Lawyers for accused 9/11 mastermind battle to let his guilty plea go forward
WASHINGTON — Lawyers for accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are urging a federal appeals panel to allow his planned guilty plea Friday in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a settlement that would spare him and two co-defendants the risk of the death penalty in al-Qaeda’s infamous Sept. 11, 2001, shooting spree. , to attack.
Defense attorneys detailed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s case in a filing Wednesday trying to reach a plea deal that his own military had negotiated and approved as the latest in twenty years of “irregular” and “negligent” mishandling of the case by the US military and successive administrations.
Mohammed will make his case Friday morning in the attacks, in which 19 al-Qaeda hijackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed another in a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people. Relatives of some of the victims are currently gathered in Guantanamo.
Austin unexpectedly reneged on the plea deal after it was announced this summer, and the Biden administration’s Justice Department is trying to prevent Mohammed’s plea from proceeding in a U.S. military commission courtroom.
“An 11-hour stay will only add to the delays and reward the government for its — at best — negligent handling” of the September 11 prosecutions, Mohammed’s lawyers argued in a filing with a federal appeals panel for the District. of Columbia. midnight.
The federal appeals panel appears on track to potentially rule on the Democratic Biden administration’s request on Thursday.
Legal and logistical challenges have stalled the September 11 case in the 17 years since Mohammed, who prosecutors say came up with the idea of using hijacked planes in the attacks, was first charged. The case is still in preliminary hearing, with no trial date set.
Years of defense and prosecution testimony are underway about how much the victims suffered torture of Mohammed and other defendants in CIA custody makes their subsequent statements legally inadmissible.
While the prosecution of the September 11 attacks has dragged on for decades with no conclusion in sight, military prosecutors this summer notified the families of the victims that after more than two years of negotiations had approved a plea deal.
The deal was “the best path to finality and justice,” military prosecutors told families at the time. In it, Mohammed and co-defendants Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty to 2,976 murder charges in exchange for life sentences.
Austin unexpectedly announced on August 2 that he was voiding the plea deal, and he has been fighting to have it thrown out ever since. He states that a decision on the death penalty in an attack as serious as September 11 should only be made by the Minister of Defense.
Defense attorneys say the plea deal is already in effect and Austin has no legal standing to reject it after the fact. The Biden administration went to the federal appeals court on Tuesday after the judge at Guantanamo and a military review panel sided with Austin’s request.
Mohammed’s lawyers argued in the new filing that Austin’s “extraordinary intervention in this case is solely a product of his lack of oversight of his own duly appointed deputy,” meaning the senior Pentagon official who oversaw Guantánamo .
The Justice Department letter earlier this week said the government would suffer irreparable harm if the guilty pleas for Mohammed and the two co-defendants in the September 11 attacks were accepted.
It said the government would be denied the opportunity for a public trial and the opportunity to “seek the death penalty against three men accused of a heinous act of mass murder that caused the deaths of thousands of people and shocked the nation and the world. ”