Plea agreements offer 9/11 suspects lifelong prison sentences, avoiding death penalty

A Pentagon appeals panel on December 30 upheld a military judge's decision that the plea agreements in the Sept. 11 case are valid, paving the way for a potential guilty plea hearing next week with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge in the case, had previously ruled that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III exceeded his authority and acted too late when he rescinded the three plea deals on August 2, just two days after a senior Pentagon official had signed them, Caliber.Az reports, citing foreign media.

Under the pretrial agreements, or PTAs, Mohammed and two co-defendants had agreed to plead guilty to war crimes charges in exchange for life sentences instead of facing the death penalty. Their case, which accuses them of conspiring with the hijackers responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon, has been tied up in legal proceedings since 2012.

“We agree with the military judge that the secretary did not have authority to revoke respondents’ existing PTAs because the respondents had started performance of the PTAs,” the three-judge panel wrote in a 21-page decision released on December 30.

Families of Sept. 11 victims, both in support of and against the plea deals, had been anxiously awaiting the panel's ruling. The decision is significant as Col. McCall prepares for a two-week visit to the Guantánamo Bay war court on Saturday, where he will separately examine the pleas of Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al Hawsawi.

The back-and-forth nature of the plea deal process has been described as agonizing by many. If no further appeals are filed, the January proceedings at Guantánamo Bay could mark the first step in a lengthy process extending through 2025. This would involve the selection of a military jury to hear the case, witness testimony from victims, and the deliberation of a potential sentence.

The plea deals had been reached after over two years of negotiations led by Admiral Rugh’s team and were approved by Susan K. Escallier, the official appointed by Austin to oversee the military commissions. Now, prosecutors must decide whether to challenge the deals in a higher court.

Mohammed’s defence team had pushed for swift progress over the summer, arguing that the deals had been signed, filed with the court, and that plea proceedings had already been set in motion before Austin’s intervention.

Austin, who was travelling in Asia when the deal was first announced, signed the document to undo it upon his return to Washington after consulting with his staff.

Austin has recently taken control of plea negotiations in two other ongoing court cases at Guantánamo Bay, including one involving a Saudi man accused of plotting the 2000 U.S.S. Cole bombing, and another involving an Indonesian man accused of masterminding the 2002 Bali bombing. However, no agreements have been reached in those cases.

The appeals panel concluded that while the defence secretary has the authority to prevent war court officials from negotiating plea deals, that power does not extend to retroactively undoing agreements that have already been made.

By Tamilla Hasanova