Why the US is trying to stop the 9/11 case

The suspected mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US will no longer plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals reached last year.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, commonly known as KSM, was due to present his pleas to 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 a notorious Guantanamo detainee and one of the last to be held at the base.

But an appeals court on Thursday evening halted a hearing scheduled to consider the government’s requests to drop plea deals, saying they would cause “irreparable” harm to itself and the public.

The three-judge panel said the delay “should not in any way be construed as a discretionary decision”, but was intended to give the court time to receive a full report and hear arguments “expeditiously”.

The delay means that the issue will soon enter the Trump administration.

At the start of a hearing Friday morning, Mohammed was scheduled to plead guilty to his role in the September 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 the passengers got into a fight.

Mohammed has been charged with conspiracy and murder, and 2,976 victims are on the list of charges.

He previously said he was planning a “9/11 operation from A-to-Z” – getting the idea to train pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda. , in the mid-1990s.

Friday’s hearing was to take place in the lower court, where family members of those killed and the media would sit in the observation deck behind thick glass.

The pre-trial hearings, which took place in a military court at a naval base, have dragged on for more than a decade, beset by questions about whether the torture Mohammed and the other defendants suffered while in US custody tainted the evidence.

After his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, Mohammed spent three years in secret CIA prisons known as “black sites” where he was submerged, or “waterboarded”, 183 times, among other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” including insomnia and forced nudity.

Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Wiest Place: How Guantanamo Became the World Notorious Prison, says the use of torture has made it “almost impossible to prosecute these cases in a manner that respects American law and order”.

“It is obviously impossible to present evidence in these cases without the use of evidence obtained from torture. In addition, the fact that these people were tortured adds another level of difficulty to the prosecution,” he said.

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

The settlement agreement was reached last summer, following two years of negotiations.

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

We know that the deal means that he will not face a death penalty trial.

In court 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 engaged his team as they proceeded with the deal, making minor corrections and changes to the names of the prosecutor and judge.

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

In court on Wednesday, this was described by lawyers as a form of public trial, where survivors and family members of those killed will be given the opportunity to give statements.

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

Key to the prosecutor’s agreement to the deals was the assurance “that we could present all the evidence we thought was necessary to establish a historical record of the defendant’s involvement in the events of September 11,” the prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr. , said the court on Wednesday.

Even if the appeals continue, it will be many months before these proceedings begin and the sentence is finally handed down.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nominated the senior official who signed the agreement. But he was leaving during the signing and was reportedly taken aback, according to the New York Times.

Days later, he tried to withdraw it, saying in a letter: “The responsibility for such a decision must rest with me as the supreme authority.”

However, a military judge and a panel of opposition soldiers ruled that the deal was legal, and that Mr Austin had acted too late.

In another bid to block the deal, the government this week asked the appeals court to intervene.

In an official filing, it said that Mohammed and two other men were charged with “committing the worst criminal act on American soil in modern history” and that the enforcement of the agreements “will deprive the government and the American people of the public liability for the defendants’ guilt and the possibility of the death penalty, despite the fact that the Secretary of Defense has formally withdrawn them those agreements”.

After the agreement was announced last summer, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, then the leader of the party in the chamber, issued a statement describing it as “a revolting abdication of the government’s responsibility to protect America and provide justice”.

Some families of those killed in the attack have also criticized the agreement, saying it is too soft or not transparent.

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

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

Some families see these agreements as a path toward sentencing and are disappointed by the government’s recent intervention.

Stephan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attack, flew to Guantanamo Bay to watch Mohammed plead guilty.

“What is the end goal of the Biden administration? So they get to stay and this carries over into the next administration. What is the purpose? Think about the families. Why are you extending this saga?” he said.

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

Families in the area were meeting with the media when news of the delay was revealed.

“It was supposed to be a time of healing. We’re going to get on that plane in deep pain – it’s never going away,” said another.

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

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

Most of those held here have never been charged and the military prison has faced criticism from rights groups and the United Nations for its treatment of prisoners. Many have now been repatriated or resettled in other countries.

The prison currently has 15 – the lowest number in its history. All but six of them have been charged or convicted of war crimes.