By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
WASHINGTON – A military judge has ruled that plea deals struck by alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants are valid, invalidating a September 11 order. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is throwing out the dealsa government official said Wednesday.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the order from the judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has not yet been publicly posted or officially announced.
Unless prosecutors or others again try to challenge the plea deals, McCall’s ruling means the three September 11 suspects could soon enter guilty pleas in the U.S. military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, taking a dramatic step toward of completing the long-running lawsuit. ongoing and legally problematic government prosecution in one of the deadliest attacks on the United States.
The plea deals would spare Mohammed and two co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the risk of the death penalty in exchange for the guilty pleas.
Government prosecutors had negotiated the deals with lawyers under government auspices, and the top official of the military commission at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had approved the agreements.
The plea over the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people drew immediate political backlash from Republican lawmakers and others after they were made public this summer.
Within days, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a brief order saying he would nullify them. Plea deals in potential death penalty cases related to one of the most serious crimes ever committed on U.S. soil were a momentous step that should be decided by the Secretary of Defense alone, Austin said at the time.
The agreements, and Austin’s attempt to undo them, have led to one of the most fraught episodes in a U.S. prosecution, marked by delays and legal challenges. That includes years of ongoing pretrial hearings to determine the admissibility of the defendants’ statements given their years of torture in CIA custody.
The Pentagon is reviewing the judge’s decision and had no immediate further comment, said Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary.
The New York Times first reported the ruling.
Military officials have yet to post the judge’s decision on the Guantanamo military commission’s online site. However, a legal blog that has long reported on the prosecutions from the Guantanamo courtroom says McCall’s 29-page ruling concludes that Austin did not have the legal authority to reject the plea deals.
The ruling also calls the timing of Austin’s move “fatal,” after Guantanamo’s top official had already approved the deals, according to the blog, called Lawdragon.
Obeying Austin’s order would give defense secretaries an “absolute veto” over any action they disagree with, which would violate the independence of the chairman of the Guantanamo trials, the legal blog quotes McCall in the ruling.
While the families of some of the victims and others are adamant that the September 11 prosecutions continue until trial and possible death sentences, legal experts say it is not clear that could ever happen. If the September 11 cases ever clear the hurdles of trial, verdicts and convictions, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will likely hear many of the issues in the course of any death penalty appeals .
The issues include the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videos, whether Austin’s reversal of the plea deal constituted unlawful interference and whether the torture of the men influenced subsequent interrogations by “clean teams” of FBI agents, which did not involve of violence, defiled.
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AP writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
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