Pentagon Announces Cancellation of Negotiated Sentence Agreement for 9/11 'Mastermind'

Photo: Alex Brandon Archives Associated Press US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked the plea bargain agreement for the man considered the “mastermind” of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon announced.

Agence France-Presse in Washington

Published on August 2 Updated yesterday at 8:12 p.m.

• United States

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked the plea deal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the “mastermind” of the September 11, 2001 attacks, two days after the highly contested decision that would have spared him the death penalty.

This agreement announced Wednesday for the man who remains, after Osama bin Laden, the most hated figure linked to the September 11 attacks, shocked many relatives of the nearly 3,000 victims and sparked virulent criticism in the Republican camp.

The revocation is also effective for the two co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, detained at the American military base at Guantanamo and also affected by the agreement that would have spared them the death penalty.

“I have decided, given the importance of the decision to enter into pretrial plea agreements with the defendants […], that the responsibility for such a decision should fall to me,” the minister explained in a brief note.

Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee The House of Representatives had notably sent a letter to the minister stating that these agreements were “inadmissible.”

For Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, they were a “slap in the face” to the victims’ families, while Donald Trump’s running mate for the November election, Senator J.D. Vance, declared at a rally that the United States “needs a president who kills terrorists, not negotiates with them.”

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In his memo, the Secretary of Defense adds that he is revoking the authority of Susan K. Escallier, who oversaw the case as the Defense Department’s senior official for military commissions, over the three cases he is taking up.

“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I am revoking the three plea bargains” signed Wednesday, it states.

The agreement concerning him notably allowed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to avoid a trial where he would face the death penalty, in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment, according to the American media.

“Terrorist entrepreneur”

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed boasted to investigators of having imagined and organized the deadliest attacks in history. He has languished in a cell at the ultra-secure Guantanamo Bay prison for 18 years.

Most people know the 59-year-old from the photo taken of him on the night of his capture in 2003, his hair disheveled and his moustache bushy, wearing white pajamas.

A Pakistani raised in Kuwait, he is said to have suggested the idea of ​​crashing planes to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.

Although he did not initially join al-Qaeda, the official 9/11 report called him a “terrorist entrepreneur” who had the motives and ideas for attacks but not the funds and organization to carry them out.

The three men are charged with terrorism and the murder of nearly 3,000 people in the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in one of the most traumatic episodes in U.S. history.

They have never been tried, as the process of bringing them to trial has become bogged down by the question of whether the torture they suffered in secret CIA prisons tainted the evidence against them.

In March 2022, the prisoners' lawyers confirmed that negotiations were underway for a possible plea bargain, rather than a trial before the Guantanamo military tribunal.

The defendants wanted in particular to obtain a guarantee that they would remain in Guantanamo, rather than being transferred to a federal penitentiary on the American continent, in a solitary confinement cell.

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