Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has overruled a recent plea agreement with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and two alleged accomplices, reinstating their case as a death-penalty trial.
The Pentagon announced this decision on Friday, relieving retired Brig. Gen. Susan K. Escallier of her oversight of the capital case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused … responsibility should rest with me as the superior convening authority,” Secretary Austin wrote in the public statement.
Earlier this week, Escallier had signed a pretrial agreement with the defendants that would have exchanged guilty pleas for sentences that would have ruled out the death penalty.
Just prior to this reversal, it was reported that Mohammed and his accomplices had agreed to plead guilty, a move that pointed to a long-awaited resolution for an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The men were expected to enter their pleas at the military commission at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as soon as next week, with defense lawyers negotiating life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas.
The proposed plea agreement, however, was met with mixed reactions. Terry Strada, who leads a group of families of the direct victims of the attacks, expressed frustration over the plea deal, taking aim at the defendents: “They were cowards when they planned the attack,” she said. “And they’re cowards today.”
The plea agreement came more than 20 years after the attacks, where militants commandeered commercial airliners and used them to strike the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
The attack prompted President George W. Bush’s administration to then launch the war on terror, leading to U.S. military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and years of operations against armed extremist groups throughout the Middle East.
With Secretary Austin’s decision, the case now returns to its original status as a death-penalty trial.
