Washington
AP
—
A military appeals court has ruled against Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin attempt to throw away the plea deals reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the September 11 attacks, a US official said.
The decision puts the deals back on track, with the three men having to plead guilty to one of the deadliest attacks ever on the United States in exchange for being spared the possibility of the death penalty. Al Qaeda’s attacks killed nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, and helped fuel U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called the war on terror.
The military appeals court ruled Monday evening, said the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Military prosecutors and lawyers for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached the plea agreements in July after two years of government-approved negotiations.
Supporters of the plea deal see it as a way to resolve the legally problematic case against the U.S. military commission men at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The preliminary investigations against Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been ongoing for more than a decade.
Much of the focus of the pre-trial arguments was on how torture of the men while in CIA custody in the early years after their detention could taint the overall evidence in the case.
Within days of news of the settlement this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullify them. He cited the severity of the September 11 attacks, saying that as defense secretary he would have to decide on plea deals that would spare the suspects the possibility of execution.
Defense lawyers said Austin had no legal authority to overturn a decision already approved by the court’s highest authority at Guantanamo, saying the move amounted to unlawful interference in the case.
The military judge who heard the September 11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, agreed that Austin lacked standing to throw out the settlement agreements after they were on their way. That was the reason for the Ministry of Defense’s appeal to the military appeals court.
Austin now has the opportunity to try his hand at presenting the plea deals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. There was no immediate word from the Pentagon on a next step.