Austin said the decision-making authority for this case should rest with him.
U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin talks to the media at the seventh gathering of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group at Ramstein air base in Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany, on March 19, 2024. (Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images)
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked a plea deal made earlier this week that would have spared the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and his two alleged accomplices the death penalty.
In a memorandum addressed to Susan Escallier, the convening authority for military commissions, Austin withdrew Escallier’s authority to enter into pre-trial agreements with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two of his alleged accomplices. He told her that this authority sits with him.
“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009,” Austin stated in the memorandum.
“Effective immediately, I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself,” he said.
On July 31, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Office of Military Commissions (OMC) announced that it had entered into pre-trial agreements for the three defendants after years of incarceration at Guantanamo Bay. The OMC is prosecuting the case.
The plea deal took the death penalty off the table in exchange for life imprisonment for the three defendants: Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin’ Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.
The revoking of the plea deal effectively puts the death penalty back in place.
Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-Pakistani mechanical engineer who was the former head of al-Qaeda’s propaganda department, is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
He allegedly presented the idea of hijacking planes and flying them into U.S. buildings to Osama bin Laden in about 1996 and later helped train some of the hijackers.
Hawsawi has been accused of helping with financial and travel arrangements for the hijackers. Attash is accused of assisting with combat training for the terrorists.
The alleged terrorists have long been incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, where Mohammed is the most well-known inmate. The facility was set up in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush to house foreign terrorist suspects following the 9/11 attacks.
The OMC said on July 31 that the specific terms of the plea deal were not currently publicly available.
The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and injured thousands more. The attacks led to a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
When the Pentagon first announced the plea deal, some family members of the people who were killed in the 9/11 attacks reacted with anger.
FDNY’s Uniformed Fire Association President Andrew Ansbro, who survived the 9/11 attacks, also condemned the deal, saying that thousands of firefighters felt “betrayed and disgusted.”
The Epoch Times has contacted OMC for comment.
