to try to address the type of battle taking place now.
The Department of Defense notified the families on Friday that it would continue to fight plea deals. The officials said in a letter to the families of September 11 victims that the officials will appeal the agreements and McCall’s ruling before a US military commission court and ask that the three men submit their applications for the time being. Late Tuesday, McCaul agreed to only a partial postponement for now, until January, to give the review committee time.
A U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss legal matters, said the government has not yet filed paperwork asking the military commission review court to review the Guantanamo judge’s ruling. In response to a question about whether the White House was involved in the decision to appeal the ruling, the official said: No.
While families of some victims and others insist the September 11 trials and possible death sentences will continue, legal experts say it’s not clear that could ever happen. If the 9/11 cases clear the hurdles of trial, sentencing, and sentencing, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would likely hear many more cases in the context of any death penalty appeal.
The issues include the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videos, whether the rescission of Austin’s plea deal constituted unlawful interference, and whether the torture of the men marred subsequent interrogations by “clean teams” of FBI agents that did not involve violence. .
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