The US Department of Defense will appeal a military court ruling that the plea agreements entered into by Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and two of his co-defendants are valid, a ministry official said today.
The verdict allowed the three accused of September 11 to plead guilty, in order to avoid the risk of the death penalty.
Government prosecutors negotiated it with government-sponsored defense lawyers, and the top military commission official at Guantanamo approved the deals. But the contracts were immediately condemned by Republicans when they were announced this summer.
Within days, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin overruled them. He said that plea agreements in possible death penalty cases related to one of the most serious crimes ever committed on US soil are an important step that should be decided only by the Secretary of Defense.
Last week's ruling overturned Austin's order to void the contracts and concluded that the plea agreements were valid. The judge granted the three plea requests and said he would schedule them for a date to be determined by a military commission.
The judge ruled that Austin did not have the legal authority to reject plea deals.
The department will also seek a postponement of the plea hearing. Admiral. Aaron Rugg, the lead prosecutor, sent a letter to the families of the 11/XNUMX victims informing them of the decision.
The agreements, and Austin's attempt to overturn them, led to one of the most contentious episodes in a case marked by delays and legal difficulties. This includes years of pretrial hearings to determine the admissibility of the defendants' statements, given their torture in CIA custody.
Issues at issue include the CIA's destruction of interrogation videos, as well as whether Austin's reversal of the plea agreement constituted unlawful interference and whether the torture of the defendants interfered with subsequent interrogations by FBI agents, which did not involve violence.
Bonus video:
