The US Secretary of Defense has revoked plea deals with alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two alleged accomplices.
United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has revoked plea deals reached with the man accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001 attacks and two accomplices, just two days after announcing a deal that allegedly would have removed the sentence of death from the table.
The agreements, which involved the man considered one of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were revoked on Friday after angering some of the victims’ relatives.
Austin also relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees the Pentagon’s war tribunal at Guantánamo, of her authority to enter into pretrial agreements in the case and took responsibility himself.
“I have determined that in light of the importance of the decision to enter into pretrial agreements with the defendant…responsibility for that decision should rest with me,” Austin said in a memo addressed to Escallier.
“I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements you signed on July 31, 2024 in the aforementioned case,” the memo read.
The Pentagon announced the plea deals on Wednesday but did not elaborate.
The New York Times reported that Mohammed and accomplices, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy in exchange for a life sentence rather than face a trial that could take to their executions.
Mohammed is the best-known inmate at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, which was created in 2002 by then-US President George W. Bush following the attacks.
He is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they are known, killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade war in Afghanistan.
The cases against them were mired in pretrial maneuvering for years while the defendants remained detained at Guantánamo Bay.
Much of the legal dispute centered on the question of whether they could be tried fairly after being subjected to methodical torture at the hands of the CIA in the years following 9/11.
J Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented Guantánamo defendants as well as other detainees who have been cleared of any wrongdoing, hailed plea agreements as the only viable way to resolve the long-stalled issue of 9/11. legally complicated September.
On Friday, Dixon accused Austin of “giving in to political pressure and pushing some of the victims’ family members into an emotional abyss” by rescinding the plea deals.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
