BBCThe accused mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States will not plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to prevent plea agreements reached last year from going forward.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, commonly referred to as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is scheduled to present his plea before a war tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeastern Cuba, where he has been held in a military prison for nearly two decades.
Muhammad is the most famous detainee at Guantanamo and one of the last detainees at the base.
But a federal appeals court on Thursday evening halted proceedings scheduled to consider the government's requests to abandon plea deals, which it said would cause “irreparable” harm to it and the public.
A three-judge panel said the postponement “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of the case,” but was intended to give the court time to receive a full briefing and hear arguments “expeditiously.”
The delay means that the matter will now fall to the incoming Trump administration.
What was scheduled to happen this week?
In a hearing beginning Friday morning, Mohammed was scheduled to plead guilty to his role in the September 11, 2001, attacks, when hijackers seized 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 passengers responded.
Mohammed has been charged with crimes including conspiracy and murder, with 2,976 victims listed in the indictment.
He previously said he planned the “9/11 operation from the ground up” — conceived the idea of training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and relayed those plans to Osama bin Laden, the leader of the militant Islamist group. Al-Qaeda in the mid-nineties.
Friday's hearing was scheduled to take place in the base's courtroom, where family members of the dead and the press were scheduled to sit in a gallery behind thick glass.
Why is all this happening 23 years after 9/11?
The pre-trial hearings, held in a military court at the naval base, have been going on for more than a decade, and are complicated by questions about whether the torture to which Mohammed and other defendants were subjected 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 subjected to waterboarding 183 times, among so-called “advanced interrogation techniques” that included sleep deprivation. And forced nudity.
The use of torture has made “almost impossible to bring these cases to trial in a way that respects the rule of law and American jurisprudence,” says Karen Greenberg, author of “The Least Worst Place: How Guantanamo Became the World’s Worst Prison.”
“It seems impossible to provide evidence in these cases without using evidence derived from torture,” she says. “Furthermore, the fact that these individuals were subjected to torture adds another level of complexity to the prosecutions.”
The case also falls under the jurisdiction of military commissions, which operate under different rules than the traditional American criminal justice system and slow down the process.
The plea agreement was reached last summer, after two years of negotiations.
What does the plea deal include?
The full details of the deals reached with Muhammad and two of his co-defendants were not revealed.
We know the deal means he will not face a death penalty trial.
At Wednesday's court hearing, his legal team confirmed that he had agreed to plead guilty to all charges against him. Muhammad did not personally address the court, but engaged with his team as they reviewed the agreement, making corrections and small changes to the wording with the prosecution and the judge.
If the deals are upheld and the court accepts the motions, the next steps will be to appoint a military jury, known as a panel, to hear the evidence at the sentencing hearing.
In court on Wednesday, lawyers described this as a form of public trial, where survivors and family members of those killed would be given the opportunity to testify.
Under the agreement, the families will also be able to ask Mohamed questions, who will be required to “answer their questions fully and truthfully,” the lawyers say.
Central to the prosecution's approval of the deals was ensuring “that we could present all of the evidence that we believed was necessary to create a historical record of the defendant's involvement in what happened on September 11,” said District Attorney Clayton G. Trivett Jr. He said in court on Wednesday.
Even if petitions are filed, it will be many months before these proceedings begin and a ruling is finally issued.
ReutersWhy is the US government trying to block the appeals?
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin appointed the senior official who signed the deal. But he was traveling at the time the signing took place, and was reportedly surprised, according to the New York Times.
Days later, he tried to cancel it, saying in a memo: “Responsibility for such a decision must fall on me as the highest authority.”
However, both the military judge and the military appeals board ruled that the deal was valid, and that Mr. Austin acted too late.
In another attempt to block the deal, the government this week asked a federal appeals court to intervene.
She said in a legal filing that Muhammad and the two other men are accused of “committing the most horrific criminal act on American soil in modern history” and that implementing the agreements would “deprive the American government and people of a public trial regarding human rights violations.” “Conviction of the defendants and the possibility of the death penalty, even though the Secretary of Defense has legally withdrawn these agreements.”
After the deal was announced last summer, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, the party's leader in the House at the time, issued a statement calling it a “disgusting abdication of the government's responsibility to defend America and provide justice.”
What did the victims' families say?
Some families of those killed in the attacks also criticized the deal, saying it was too lenient or lacked transparency.
Speaking on the BBC's Today program last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the attacks, described the deal as “giving the detainees at Guantanamo Bay what they want.”
“This is a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other two, this is a victory for them,” said Strada, national president of the United September 11 Families Campaign.
Other families see the agreements as a path towards conviction in complex and long-running proceedings, and have been disappointed by the government's recent intervention.
Stefan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attacks, had flown to Guantanamo Bay to watch Mohammed's guilty plea.
He asked, “What is the ultimate goal of the Biden administration? So they get residency and this extends to the next administration. To what end? Think about the families. Why prolong this saga?” He said.
Gerhardt told the BBC that these deals were “not a victory” for the victims' families, but “it is time to find a way to end this, and convict these men.”
Families were at the base meeting with the press when news of the postponement was announced.
One said: “It was supposed to be healing time. We're going to get on that plane still feeling this deep feeling of pain – there's no end to it.”
Why are procedures taking place at Guantanamo?
Muhammad has been held in a military prison in Guantanamo Bay since 2006.
The prison was opened 23 years ago – on January 11, 2002 – during the “war on terror” that followed the September 11 attacks, as a place to hold terrorism suspects and “unlawful enemy combatants.”
Most of those detained here have never been charged, and the military prison has faced criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations over its treatment of detainees. Most of them have now been repatriated or resettled in other countries.
The prison currently houses 15 people, the smallest number ever in its history. All but six are accused or convicted of war crimes.
