US reinstates plea deals for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, other 9/11 suspects

A ruling by the country’s defense minister has been overturned by a military judge ruling that plea agreements reached with the alleged plottors of the attacks are valid.

According to The New York Times and The Associated Press news agency on Wednesday, the judge’s order, which is led by Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall, leaves the three accused men with the option of receiving life sentences rather than death.

Two days after a senior Pentagon official signed the three separate pretrial agreements, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rescinded them.

But the military judge at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba ordered that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind, and two accused accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, can appear before his court to enter pleas. He is reportedly yet to set a timetable.

The judge argued that Austin was able to supervise the proceeding while it was still in progress but that he was not the judge’s designated attorney who had the legal authority to revoke plea deals.

The Pentagon was reviewing the judge’s decision and had no further comment, said its spokesman Major-General Pat Ryder. The ruling hasn’t been made available to the public, and the prosecution has not made any comments.

Mohammed and four others were charged with conspiring to carry out the attacks in 2012 that claimed the lives of nearly 3, 000 people, but the cases have for years been entangled in legal battles over the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) torture of the defendants.

Pretrial hearings were scheduled at Guantanamo Bay in the case for another defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, who has not reached a plea deal. The fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was last September found incompetent to stand trial or reach a plea deal.

On Thursday, a forensic psychiatrist is expected to testify about whether the defendants’ 2007 confessions were made voluntarily or voluntarily after years of confinement in secret CIA cells.

Even if verdicts and sentences are delivered, it is still anticipated that the trials will take a while before reaching the conclusion. The issues involving the cases, including the CIA’s destruction of the videos of interrogations, would likely be heard by a US appeals court.

Before being taken prisoner in a covert operation in Pakistan in March 2003, Mohammed was regarded as one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted men. Before arriving in Guantanamo in 2006, he spent three years in CIA secret prisons.

Bin Attash, a Saudi of Yemeni origin, allegedly trained two of the hijackers who carried out the attacks. In addition to being detained in a number of covert CIA prisons, he was also apprehended alongside Mohammed in 2003.