Plea Deal
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If you're into podcasts, the latest "Serial" series is about Gitmo. I was listening to it when I was repainting our kids' bathroom and there was a full episode dedicated to how inevitable a plea deal would be given how slooooooooooow the process is, how many times the lawyers, judges, and others either move on or retire, and so forth. It was enlightening and a bit sad for the 9/11 victims families.
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Ultimately, I don't think that the US really wants to know or assuming we do know, does not really want to publicize Saudi Arabia involvement.
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Must not have liked the optics. Cannot believe he wasn’t consulted to begin with.
One will where I read was that he was in transit from overseas when that decision was made.
However, like you, I can’t believe that he was not consulted. Nevertheless, it looks like he has a convenience scapegoat.
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Assuming he did know of the plea the fact is he refused to sign off on the deal when the paperwork hit his desk. Doesn’t matter the motivation, he didn’t approve it and sent it back.
No big deal. Let them rot in Guantanamo. They earned and deserve it.
Not worth politicising it.
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https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/world/the-pentagon-chief-loses-bid-to-reject-9-11-plea-deals-1.7161091
A military appeals court has ruled against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's effort to throw out the plea deals reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the 9/11 attacks, a U.S. official said.
The decision puts back on track the agreements that would have the three men plead guilty to one of the deadliest attacks on the United States in exchange for being spared the possibility of the death penalty. The attacks by al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and helped spur U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its war on terror.
The military appeals court released its ruling Monday night, according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Military prosecutors and defence attorneys for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached the plea agreements after two years of government-approved negotiations. The deals were announced late last summer.
Supporters of the plea agreements see them as a way of resolving the legally troubled case against the men at the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Pretrial hearings for Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been underway for more than a decade.
Much of the focus of pretrial arguments has been on how torture of the men while in CIA custody in the first years after their detention may taint the overall evidence in the case.
Within days of news of the plea deal this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullifying them.
He cited the gravity of the 9/11 attacks in saying that as defence secretary, he should decide on any plea agreements that would spare the defendants the possibility of execution.
Defence lawyers said Austin had no legal authority to reject a decision already approved by the Guantanamo court's top authority and said the move amounted to unlawful interference in the case.
The military judge hearing the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, had agreed that Austin lacked standing to throw out the plea bargains after they were underway. That had set up the Defense Department's appeal to the military appeals court.
