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US defence secretary Lloyd Austin has withdrawn plea deals reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind behind the September 11 2001 terror attacks and two accomplices, an extraordinary about-face in politically charged cases that have dragged on for years.
The brief memorandum published on Friday came just two days after the Pentagon announced Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi had reached deals with the head of the military tribunal in Guntánamo Bay. The three men had been held at the US military base in Cuba for nearly two decades, where they faced the death penalty.
Austin also revoked the authority of retired Brigadier General Susan Escallier, who oversaw the Guantánamo war court, to enter into the agreements with the three prisoners, reserving such power for himself. Escallier was appointed to her post in 2023.
“I have determined that in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009,” Austin wrote in the memo addressed to Escallier.
“Effective immediately, I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself. Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024” in the cases in question, the memo stated.
The agreements reached on Wednesday had prompted a fierce backlash from Republicans, who accused the Biden administration of negotiating with individuals accused of taking part in a terror attack that killed nearly 3,000 people and dramatically altered US domestic and foreign policy.
The party’s Senate leader Mitch McConnell called the decision “a revolting abdication of the government’s responsibility”. It had also led to some criticism from the families of those who died on September 11, when attackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.
A lawyer for Mohammed did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The exact terms of the three men’s original pleas were not disclosed by the US government, but they were expected to plead guilty and avoid a full trial. The proceedings had been mired in legal and ethical controversy over the length of the defendants’ custody without trial and instances of torture.
Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, was captured in 2003 in Pakistan, and held at CIA prisons before being sent to Guantánamo Bay, where a military detention facility was opened during the administration of George W Bush to house prisoners captured during the US’s “war on terror” following the September 11 attacks. The agency has since been found to have subjected him to waterboarding, a form of torture, at least 183 times.
A report by a Senate select committee in 2014 found that “internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of [Khaled Sheikh Mohammed] as evolving into a ‘series of near drownings’”.
Harrowing accounts of such techniques sparked a fierce debate within the US over the legality of cases against Mohammed and other prisoners, and the ongoing litigation became a deeply divisive topic in Washington.