US military court rejects Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin’s bid to nullify 9/11 plea deals

A military appeal court has ruled against Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s effort to throw out the plea deals reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the 9/11 attacks, a US official said.

The decision puts back on track the agreements that would have the three men plead guilty to one of the deadliest attacks ever on the United States in exchange for being spared the possibility of the death penalty. The attacks by al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people on September 11, and helped spur US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its war on terror.

The military appeal court released its ruling on Monday night, according to the US official, who was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Military prosecutors and defence lawyers for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached the plea agreements after two years of government-approved negotiations. The deals were announced late last summer.

Supporters of the plea agreement see it as a way of resolving the legally troubled case against the men at the US military commission at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Pretrial hearings for Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been under way for more than a decade.

Much of the focus of pretrial arguments has been on how torture of the men while in CIA custody in the first years after their detention may taint the overall evidence in the case.