A US military judge has reinstated plea agreements for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants, three months after the deals were scrapped by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.
The agreements — which are understood to take the death penalty off the table — had triggered anger among some relatives of victims of the 2001 attacks, and Austin has said that both they and the American public deserved to see the defendants stand trial.
The prosecution has the opportunity to appeal Wednesday’s ruling, but it was not immediately clear if they would do so.
Pentagon spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder said in a statement, “We are reviewing the decision and don’t have anything further at this time.”
The plea deals with Mohammed and two alleged accomplices — Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi — were announced in late July.
The decision appeared to have moved their long-running cases toward resolution after years of being bogged down in pre-trial manoeuvrings while the defendants remained held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.
But Austin withdrew the agreements two days after they were announced, saying the decision should be his given its significance.
He subsequently told journalists that “the families of the victims, our service members and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out in this case.”
Torture Much of the legal jousting surrounding the men’s cases has focused on whether they could be tried fairly after having undergone methodical torture at the hands of the CIA in the years after 9/11 — a thorny issue that the plea agreements would have avoided.
“For too long, the US has repeatedly defended its use of torture and unconstitutional military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay,” Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement on Thursday.
Mohammed was regarded as one of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted and intelligent lieutenants before his March 2003 capture in Pakistan.
He then spent three years in secret CIA prisons before arriving at Guantanamo in 2006.
