By The newspaper
03 Aug 2024, 09:26 AM EDT
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin abruptly revoked a plea deal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, and two accomplices, and relieved the supervisor in charge after years of efforts to reach a deal to close the cases.
Two days earlier, the Pentagon had announced that it had reached a plea agreement with Sheikh Mohammed – better known as KSM – and two other defendants: Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
In a surprise memo released last night, Austin said responsibility for such a momentous decision “should rest with me” and that he was backing away from all three pretrial agreements that had eliminated the death penalty for all three men.
The memo last night was addressed to Susan Escallier, the official who runs the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and said the defense secretary would immediately withdraw his authority over the cases and “reserve that authority for (himself).”
Prosecutors in the case had been discussing the possibility of reaching a deal for more than two years, which would have avoided a long and complicated trial over questions about the admissibility of evidence obtained during torture, he said. CNN.
Following the announced plea agreement on July 31, Mohammed, bin Attash and al-Hawsawi were scheduled to plead guilty next week before the military commission at the U.S. prison in Cuba.
Defense attorneys had requested that the defendants receive life sentences in exchange for guilty pleas, according to federal government letters received by relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
Pentagon officials declined to make public the terms of the plea agreement, he said. Associated Press. The U.S. government’s annulment of the plea deal with the defendants comes more than 16 years after their prosecution began for the 2001 attack, when al-Qaeda attackers hijacked four commercial airliners to use as missiles and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC/Virginia.
On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, in the worst terrorist attack in the history of the United States. Only 60% of the victims of that day have been identified. And many more have died or reported illnesses in subsequent years as a result of the events.
The collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) sent a cloud of thick dust over Lower Manhattan and fires raged for weeks. Thousands of construction workers, police officers, firefighters, volunteers and others spent time working in the soot, often without proper respiratory protection.