Plotters Affirm Their Guilty Plea in Guantánamo Bay on September 11th
Prosecutors’ letter to the relatives of the attack victims revealed the terms of the agreement.
Prosecutors said on Wednesday that the man who is suspected of organizing the September 11, 2001 attacks, along with two of his accomplices, had consented to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in return for a life sentence instead of a death-penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In particular for the relatives of the almost 3,000 victims slain in the attacks in New York City, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, the prosecution claimed that the agreement was intended to provide some “finality and justice” to the case.
The agreement was negotiated by the defendants Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi during 27 months of negotiations with the prosecutors in Guantánamo, and it was authorized on Wednesday by a top Pentagon officer in charge of the war court.
Since 2003, the men have been detained by the US. However, the case had become bogged down in over ten years of pretrial proceedings centered on the question of whether the evidence against them had been tainted by their torture in covert C.I.A. prisons.
In a letter to Sept. 11 family members, war court prosecutors revealed the agreement.
The letter, signed by chief prosecutor for military commissions Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh and three legal team members, stated, “In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet.”
The letter stated that the guys could enter their pleas as early as the following week in public court.
The plea avoided the prospect of a trial that would have taken between 12 and 18 months, or, conversely, the chance that the military judge would suppress confessions that were crucial to the government’s case. The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, had been hearing testimony this week and planned additional hearings for later this year to resolve that and other significant pretrial matters.
Mr. Mohammed, 59, an engineer with a degree from the United States and a self-declared jihadist, was charged with having the intention to take over aircraft and crash them into buildings. According to the prosecution, he brought the plot to Osama bin Laden in 1996 and afterwards assisted in leading and training some of the hijackers.
Together, he and Mr. Hawsawi, 55, were apprehended in Pakistan in March 2003 and detained in covert C.I.A. facilities until September 2006, when they were moved to the U.S. naval facility at Guantánamo in anticipation of a trial. By then, interrogators had tortured and detained them for years, even putting Mr. Mohammed through 183 rounds of waterboarding—a move that would thwart years of efforts to try the men for a crime.
The other deputy in the scheme, Mr. bin Attash, is a middle-aged man who has been described as having assisted in the training of certain hijackers and completed objectives assigned to him by both bin Laden and Mr. Mohammed.
The trio of men will likely not experience a mock trial until the following year. A judge accepts the plea at the military commissions where they were charged, but a military jury needs to be empaneled in order to hear evidence, including testimonies from attack victims, and to impose a penalty. By then, most cases involving the admissibility of evidence in the sentence hearing have been settled by the court.
The agreement caused hundreds of relatives of those slain on September 11 to feel both relieved and angry.
A few relatives had been worried that the case would never end and that the accused would pass away while being held in U.S. custody without being found guilty. Others, who supported the death penalty, had pressured the government to take the case to trial, even if doing so could result in the sentence being subsequently reversed.
Kathleen Vigiano expressed her anger at the outcome, saying she was “mostly angry.” Her husband, Joseph Vigiano, a New York Police detective, and her brother-in-law, John, a firefighter, were both slain at the World Trade Center.
She declared, “I really did want the death penalty.” “They did kill three thousand Americans, and post-9/11 cancer deaths continue.”
She went on to say that although she was worried the inmates would be released at some point, if they stayed behind bars the government would have to provide for them forever.
Glenn Morgan, whose father Richard Morgan perished in the World Trade Center collapse, expressed his gratitude for the prosecution, saying they “made the best of the worst possible situation” by forgoing a planned capital punishment.
He claimed, “They beat time in doing so.” “In doing so, they upheld the law and determined that the miserable individuals who killed my father and his associates were guilty.”
In his letter, Admiral Rugh stated that as a condition of the agreement, Mr. Mohammed and the others had consented to respond to inquiries from the relatives of the dead “about their roles and motivations for carrying out the September 11 attacks.“
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