US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has revoked plea deals for three men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. According to the memo: It was sent to Susan Escalier, who is overseeing the war tribunal hearings.
The short-lived agreement came 16 years after the prosecution of the three began.
Escalie announced on Wednesday that he had reached an agreement with the alleged mastermind of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices, Walid Mohammed Saleh Mubarak bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam Al-Hawsawi.
Instead of the three pleading guilty, they Sentenced to life imprisonmentThe New York Times reported.
The memo states that Austin argued that “due to the importance of the decision to enter into pretrial agreements with the defendants in the above cases, responsibility for such decisions should rest with me as the senior convening authority.”
For some victims’ families, the deal Escalier struck destroyed any chance of a full trial that could have ended in a death sentence, giving people the chance to speak to the men accused of killing their loved ones. According to the Washington Post.
“I wanted a trial for people who weren’t tortured, but they were not given the opportunity to have justice served and this is the path to verdict and closure,” Terri Kaye Rockefeller, 74, whose sister Laura was killed on 9/11, told The Washington Post.
The initial news of the plea deal was reported by Mitch McConnell and J.D. Vance Condemning the deal, New York congresswoman Elise StefanickHe accused the Biden-Harris administration of betraying the American people.
However, a senior Pentagon official told The New York Times that the president and vice president had no involvement in Austin’s controversial decision to withdraw from the agreement.
Mohammed and the other defendants were expected to formally file pleas under the agreement as early as next week.
Mohammed allegedly masterminded a plot to fly hijacked civilian planes into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into a 20-year war in Afghanistan.
The U.S. military commission overseeing the cases of five defendants in the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been bogged down in pretrial hearings and other preliminary court proceedings since 2008. The torture the defendants suffered while in CIA custody has delayed the cases, and the prospects for a full trial and sentencing remain unclear, in part because evidence related to torture is inadmissible.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
