A military appeals court has ruled against the Defense Department’s attempt to throw out the Biden regime’s plea deals with three key conspirators of the 9/11 attacks, which spare them the death penalty.
Pretrial hearings for the key 9/11 attack coconspirators, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, have been underway for more than a decade, and the plea agreements were reached last summer, US News reported.
Military prosecutors and defense attorneys for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached the plea agreements after two years of government-approved negotiations.
Supporters of the plea agreements see them as a way of resolving the legally troubled case against the men at the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.
The three al-Qaida terrorists agreed to plead guilty to plotting the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history in exchange for being spared the possibility of the death penalty.
Following the plea deal, Rear Admiral Aaron Rugh, the chief prosecutor in the cases, said in a letter to families of the victims, that “in exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet.”
The terrorists also agreed “to a process to respond to questions submitted” by victims’ family members “regarding their roles and reasons for conducting the September 11 attacks.”
After the plea agreements were announced, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin quickly issued a brief order saying he would nullify the deals, citing the gravity of the 9/11 attacks.
Austin argued that as defense secretary, “he should decide on any plea agreements that would spare the defendants the possibility of execution.”
But Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, the military judge who heard the case, agreed with defense attorneys that “Austin had no legal authority to reject a decision already approved by the Guantanamo court’s top authority.”
The Defense Secretary now has the option of taking his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
On Sept. 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, flying the first two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the third into the Pentagon. The fourth hijacked plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania during a passenger revolt.
The coordinated suicide attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and led to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the launch of George W. Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”
There are currently 26 Islamists being held at Guantanamo, down from the peak population of about 700 prisoners. Fourteen of those men are awaiting transfers to countries willing to accept them after being after U.S. authorities waived their prosecutions and cleared them as security risks.
Of those remaining at Guantanamo, Mohammed, his 9/11 co-defendants, and seven others still have active cases, according to US News. Two others have reportedly been convicted and sentenced by the military commission.
Mohammed, Attash and al-Hawsawi are scheduled to have sentencing hearings starting in summer 2025, where victims’ family members will have the opportunity “to testify about the impact the September 11 attacks have had” and “provide a victim impact statement that will be considered by the military jury in determining a sentence,” according to the prosecutor’s letter.