US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has cancelled a plea agreement reached earlier this week for the accused mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks and two other defendants, AP News informed.
Austin wrote in a ruling released Friday night that he had decided the authority to make the plea decision belonged to him and as a result rescinded the approval of retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier. Earlier, the military commission at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba announced that Escallier had approved plea deals with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accused co-conspirators in the attacks, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
Letters to the families of the dead and victims of Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks said the plea agreement stipulated that all three would serve a maximum of life in prison. Some families have condemned the deal for depriving them of full trials and possible death sentences.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the main defendant in the World Trade Centre, Pentagon and Pennsylvania airfield terrorist attacks, and two other defendants were formally due to submit their confessions under the agreement as early as next week.
The US military commission overseeing the cases of the five accused in the 9/11 attacks has stalled in pre-trial hearings and other preliminary procedures since 2008, with the issue of torture of detainees and the subsequent inadmissibility of evidence a major stumbling block.
Last year, a military commission declared a fifth defendant mentally incompetent. The commission cited post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis and linked this to torture and solitary confinement for four years in CIA custody before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay. Another defendant in the 9/11 case at Guantanamo Bay was still negotiating a possible plea bargain.
The plea agreement was the only possible way to resolve the long-drawn-out and legally complex 9/11 cases, according to J. Wells Dixon, a staff attorney at the Centre for Constitutional Rights. He also condemned the defence secretary in the context of giving in to political pressure by terminating plea agreements.
President Joe Biden in 2023 refused to approve some of the conditions sought by lawyers for those accused of the 11 September 2001 attacks as part of a possible plea bargain, rejecting presidential assurances that the five men would not face solitary confinement and would receive medical treatment for their injuries.
