WASHINGTON (AP) – A military judge has ruled that plea agreements reached by alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants are valid, voiding an order by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to throw out the deals, an administration official said Wednesday. .
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the order by the judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has not yet been made public or officially announced.
Unless state prosecutors or others seek to challenge the plea deals again, McCall’s ruling means the three 9/11 defendants could soon enter a guilty plea in the U.S. military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, taking a dramatic step toward ending the long-running and legally troubled government prosecution in one of the deadliest attacks on the United States.
The plea deals would spare Mohammed and two co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the risk of the death penalty in exchange for the guilty pleas.
Government prosecutors had negotiated the deals with government-sponsored defense lawyers, and the top military commission official at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had approved the deals.
The appeals in the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people drew immediate political pushback from Republican lawmakers and others after they were made public this summer.
Within days, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a brief order canceling them. Plead deals in possible death penalty cases linked to one of the most serious crimes ever committed on American soil were a significant step that should only be decided by the defense secretary, Austin said at the time.
The deals, and Austin’s efforts to overturn them, have been one of the most troubling episodes in a US prosecution marked by delays and legal difficulties. It includes years of ongoing interrogations to determine the admissibility of statements made by the defendants given their years of torture in CIA custody.
The Pentagon is reviewing the judge’s decision and had no immediate further comment, said Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary.
The New York Times first reported the verdict.
Military officials have not yet posted the judge’s decision on the Guantanamo Military Commission website. But a legal blog that has long covered the Guantanamo courtroom indictments said McCall’s 29-page ruling concludes that Austin lacked the legal authority to throw out the plea deals.
The ruling also calls the timing of Austin’s move “fatal,” after Guantanamo’s top official had already approved the deals, according to the blog, called Lawdragon.
Following Austin’s order would give defense secretaries “absolute veto power” over any action they disagree with, which would violate the presiding officer’s independence over the Guantanamo trials, the legal blog McCall cited in the ruling.
While families of some of the victims and others are determined to see the 9/11 charges proceed to trial and possible death sentences, legal experts say it’s not clear that could ever happen. If the 9/11 cases ever clear the hurdles of trial, convictions and sentences, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would likely hear many of the issues associated with death penalty appeals.
The questions include the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videos, whether Austin’s reversal of the plea deal constituted unlawful interference and whether the torture of the men tainted subsequent interrogations by “clean teams” of FBI agents that did not involve violence.
___
AP writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
