A US military judge is said to have declared agreements between the alleged chief planner of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and two of his co-defendants with the judiciary to be valid. Judge Matthew McCall, a colonel in the Air Force, overturned an order from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to scrap the deals, a US government official who wished to remain anonymous reported on Wednesday (local time). The decision had not yet been officially announced at this point.
The defendant’s agreement to plead guilty would spare the alleged chief planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices the death penalty. Government prosecutors had negotiated the agreements with the men’s defense attorneys, and the chairman of the military commission at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had approved them.
In the attacks carried out by the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, Islamist attackers piloted hijacked passenger planes into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and another plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed.
The Justice Department’s agreement with the suspected terrorists sparked a storm of outrage when it was announced in July, particularly among Republican members of Congress. A short time later, Pentagon chief Austin declared the controversial justice deal invalid.
