Pentagon cancels 9/11 'Mastermind' plea deal

This plea deal allowed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his two co-defendants to escape a trial where they would have been sentenced to death and received life in prison instead.

On Friday, August 2, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin canceled the plea deal arranged for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, also referred to as “KSM” (short for “sheikh”), who is believed to be the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. As stated in a Pentagon note, he took up the issue “given the importance of this decision”. For the two co-defendants, Walid Ben Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who are being held at the US military base in Guantanamo and are affected by the agreement that spared them the death penalty, the revocation is effective.

“I have decided, given the importance of the decision to enter into pre-trial plea agreements with the accused (…) , that the responsibility for such a decision should fall to me ,” the minister wrote in a brief memo. After Osama bin Laden, the most despised person associated with September 11, surprised many relatives of the almost 3,000 deceased and provoked fierce criticism in the Republican side, an agreement was made on Wednesday for the man who remained.

Notably, these agreements were labeled as “unconscionable” in a letter to the secretary written by Republican House Armed Services Committee chairman Mike Rogers. The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, called them “a slap in the face” to the families of the victims, and Senator J. D. Vance, who is running with Donald Trump in November, said at a rally that the country “needed a president who kills terrorists and not negotiates with them.”

“Terrorist Entrepreneur”

Mr. Austin further stated in his memo that he was withdrawing Susan K. Escallier’s authority over the three cases he is taking up, as she was the Defense Department’s top official for military commissions. It stated, “In the exercise of my authority, I am revoking the three plea agreements, effective immediately.” on Wednesday.

Investigators have heard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed brag about having orchestrated and prepared the bloodiest assaults in recorded history. He has been a prisoner at the incredibly secure Guantanamo prison for eighteen years.

He is a Pakistani who was reared in Kuwait and is reported to have proposed the notion of plane crashes to Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qaeda, in 1996. Even though he did not initially join al-Qaeda, he was described as a “terrorist entrepreneur” in the official 9/11 report, having the ideas and drive for attacks but lacking the resources and coordination to carry them out.

Never rendered a verdict

According to US media accounts, the agreement spared him from a trial where he might have received a life sentence instead of the death penalty. In one of the most horrific incidents in US history—the attacks on New York and Washington—the three men are charged with both terrorism and the death of almost 3,000 people.

They have never been put on trial because the question of whether the evidence against them was corrupted by the torture they endured in covert CIA prisons has hampered efforts to put them on trial. The attorneys for the detainees announced in March 2022 that talks were in progress for a potential plea agreement as opposed to a trial before the military court in Guantanamo.

The defendants specifically requested a guarantee that they would stay in solitary confinement at Guantanamo instead of being moved to a federal prison on the American continent.

Pentagon cancels 9/11 ‘Mastermind’ plea deal

By ki0nk

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