Why the US is trying to stop admitting guilt on 9/11

A man accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks in the US will no longer plead guilty on Friday after the US government decided to block plea deals reached last year.

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

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

But a federal appeals court on Thursday night halted a scheduled hearing on the government’s requests to reject plea deals from Mohamed and two co-defendants, which it said 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 decision on the merits” but was intended to give the court time to be fully briefed and hear arguments “on an expedited basis.”

The delay means the case will now be handed over to the incoming Trump administration.

In a hearing that began Friday morning, Mohammed was expected to plead guilty to his role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when hijackers hijacked 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 was charged with crimes including conspiracy and murder, with 2,976 victims listed in the indictment.

He previously claimed to have planned “Operation 9/11 from A to Z” – training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings – and passed those plans on to Osama bin Laden, the leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda, in the mid-1990s.

Friday’s hearing was to be held in a courtroom on the base, where family members of the slain and the press would sit in an observation gallery behind thick glass.

The pre-trial hearings at the military court at the naval base have been going on for more than a decade and have been complicated by questions about whether evidence was tainted by the torture Mohammed and the other defendants faced while in U.S. custody.

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, among other so-called “advanced interrogation techniques” that included sleep deprivation and forced naked

Karen Greenberg, author of “The Smallest Worst Place: How Guantanamo Bay Became the World’s Most Infamous Prison,” says the use of torture has made it “virtually impossible to bring these cases to court in a way that respects the rule of law and American jurisprudence.”

“It seems impossible to present evidence in these cases without using evidence obtained as a result of torture. Moreover, the fact that these individuals were subjected to torture adds another layer of complexity to the prosecution,” she says.

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

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

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

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

At a court 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 interacted with his team as they reviewed the agreement, making small corrections and wording changes with the prosecution and the judge.

If the deals are approved and the pleas are accepted by the court, the next step will be to appoint a military jury, known as a panel, to hear evidence at a sentencing hearing.

In court Wednesday, lawyers described it as a form of open trial where survivors and family members of those killed would be given the opportunity to testify.

Under the agreement, the families will also be able to ask questions of Mohamed, who will have to “answer their questions fully and truthfully,” the lawyers said.

U.S. Attorney Clayton G. Trivett Jr. said that a major factor in the prosecution’s agreement to the plea deal was to ensure that “we could present all the evidence that we felt was necessary to establish a historical record of the defendant’s involvement in what happened on September 11.” , said in court on Wednesday.

Even if the pleas are granted, it will be many months before the process begins and a verdict is ultimately handed down.

The senior official who signed the agreement was appointed by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. But he was driving at the time he was signed and was reportedly caught off guard, according to the New York Times.

A few days later, he tried to reverse it, saying in a memo: “The responsibility for such a decision must rest with me as the highest authority.”

However, both the military judge and the military appeals board ruled that the deal was valid and that Mr. Austin had acted too late.

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

The court filing said that Mohammed and the two other men were accused of “committing the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history” and that the plea agreements would “deprive the government and the American people of a public trial of the defendants’ guilt and the possibility of the death penalty, despite to the fact that the Minister of Defense legally revoked these agreements.”

After the deal was announced last summer, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the House leader, issued a statement that he described as a “disgusting abdication of the government’s responsibility to protect America and deliver justice.”

Some families of those killed in the attacks also criticized the deal, saying it was too soft or opaque.

Speaking to the BBC’s Today program last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the attacks, described the deal as “giving Guantanamo prisoners what they want”.

Ms Strada, the national chair of 9/11 Families United, said: “This is a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others, this is a victory for them.”

Other families see the agreements as a path to conviction in complex and lengthy proceedings and have been disappointed by the government’s latest intervention.

Stefan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralf was killed in the attacks, flew to Guantanamo Bay to watch Mohammed plead guilty.

“What is the ultimate goal of the Biden administration? So they are delayed and it carries over into the next administration. For what purpose? Think about families. Why are you dragging this saga on?” he said.

Mr Gerhardt told the BBC the deals were “not a victory” for the families, but that “it’s time to find a way to close this, to convict these people”.

Families on base were meeting with the press when the delay became known.

“It was supposed to be a time of healing. We will board the plane with such a deep sense of pain – there is just no end to it,” said one.

Mohammed has been in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay since 2006.

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

Most of those held there have never been charged, and the military prison has faced criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations over its treatment of prisoners. Most are now repatriated or resettled in other countries.

Currently, the prison holds 15 people – the lowest number in its history. All but six have been charged or convicted of war crimes.