US Defense Secretary Cancels Deal for Accused 9/11 Mastermind

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday vacated a plea deal reached this week for the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two accomplices, reinstating them as cases punishable by the death penalty.

Lloyd took the action two days after the military commission at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, announced that the official assigned to oversee the court-martial, retired Brigadier General Susan Escallier, had reached plea agreements with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two defendants accused of being accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, in the attacks.

Letters sent to families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in al-Qaeda attacks said the court settlement stipulated that the three would be sentenced to life in prison at most.

In an order released late Friday, Austin wrote that he had decided that he had the authority to make a decision on whether to accept the settlements. Austin rescinded Escallier’s approval.

Some families of the attack victims condemned the deal for eliminating any chance of full trials and possible death sentences. Republicans were quick to criticize President Joe Biden’s administration for the deal, though after it was announced the White House said it had no prior knowledge of it.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, condemned the settlement in a social media post earlier Friday, calling it “disgraceful.”

Cotton said he had introduced a bill that would mandate that defendants charged with the Sept. 11 attacks face trial and the possibility of the death penalty.

Mohammed — considered by the United States to be the main mastermind behind the attack in which hijacked passenger planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania — and the two other defendants were expected to formally enter their plea agreements as early as next week.

Authorities captured Mohammed in 2003. He was waterboarded 183 times while in CIA custody before arriving at Guantanamo, where he was subjected to other forms of torture and coercive interrogation.

The U.S. military commission overseeing the cases of five defendants has been bogged down in pretrial hearings and other preliminary legal actions since 2008.

The use of torture has been one of the biggest obstacles to US attempts to try the men at the Guantanamo military commission, because of the inadmissibility of evidence relating to mistreatment.

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