US Defense Secretary Rejects Life Sentence Deal for 9/11 Defendants
MINNEAPOLIS, MN.-
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked the country’s plea deal with three defendants charged with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in which they pleaded guilty to the charges in exchange for life sentences.
In a memo released today by the Pentagon, Austin announced the decision to “exercise his authority” to revoke the agreements with the accused: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the attacks and two of his accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, held in the Guantanamo prison (Cuba).
In turn, the Secretary of Defense removed Brigadier General Susan Escallier, who negotiated and reached the agreement with the accused, from her duties as supervisor in the case.
“In light of the importance of the decision to reach a pretrial settlement with the defendants, I have determined that responsibility for that decision must rest with me,” Austin wrote in the memo.
The plea agreement prevented the case from carrying a death sentence, but with today’s decision, that possibility is back on the table.
The defendants have been held at Guantanamo without trial since 2003.
The case has been embroiled in more than a decade of pre-trial proceedings centering on the question of whether torture in secret CIA prisons had tainted the evidence against him.
The suspects are accused of organizing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On that day, 19 men hijacked four commercial airplanes: two of them were crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, another into the Pentagon, outside Washington; and another in a field in Pennsylvania.
In addition to the conspiracy charge, they were charged with committing murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians and terrorism.
Mohammed, a U.S.-educated engineer, was accused of coming up with the idea of hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings. Prosecutors said he pitched the idea to Osama bin Laden in 1996, and then helped train and direct some of the hijackers.
