Last week, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin revoked the plea agreements with three suspects involved in the planning of the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon, according to a statement from the Pentagon on Monday. Austin, as the head of the Pentagon, was completely unaware of the plea agreements prior to their revocation.
A Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh stated, as reported by Reuters, that the Guantanamo war court, responsible for handling the agreements, operated independently throughout the process and the Defense Secretary was not consulted. “The Defense Secretary was undoubtedly as surprised as we were,” Singh said.
She added that when the deal was made public, Austin was on a plane returning from the Philippines to the United States.
Last Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two associates, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who were charged with orchestrating the 9/11 terror attacks, had agreed to pre-trial plea agreements.
On Friday, Austin also revoked the plea agreements of the three 9/11 suspects and personally took over the oversight of the Guantanamo war court. Susan Escallier, who previously oversaw the court, will now handle other cases at Guantanamo.
Austin’s decision implies that these three individuals may ultimately face a death penalty trial, with the military commission trials set to continue.
The Pentagon has not disclosed specific details about the agreements. An unnamed US official told Reuters that the plea agreements likely included guilty pleas in exchange for avoiding a death sentence.
Many Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have strongly criticized the plea agreements reached.
Mohammed is currently detained at the US military prison in Guantanamo. The military prison was established by then-President George W. Bush in 2002 to detain foreign armed suspects involved in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
Mohammed is accused of plotting the conspiracy to hijack commercial planes and crash them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. It is well known that the 9/11 attacks resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths and plunged the United States into the nearly two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.