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US defence secretary Lloyd Austin has withdrawn plea offers reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind behind the September 11 2001 terror assaults and two accomplices, a rare about-face in politically charged instances which have dragged on for years.
The transient memorandum revealed on Friday got here simply two days after the Pentagon introduced Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi had reached offers with the pinnacle of the army tribunal in Guntánamo Bay. The three males had been held on the US army base in Cuba for practically twenty years, the place they confronted the dying penalty.
Austin additionally revoked the authority of retired Brigadier Normal Susan Escallier, who oversaw the Guantánamo warfare court docket, to enter into the agreements with the three prisoners, reserving such energy for himself. Escallier was appointed to her publish in 2023.
“I’ve decided that in mild of the importance of the choice to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused within the above-referenced case, duty for such a choice ought to relaxation with me because the superior convening authority beneath the Army Commissions Act of 2009,” Austin wrote within the memo addressed to Escallier.
“Efficient instantly, I hereby withdraw your authority within the above-referenced case to enter right into a pre-trial settlement and reserve such authority to myself. Efficient instantly, within the train of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you simply signed on July 31, 2024” within the instances in query, the memo said.
The agreements reached on Wednesday had prompted a fierce backlash from Republicans, who accused the Biden administration of negotiating with people accused of participating in a terror assault that killed practically 3,000 individuals and dramatically altered US home and overseas coverage.
The social gathering’s Senate chief Mitch McConnell known as the choice “a revolting abdication of the federal government’s duty”. It had additionally led to some criticism from the households of those that died on September 11, when attackers crashed planes into the World Commerce Middle in New York, the Pentagon, and a subject in Pennsylvania.
A lawyer for Mohammed didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The precise phrases of the three males’s authentic pleas weren’t disclosed by the US authorities, however they had been anticipated to plead responsible and keep away from a full trial. The proceedings had been mired in authorized and moral controversy over the size of the defendants’ custody with out trial and situations of torture.
Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the assaults, was captured in 2003 in Pakistan, and held at CIA prisons earlier than being despatched to Guantánamo Bay, the place a army detention facility was opened through the administration of George W Bush to accommodate prisoners captured through the US’s “warfare on terror” following the September 11 assaults. The company has since been discovered to have subjected him to waterboarding, a type of torture, not less than 183 occasions.
A report by a Senate choose committee in 2014 discovered that “inner CIA information describe the waterboarding of [Khaled Sheikh Mohammed] as evolving right into a ‘collection of close to drownings’”.
Harrowing accounts of such methods sparked a fierce debate throughout the US over the legality of instances towards Mohammed and different prisoners, and the continued litigation grew to become a deeply divisive subject in Washington.
