A plea hearing to enable alleged 9/11 terror attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to avoid the death penalty will not go forward Friday, after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday to pause the proceedings to allow the court to receive full briefings and hear arguments in the case on an expedited basis.
The court did not rule on whether Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has the power to reverse the plea agreements with Mohammed and other defendants, but instead said it needs more time to make that decision.
The U.S. government had filed a motion earlier this week seeking to stop a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from accepting the plea agreements offered to three men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, including Mohammed.
According to the motion, the plea agreements reached over the summer, which are still under seal, would have the three defendants plead guilty to the seven charges against them for their alleged roles in the terrorist attacks, in exchange for allowing them to avoid the death penalty. The charges include murder, conspiracy and terrorism, as well as an eighth charge of intentionally causing serious bodily injury.
Government attorneys also asked the appeals court to stay the proceedings — including Mohammed’s plea hearing Friday — while the request was being considered.
Family members who travelled to Guantanamo Bay are devastated that the plea proceedings won’t go forward Friday. Eight of them were speaking to reporters when the court granted the administrative stay. All eight supported the plea agreements, though they acknowledged other victims’ families do not.
Stephan Gerhardt, whose brother Ralph died in the World Trade Center in the terrorist attack, said, “I think by delaying this to the next administration, the Biden administration failed the families of 9/11. For whatever political agenda they had. We cannot pin our hopes on the next administration to resolve this for us.”
Deborah Garcia, whose husband David also died in the World Trade Center, said she had hoped for the finality of a judgment that would be settled by the plea agreements, “because if these guys die (now), they die innocent.”
Garcia is here with her son Dylan, whose 28th birthday was Thursday and was just 4 years old when his father died.
“I felt I failed my husband that he was at the Trade Center, and I feel like this adds onto my sense of failure,” Deborah Garcia said. “I still can’t bring this to justice.”
Claire Gates teared up as she talked about her mother, Carol Freund, who has been coming to Guantanamo Bay since 2013. Gates’ uncle, Peter Freund, was a firefighter and Carol Freund’s brother.
Gates said of the trip with her mother, “I see her in so much pain all the time, and this was the first time I got to be here to see it for myself. And it was supposed to be a time for healing for us, and we’ll board that plane still with that just deep sense of pain that never seems to — there’s just no end to it.”
She added that she had hoped this visit would bring her mother “some sense of resolution after all of these years.” She said she was glad to have come to support Freund, but “this is not the ending to this trip that I thought we would be experiencing together.”
Soon after the plea agreements were reached, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to revoke them, arguing in a memo that “in light of the significance” of the decision, he alone should have the power to approve the plea deals, rather than the subordinate authority who accepted the deals.
The judge in the 9/11 case and then a military appeals court ruled against Austin and said he had weighed in too late. Austin has since reiterated that he still feels he should be the person who makes the decision on the 9/11 plea deals. On Thursday, during a trip to Germany, Austin was asked again about his decision to revoke the deals.
“I’ve stated where I am on this, and I haven’t changed,” he replied. “We are in the process of appealing that ruling, and since we are appealing, I don’t have any comment.”
There are also two other defendants in the case, but one hasn’t negotiated a plea deal, and the other has been ruled mentally unfit to stand trial.
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