EXCLUSIVE – 9/11 families call Biden administration’s deal to spare terrorists the death penalty a ‘sickening betrayal’

Furious 9/11 families have urged the Biden administration not to spare the attackers the death penalty and have demanded the release of documents that could eventually implicate Saudi Arabia.

Brett Eagleson, who was 15 when he lost his father in the South Tower nearly 22 years ago, called the proposed plea deal for the Guantánamo Bay suspects a “sickening betrayal.”

For Eagleson, a plea deal would mean the defendants could avoid a trial and not reveal answers. Relatives of the 2,977 Americans killed in the attack have had an agonizing wait to hear.

“To the victims of 9/11, we have been fighting for peace, closure and accountability for 22 years,” he told DailyMail.com. “We need to hear what KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) and these other prisoners have to say.”

Earlier this month, the Pentagon sent a letter to the families of the September 11 victims explaining that plea deals are being explored for chief architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of his alleged co-conspirators.

Under the agreements, they would “accept criminal responsibility for their actions and plead guilty…in exchange for not receiving the death penalty.”

This week, a group of 2,000 9/11 family members denounced the plans and wrote a letter to the Biden administration demanding that they drop the plea deals.

Guilty pleas in exchange for life imprisonment could finally bring to an end the more than 20-year-long case, the longest ever at the war court.

But family members want answers they’ve been waiting for decades for — and believe the proposed deal violates longstanding policies that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists.

“The Pentagon is ashamed that it took 20 years to prosecute terrorists,” said 9/11 lawyer Troy Rosasco. “They think this is going to be a one-day news cycle, and they can sweep that under the rug.”

But guilty pleas resulting in life sentences could complicate President Biden’s pledge to close Guantanamo Bay.

The facility has become increasingly secretive in its 20 years in operation, even as it costs taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

“Here we are on the eve of the 22nd anniversary of September 11, and we are once again being kicked in the gut by our own government,” Dennis McGinley, whose brother Daniel McGinley died while working on the 89th floor on September 11. , told DailyMail.com about the potential plea deals.

“U.S. policy should always be — and I thought so — that we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Rosasco added.

In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order requiring government agencies — the CIA, FBI, and Justice Department — to release to the public a wealth of documents that would shed more light on how the attack happened.

The move released more than 900 pages of documents — reversing a move by Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr who invoked the state secret privilege that suppressed information that might have pointed to Saudi involvement in the attack.

However, the administration refused to follow Biden’s order and released only a few sanitized summaries of the information, the September 11 families say.

The reason they don’t release the documents is, according to family members, the same reason they don’t want a trial.

“They are terrified of what KSM and these other detainees will say, not just about the Saudi role in September 11, but what the US intelligence community knew. And they don’t want information to see the light of day,” said Eagleson, founder of 9/11 Justice.

The same DOJ and FBI that prevented the 9/11 families from receiving all the 9/11 evidence are now sending us letters telling us that there will most likely be no trial for (Mohammed’s) prevention of that same evidence. never made public – all to cover up the embarrassment of Saudi Arabia and the US government,” McGinley agreed.

Complicating matters is that President Biden is reportedly considering a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman at the G-20 conference in India next month. The pair could discuss an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel to normalize relations – which would be a huge win for the US president.

“Long ago, the US made a political decision not to embarrass the Saudis,” Eagleson said. “But we ask that the families of 9/11 be involved in every deal: we want an apology, we want an admission of guilt, we want closure.”

The Saudi government has always denied involvement in the attacks and has sought to move beyond the issue as Bin Salman seeks to modernize and deepen ties with the West.

In 2000, then-Saudi student Omar al-Bayoumi, then age 42, claimed that he met the first two 9/11 hijackers by chance at a restaurant and decided to be hospitable and take them under his wing.

He took them to their flying lessons, secured bank accounts and rented a property for them.

Both the FBI and the 9/11 Commission initially supported al-Bayoumi’s story that he was unaware of their intentions to kill people in their country when they met them.

But last year, the FBI released new documents confirming that a-Bayoumi was an agent in Saudi intelligence who worked with Saudi religious officials and even reported to the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

The two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were known to both Saudi intelligence and the CIA as Al-Qaeda operatives. The CIA had tracked them from a meeting in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, but said they lost track of them when they flew from Bangkok to Los Angeles in 2000.

The CIA failed to inform the FBI that two terrorists had entered the country for over a year (in August 2001), just a month before the fateful attack.

Families of the Sept. 11 victims say there is a slew of documents that could be released to build an even stronger bond between the Saudi kingdom and the Sept. 11 attackers.

“By refusing to give us the documents, we accomplish two things. They’re there, protecting the kingdom from embarrassment, but they’re also protecting our own intelligence shortcomings,” Eagleson said.

They buy billions of dollars worth of US-made weapons, they stabilize global oil markets. So there aren’t many people and there isn’t much willingness to push them much.’

Five al-Qaeda terrorists are accused of hijacking four planes and carrying out the coordinated attacks across the US that led to the deaths of 2,977 people, plus thousands more who died in the following years from inhaling toxic particles that were released in the rubble of the attacks. .

The case against the five men has stalled in a preliminary investigation due to the CIA’s use of torture to extract evidence from the defendants and delays from Covid-19.

Almost ten years after the men’s arraignment, the military judge has not yet set a start date for the trial. American taxpayers have spent well over a million dollars estimated at $161.5 million housing only for 9/11 mastermind KSM.