WASHINGTON: A US military judge has reinstated plea agreements for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants, an official said on Thursday, some three months after Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin scrapped the deals.

The agreements — which are understood to take the death penalty off the table — had triggered anger among some relatives of victims of the 2001 attacks, and Austin said that both they and the American public deserved to see the defendants stand trial.

“I can confirm that the military judge has ruled that the pretrial agreements for the three accused are valid and enforceable,” the US official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The prosecution has the opportunity to appeal the ruling, but it was not immediately clear if they would do so.

Prosecution has chance to appeal the ruling

Pentagon spokesman Major General Pat Ryder said, “We are reviewing the decision and don’t have anything further at this time.”

The plea deals with Khalid Sheikh and two alleged accomplices — Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi — were announced in late July.

The decision appeared to have moved their long-running cases towards resolution after years of being bogged down in pre-trial maneuverings while the defendants remained held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.

But Austin withdrew the agreements two days after they were announced, saying the decision should be his given its significance. He said, “The families of the victims, our service members and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out in this case.”

Much of the legal jousting surrounding the men’s cases has focused on whether they could be tried ‘fairly’ after having undergone ‘methodical torture’ at the hands of CIA in the years after 9/11 — a thorny issue that the plea agreements would have avoided.

Khalid Sheikh was regarded as one of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted and intelligent lieutenants before his March 2003 capture in Pakistan. He then spent three years in secret CIA prisons before arriving at Guantanamo in 2006.

The trained engineer — who said he masterminded the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z” — was allegedly involved in a string of major plots against the United States, where he had attended university.

Bin Attash, a Saudi of Yemeni origin, allegedly trained two of the hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks, and his US interrogators also said he confessed to buying the explosives and recruiting members of the team that killed 17 sailors in an attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

Two years after the US invasion of Afghanistan, both Attash and Hawsawi had fled to Pakistan where they were captured in 2003. Both were held in a network of secret prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.

The US held roughly 800 prisoners in Guantanamo, an isolated naval base, in a bid to keep the defendants from claiming rights under US law though many of them have since slowly been repatriated to other countries.

While Joe Biden had pledged before his election to try to shut down Guantanamo, but it remains open.

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2024