Why the US is trying to stop 9/11 blame

The accused mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States will plead not guilty on Friday after the US government blocked a plea deal reached last year.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often referred to as KSM, was due to enter his pleas at a military court at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeastern Cuba, where he has been held for nearly two decades in a military prison.

Mohammed is Guantanamo’s most notorious detainee and one of the last to be held at the base.

But a federal appeals court on Thursday afternoon halted the government’s planned hearing of requests to overturn plea deals from Mohammed and two co-defendants, saying it would cause “irreparable” harm to both him and the public.

The three-judge panel said the delay “should in no way be construed as a ruling on the merits” but was intended to give the court time to receive full information and hear arguments “expeditiously”.

The delay means the issue will be left to the Trump administration.

In a trial that began Friday morning, Mohammed was expected to plead guilty to his role in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when hijackers took passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. Another plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

Mohammed has been charged with crimes including conspiracy and murder, with 2,976 victims on the indictment.

He has previously said he planned “Operation 9/11 to AZ” – he came up with the idea of ​​training pilots to fly commercial airliners into buildings, and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, the leader of the militant Islamist group. Qaeda in the mid-1990s.

Friday’s trial was to take place in a courtroom at the base, where family members of the dead and the press would sit in an audience behind thick glass.

The pre-trial hearings, held in a military court at the naval base, have been going on for more than a decade, and it is difficult to determine whether the torture of Mohammed and the other defendants in US custody taints the evidence.

After his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, Mohammed spent three years in secret CIA prisons known as “black sites” where he was subjected to simulated drowning or “waterboarding” 183 times, including so-called “advanced interrogation techniques”. sleep deprivation and forced nudity.

Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: How Guantanamo Became the World’s Most Notorious Prison, says the use of torture has made it “almost impossible” to prosecute these cases in accordance with the rule of law and American jurisprudence.

“It seems impossible to present evidence in these cases without using evidence derived from torture. Also, the fact that these people were tortured adds another level of complexity to the charges,” he says.

The case is pending before military commissions, which operate under different rules than the traditional U.S. criminal justice system and slow down the process.

The plea agreement was reached last summer after two years of negotiations.

Full details of the deals reached with Mohammed and two of his co-defendants have not been released.

We know a deal means he won’t face a death penalty trial.

At a hearing on Wednesday, his legal team confirmed that he had agreed to plead guilty to all charges. Mohammed did not address the court in person, but spoke to his team as they hammered out the plea deal, making minor corrections and wording changes with the prosecution and the judge.

If the deals are approved and the court approves the petitions, the next step would be to appoint a military jury, known as a grand jury, to hear the evidence at a sentencing hearing.

In court Wednesday, lawyers described it as a public hearing where survivors and family members of the dead would have the opportunity to testify.

Under the agreement, the families would also be able to ask Mohammadi questions, and he would have to “answer their questions fully and truthfully,” the lawyers said.

Key to the prosecution’s agreement to the plea deal was “an assurance that we could present all the evidence we believed was necessary to establish the historical record of the defendant’s involvement in the events of 9/11,” Clayton G. Trivett Jr. prosecutors , he said in court on Wednesday.

Even if the claims were to proceed, it would be many months before those proceedings could be initiated and a judgment finally rendered.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin named the senior official who signed the agreement. But he was traveling at the time it was signed and reportedly caught it by accident, according to the New York Times.

A few days later, he tried to repeal it, saying in a statement: “The responsibility for such a decision should be in my hands as the supreme authority.”

However, a military judge and a military appeals panel ruled that the agreement was valid, and that Mr. Austin had acted too late.

In another effort to block the deal, the government this week asked a federal appeals court to intervene.

In a legal filing, he said Mohammed and two other men were accused of “committing the worst criminal act on American soil in modern history” and that enforcing the agreements would “deprive the government and the American people of a public trial.” the guilt of the respondents and the possibility of imposing the death penalty, even though the Secretary of Defense has legally withdrawn those agreements”.

After the deal was announced last summer, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, then the House leader, released a statement describing it as “an outrageous abdication of the government’s responsibility to defend America and provide justice.”

Some families of those killed in the attacks have also criticized the deal, saying it is too soft or lacks transparency.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today Program last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the raids, described the deal as “giving Guantanamo detainees what they want”.

Ms Strada, national chair of the 9/11 campaign group Families United, said: “This is a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and for the other two, it’s a victory.”

Other families see the agreements as a way to get judgments in the long and complex process, and expressed disappointment at the government’s latest intervention.

Stephan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attacks, went to Guantanamo Bay to see Mohammed plead guilty.

“What is the ultimate goal of the Biden administration? So they get a stay and this leads to the next administration. To what end? Think about the families. Why are you prolonging this saga?”. he said

Mr Gerhardt told the BBC the deals were “not a victory” for the families, but “it was time to find a way to bring closure to this, to convict these men”.

Families on the base were meeting with the press when news of the delay became public.

“It should have been time to heal. We’re still going to get on that plane with that deep feeling of pain – there’s no end to it,” said one.

Mohammed has been in a military prison in Guantanamo since 2006.

The prison was opened 23 years ago – on January 11, 2002 – as a place to hold terror suspects and “unlawful enemy combatants” during the “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks.

Most of those detained here were never charged and the military prison has come under criticism from rights groups and the United Nations for its treatment of detainees. Today, the majority have been repatriated or resettled in other countries.

The jail currently has 15, the lowest number at any time in its history. All but six have been accused or convicted of war crimes.