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A plea deal for alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and two accomplices was abruptly revoked on Friday, just two days after it was reached.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the change in a memo relieving Guantánamo Bay war court overseer Susan K Escallier of duty over the capital case.
“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,” Austin wrote in the memo, obtained by The New York Times.
The decision effectively canceled the deal — which would’ve seen Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi get life sentences — and put a potential death sentence back on the table.
After the plea deal was announced on Wednesday, some families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the 2001 terror attacks said they were disappointed with the decision.
“We waited patiently for a long time. I wanted the death penalty — the government has failed us,” Daniel D’Allara, whose brother, NYPD officer John D’Allara, was killed on 9/11, told The New York Post.
Terry Strada, national chairperson of 9/11 Families United, told The Associated Press she wished the case had gone to a full trial.
“For me personally, I wanted to see a trial,” she said. “And they just took away the justice I was expecting, a trial and the punishment.”
Republican members of Congress also spoke out against the deal.
Earlier Friday, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) opened an investigation into the Biden administration’s role in securing the plea.
The deal was a “gut punch to many of the victims’ families,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) wrote on Friday in a letter to Austin.
Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-born Al-Qaeda terrorist, often referred to by his initials KSM, was born in Kuwait, educated in the US, and later fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
In 1996, he presented Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden with the plan to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into sensitive sites across the US for the attack that later became 9/11.
The eventual plot targeted the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City as well as the Pentagon. A third hijacked plane, bound for the US Capitol, crashed in Pennsylvania.
KSM was hunted down and captured in Pakistan in 2003, and subject to torture at secret CIA “black site” prisons, including rectal rehydration, stress positions, and sleep deprivation, as well as waterboarding, an interrogation technique meant to simulate the experience of drowning.
The conspiracy case against the trio of plotters has been in pretrial proceedings for more than a decade.
Defense lawyers argued that the government’s repeated use of torture in the men’s detention — Mohammed alone was waterboarded 183 times — contaminated the evidence that would appear at a future trial.
“At the heart of the commissions’ problems is their original sin, torture,” John Baker, former defense counsel at the Military Commissions Defense Organization, once testified at the Senate in 2021. “The United States chose to secretly detain and torture the men it now seeks to punish.”
Those issues will likely resurface in court now that the case is back on.
The process to try KSM and his accomplices at a military court at Guantánamo, which operates under different rules than the normal US criminal legal system, has been no stranger to sudden changes, including an 18-month pause during the height of the Covid pandemic, and an Obama administration plan to try the plotter in New York, which was rejected by local officials and Congress.
The detention process at Guatánamo has long been criticized by human rights groups.
After the plea deal was announced, Amnesty International USA told The Independent that while it was glad some measure of “accountability” had been secured for the plotters of the attack, the plea deal also meant “there is finally an outcome for at least some of the accused, who were tortured and then languished in detention without trial for more than two decades.”
