Special to the Vanguard
Washington – On Friday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin, III, overruled prosecutors and Brig. General Susan Escallier, the Guantánamo military commission’s convening authority, revoking a plea agreement reached earlier this week with ACLU client Khalid Shaikh Mohammad.
In exchange for a guilty plea, the U.S. government had agreed to life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.
“By revoking a signed plea agreement, Secretary Austin has prevented a guilty verdict in the most important criminal case of the 21st century,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “This rash act also violates the law, and we will challenge it in court.”
The Pentagon, said the NY Times, announced the decision in a “memorandum relieving the senior official at the Defense Department responsible for military commissions of her oversight of the capital case against Khalid Shaikh 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 NY Times wrote Friday that, in “taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case. He left Ms. 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,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon (writing) “Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”
“It’s stunning that Secretary Austin betrayed 9/11 family members seeking judicial finality while recklessly setting aside the judgment of his own prosecutors and the Convening Authority, who are actually steeped in the 9/11 case,” Romero said. “Politics and command influence should play no role in this legal proceeding. Yet, Secretary Austin dishonored an agreement reached after years of hard work and painstaking consultation by all the parties involved.”
The move continues the Biden administration’s quixotic approach to the death penalty.
Romero pointed out, “It’s also more than a little ironic that Secretary Austin’s gung-ho insistence on executing the 9/11 defendants directly contradicts the Biden Administration’s public commitment to ending the death penalty.”
Moreover, he noted, “The United States has spent decades and tens of millions of dollars trying to secure a death sentence that cannot be upheld in the face of the government’s torture.”
The plea deal would have put an end to this episode, but now, Romero believes that unlikely.
“In the unlikely event that years from now the 9/11 case proceeds to trial, any military commission verdict the government secures will collapse on appeal once it reaches the federal courts. No federal court will uphold a death penalty conviction of tortured defendants in the inherently unjust military commissions,” he continued.
Romero concluded, “After over 20 years, it’s time for our government to accept the defendants’ guilty pleas as the best solution in a terrible circumstance. The 9/11 families and the American people deserve closure and adherence to due process principles that are the bedrock of our democracy.”
