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Left: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind, is seen shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan Saturday March 1, 2003 in this photo obtained by the Associated Press (AP Photo). Right: The Twin Towers at The World Trade Center collapse to the ground after hijackers crashed planes into both buildings (AP Photo).
The Biden administration is fighting to throw out a plea deal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — alleged to be the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” — and two other alleged terrorists that would see them dodge the death penalty, causing “substantial” and “irreparable” harm to the government and the public, the Justice Department says.
“Respondents are charged with perpetrating the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history — the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” wrote DOJ prosecutors in an emergency motion Tuesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The motion asked for a stay of a Dec. 30 ruling by a Military Commissions judge that upheld a lower court’s decision to stop Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin from blocking deals for Mohammed and two other accused terrorists, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, from going through after he tried revoking them last year.
The military appeals court upheld a ruling from November 2024 that said the plea agreements could go through after being criticized by the Justice Department for “improperly” curtailing Austin’s authority on the matter, which the DOJ says is “a matter of critical importance warranting the issuance of extraordinary relief,” according to the DOJ’s filing Tuesday.
Mohammed, Attash and al-Hawsawi were each charged for their alleged involvement in planning the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Mohammed was described in the 9/11 Commission Report as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”
The trio accepted plea deals from the Defense Department last summer that took the death penalty off the table for all three of them, sparking outrage. Austin and the DOJ quickly renounced the move and tried revoking the agreements, saying the “authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement” should be reserved for him.
“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009,” Austin wrote in an August 2024 memo to the commission.
Austin, 70, said he relieved the official responsible for signing off on the controversial plea deals and would fight to get them stayed. “Effective immediately, I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself,” he said.
DOJ prosecutors argued in their motion to stay Tuesday that the deals would “deprive the government and the American people of a public trial as to the respondents’ guilt and the possibility of capital punishment” for Mohammed and the others.
“The harm to the government and the public will be irreparable once the judge accepts the pleas, which he is scheduled to do in hearings beginning on January 10, 2025,” the DOJ motion says. “The government is likely to prevail on the merits of its petition for a writ of mandamus and prohibition, but it will be a pyrrhic victory unless this Court first issues a stay of the military commission’s proceedings, at least as they relate to enforcing the withdrawn pretrial agreements and accepting the respondents’ pleas, until this Court can decide the merits of the government’s petition.”