Lawyer for news organizations presses Guantanamo judge to make public a plea deal for 9/11 accused

FORT MEADE, Md. — A lawyer for news organizations urged the US military commission at Guantanamo Bay to dissolve the seals the plea agreement affected by the accused mastermind of 9/11 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others, who say the public has a constitutional right and compelling need to follow one of the “most controversial, debated and argued against prosecutions to have taken place in this country.”

The settlement was reached in August by the three suspects, their US prosecutors and the top Guantanamo Commission official, but was abruptly withdrawn by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin just days after it became public. It has become one of the most hotly debated chapters in more than a decade of military hearings related to the September 11, 2001, attacks, killing nearly 3,000 people and sparking long-running U.S. military invasions abroad.

The plea deal would have spared Mohammed and two co-defendants the risk of the death penalty in exchange for their guilty pleas in the al-Qaeda attacks.

After news of the deal broke, leading Republican lawmakers denounced the deal and the White House expressed concerns. Families of the victims expressed varying degrees of shock and approval for the plea deal, which was intended to resolve more than a decade of pretrial hearings. legally problematic case for the government.

Austin said he withdrew the military commission’s approval of the settlement he had decided The responsibility for such a serious decision should lie with him as Minister of Defense. Mohammed and the two co-defendants have filed a complaint, saying Austin’s action was illegal and that the actions of the Biden administration, lawmakers and others amounted to improper outside influence in the case.

Seven news organizations — Fox News, NBC, NPR, The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Univision — challenged the sealing of the plea deal.

Friday’s hearing highlighted the ad hoc nature of the military commission, which U.S. leaders created to try violent extremists in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks. The lawyers and judge on Friday veered between civilian and military legal precedents. their arguments for and against disclosing the terms of the plea deal.

The hearing also highlighted the obstacles the public, including news organizations, face in obtaining information about the proceedings against the September 11 defendants and the several dozen other remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In civil courts, a plea deal is traditionally a matter of public record.

Both the defense and prosecutors in the case asked the committee judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, to deny the news organizations’ request to make the plea deal public.

They argued that it would have to wait until the public became aware of all the terms of the deal that the government made with the defendants Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Prosecutors and defense attorneys offered different proposals for how long we should wait — until rulings are issued on the challenge to Austin’s overturning of the plea deal, or until after a military sentencing panel ever hears the case, or forever.

Prosecutors were concerned about an “oversaturation of information” about the men’s willingness to plead guilty, which would jeopardize a future sentencing panel, lead prosecutor Clay Trivett told McCall.

Attorney Walter Ruiz, representing Hawsawi, said “press gluttony and profiteering” prompted the news media’s request to make the terms public. Ruiz criticized news organizations for making the existence of the settlement public, saying they were trying to add to “the debate that they helped create that influenced this process.”

Attorney David Schulz, who represented the seven news outlets, argued that the Guantanamo court had failed to demonstrate any degree of threat to the conduct of the September 11 hearings that warranted violating the public’s legal rights to knowing what courts and the government in general do were hindered. .

“It’s just inappropriate to have a knee-jerk reaction and say, ‘Well, we have to keep all this from the press,'” Schulz told McCall. “Especially in this context… of one of the most contentious, debated and disputed prosecutions to have taken place in this country and involving… the most horrific crime ever to have occurred on American soil.”

“People have a right to know what’s happening here, and they have a right to know now, not in two or three years or whatever,” Schulz said.

McCall indicated that a decision on the motion to dismiss could come as early as November.