The Pentagon announced on Friday that the US has cancelled a deal with 9/11 convicts that could have saved them from the death penalty.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin relieved Suzanne Escalier, the man in charge of the Pentagon’s Guantanamo war court, of the authority to reach a pre-trial settlement in the case and took on that responsibility himself.
“I am exercising my authority, effective immediately, to withdraw from all three pretrial agreements,” Austin wrote in a memo.
Notably, the plea deal was sharply criticized by several Republican legislators, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The development comes two days after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and his two accomplices, held at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pleaded guilty.
As previously reported, this plea deal almost certainly involved guilty pleas in exchange for taking the death penalty out of the equation.
Mohammed is the most high-profile inmate at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which was established in 2002 by then-US President George W. Bush to hold foreign terror suspects after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Two other detainees — Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi — have also agreed to compromise, according to a Pentagon statement.
The Pentagon statement said the three individuals were first jointly charged and indicted on June 5, 2008, and then jointly charged and indicted for a second time on May 5, 2012.