Plea deals for accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and two others are back on the table, according to multiple reports.
Muhammad, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi agreed in July to plead guilty for their roles in the terror attack in exchange for not facing the death penalty. But Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the plea deals days later, saying the men deserved to face death penalty trials.
“I have long believed that the families of the victims, our service members, and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commissions, commission trials carried out,” Austin said in August when speaking for the first time on his decision to throw out the deals.
But Austin’s authority to make such a move was quickly questioned, and a military judge agreed this week that he had overstepped his power. The order from Air Force Col. Matthew McCall has not yet been officially announced, but was reported Thursday morning by The Associated Press.
The prosecutions of Muhammad, bin Attash and al-Hawsawi have been troubled for years. The three men have been detained at Guantanamo Bay for more than a decade, but before they arrived they were held and tortured at CIA secret prisons.
If the three men were to be convicted and sentenced at trial, their cases would likely be appealed for decades. That could theoretically even lead to release on appeal because they were denied traditional rights of the U.S. judicial system.
Still, many families of the 9/11 victims have insisted on death penalty trials for the men, with 9/11 Families United chair Terry Strada writing in August they “deserve no mercy.”
Muhammad, 59, is considered the “principal architect” of the 9/11 plot and was close with Osama bin Laden. He was captured in a March 2003 raid in Pakistan.
Bin Attash was formally charged with training multiple 9/11 hijackers ahead of the attack, while Al-Hawsawi helped handle al-Qaeda’s finances as the group planned 9/11. Both men were also captured in Pakistan in 2003.
Videos from the CIA interrogations of the three men were destroyed by the agency.
With News Wire Services
