Secret Plea Deals Reached With September 11 Defendants

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Khalid Shaikh Mohammad in a government handout photo after being captured. CIA via Wikipedia.

The Department of Defense put out a three-paragraph, unsigned statement this evening headlined, “Plea Agreements Reached with 9/11 Defendants Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Bin 'Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi.”

It disclosed, “The Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Escallier, has entered into pretrial agreements with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case. The specific terms and conditions of the pretrial agreements are not available to the public at this time.”

This is weird. The terrorist attacks on New York City, on the Pentagon, and on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, were a big deal, killing nearly 3,000 people. If there’s a deal that involves leniency for the perpetrators, the terms should be public, and it should be announced not in an after-hours unsigned press release, but by a live person who can answer questions.

The New York Times has an article reporting that the “deal” involves life imprisonment rather than the death penalty.

People have a range of views on the death penalty, but among the possible cases for which it is warranted, the September 11 attacks would seem to rank high among them. For Vice President Harris, who is running as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, it could be a politically troubling issue to get saddled with leniency for alleged September 11 perpetrators.

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