Why the US is trying to prevent a 9/11 guilty plea

The man accused of masterminding the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States will no longer plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals reached last year.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often known as KSM, was due to plead before a war tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeastern Cuba, where he has been held in a military prison for nearly two decades.

Mohammed is Guantánamo’s most notorious detainee and one of the last detainees at the base.

But a federal appeals court late Thursday halted proceedings scheduled to consider the government’s requests to abandon plea deals for Mohammed and two co-defendants, which it said would cause “irreparable” harm to both him and to the public.

A three-judge panel said the delay “should in no way be construed as a decision on the merits” but was intended to allow the court time to receive a full brief and hear arguments “on an expeditious basis.”

The delay means the matter will now fall to the incoming Trump administration.

In a hearing that began Friday morning, Mohammed was to plead guilty to his role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when hijackers seized airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in the United States. outskirts of Washington. Another plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

Mohammed has been charged with crimes including conspiracy and murder, and the charge sheet lists 2,976 victims.

He had previously said that he planned “Operation 9/11 from A to Z,” conceiving the idea of ​​training pilots to fly commercial airliners into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, leader of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda. in the mid-1990s.

Friday’s hearing was scheduled to take place in a courtroom on the base, where relatives of those killed and the press would have been sitting in a viewing gallery behind thick glass.

The pretrial hearings, held in a military court at the naval base, have dragged on for more than a decade, complicated by questions about whether the torture Mohammed and other defendants suffered while in U.S. custody tainted the evidence.

Following his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, Mohammed spent three years in secret CIA prisons known as “black sites,” where he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times, among other so-called “advanced interrogation techniques” that They included sleep deprivation and forced nudity.

Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: How Guantanamo Became the World’s Most Notorious Prison, says the use of torture has made it “virtually impossible to bring these cases to trial in a way that respects the rule of law and American jurisprudence.” .

“It is apparently impossible to present evidence in these cases without the use of evidence derived from torture. Furthermore, the fact that these people have been tortured adds another level of complexity to the prosecutions,” he says.

The case also falls on military commissions, which operate under different rules than the traditional US criminal justice system and slow down the process.

The agreement was reached last summer, after two years of negotiations.

Not all details of the agreements reached with Mohammed and two of his co-defendants have been made public.

We know that a deal means he would not face a death penalty trial.

At a court hearing on Wednesday, his legal team confirmed he had agreed to plead guilty to all charges. Mohammed did not personally address the court, but he interacted with his team as they reviewed the agreement, making minor corrections and wording changes with the prosecution and the judge.

If the agreements are upheld and the court accepts the pleas, the next steps would be to appoint a military jury, known as a panel, to hear evidence at a sentencing hearing.

Lawyers described this in court on Wednesday as a form of public trial, in which survivors and relatives of those killed would have the opportunity to give statements.

Under the agreement, the families would also be able to ask questions of Mohammed, who must “answer their questions completely and truthfully,” the lawyers say.

For the prosecution to accept the agreements it was essential to have the guarantee “that we could present all the evidence that we thought was necessary to establish a historical record of the defendant’s participation in what occurred on 9/11,” said prosecutor Clayton G. Trivett Jr. said in court Wednesday.

Even if the allegations go forward, it would be many months before these proceedings began and a sentence was finally handed down.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin named the senior official who signed the agreement. But he was traveling at the time it was signed and was reportedly caught off guard, according to the New York Times.

Days later, he attempted to revoke it, saying in a memo: “The responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the higher authority.”

However, both a military judge and a military appeals panel ruled that the agreement was valid and that Austin had acted too late.

In another attempt to block the deal, the government this week asked a federal appeals court to intervene.

In a legal filing, he said Mohammed and the other two men were accused of “perpetrating the most heinous criminal act on American soil in modern history” and that enforcing the agreements would “deprive the American government and people of a trial.” public regarding the defendants’ guilt and the possibility of the death penalty, even though the Secretary of Defense has legally withdrawn those agreements.

Following the deal’s announcement last summer, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the party’s leader in the chamber, issued a statement calling it “a sickening abdication of the government’s responsibility to defend America and provide justice.”

Some families of those killed in the attacks have also criticized the agreement, saying it is too lenient or lacks transparency.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today program last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the attacks, described the deal as “giving the detainees at Guantanamo Bay what they want.”

Ms Strada, national president of the 9/11 Families United campaign group, said: “This is a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other two, it is a victory for them.”

Other families see the settlements as a path to convictions in complex, long-running trials and were disappointed by the government’s latest intervention.

Stephan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attacks, had flown to Guantanamo Bay to see Mohammed plead guilty.

“What is the ultimate goal of the Biden administration? Then they get the reprieve and this continues into the next administration. To what end? Think about the families. Why are they prolonging this saga?” said.

Gerhardt told the BBC that the agreements were “not a victory” for the families, but that it was “time to find a way to close this, to convict these men.”

Base families were meeting with the press when news of the delay became public.

“It was supposed to be a moment of healing. We will board that plane still with that deep sense of pain; there is no end to this,” one said.

Mohammed has been held in a military prison at Guantanamo Bay since 2006.

The prison opened 23 years ago – on January 11, 2002 – during the “war on terrorism” that followed the 9/11 attacks, as a place to hold terrorism suspects and “unlawful enemy combatants.”

Most of those detained here were never charged and the military prison has faced criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations for its treatment of detainees. The majority have already been repatriated or resettled in other countries.

The prison currently houses 15 people, the smallest number ever recorded in its history. All but six have been charged or convicted of war crimes.