Defense secretary revokes plea deal for accused Sept. 11 plotters

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III on Friday overruled the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices.

The Pentagon announced the decision with the release of a memorandum relieving the senior official at the Defense Department responsible for military commissions of her oversight of the capital case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.

The overseer, retired Brig. Gen. Susan K. Escallier, signed a pretrial agreement Wednesday with Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi that exchanged guilty pleas for sentences of at most life in prison. In taking away the authority, Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death penalty case. He left Escallier in the role of oversight of Guantánamo’s other cases.

Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.

“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”

Escallier’s approval of the agreement that was reached between prosecutors and the defendants over two years of negotiations had appeared to resolve the case, which had been mired in pretrial hearings since 2012.

Austin was traveling abroad and returned to the United States later that day.

By then, prosecutors in the case had alerted the decision to family members of those killed in the attacks, some of whom expressed disappointment and anger that a death sentence was no longer possible. So did Republican leaders.

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longtime Republican leader, called the plea agreement “a revolting abdication of the government’s responsibility to defend America and provide justice.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., called the deal “disgraceful and an insult to the victims of the attacks,” and introduced legislation intended to nullify it.

But Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chair of the Judiciary Committee, hailed the plea agreement as a “small measure of justice and finality to the victims and their loved ones.”

A senior Pentagon official said that the decision was the secretary’s alone and that the White House had no involvement. The official said Austin had never supported a plea deal and wanted the military commission trials to proceed.

Austin’s action was met with disbelief by lawyers at Guantánamo Bay who were preparing for a hearing, possibly as soon as Wednesday, for the judge in the case, Col. Matthew N. McCall, to question Mohammed about whether he understood and voluntarily agreed with the plea.

“If the secretary of defense issued such an order, I am respectfully and profoundly disappointed that after all of these years the government still has not learned the lessons of this case and the mischief that results from disregarding due process and fair play,” said Gary D. Sowards, Mohammed’s lead defense counsel.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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