UPDATE: Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin withdrew the plea deals for 9/11 terror attack mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and two other terrorists.
BREAKING: @Secdef Lloyd Austin yanks plea deals for 9/11 terror attack mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, 2 others @DeptofDefense memo released tonight also relieves the official in charge of the military commissions of her oversight in the case pic.twitter.com/bMVvCDn37I
— Jeff Seldin (@jseldin) August 3, 2024
(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) The White House confirmed on Aug. 1, 2024, that Joe Biden is “determined” to close the Guantánamo Bay prison before leaving office at the beginning of 2025.
The news came after it was announced that the Biden administration offered three plea deals for al-Qaida terrorists who were responsible for the 9/11 attack and are now held at the military facility.
The New York Post reported that Biden was not responsible for the plea deal negotiations that took the death penalty off the table for the terrorists, among whom was 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
“Does the president still plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison before he leaves office? Is there a realistic pathway to do that in the next six months?” a journalist asked at one of the White House briefings.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gave a vague response.
“That’s still something that the president wants to do and get done. As far as a timeline, I don’t have anything for you here, but obviously, this is something that he wanted to be done under his administration. I just don’t have anything else to read out or preview at this time, but it is something that he’s determined to get done,” she said.
Mohammed, who reportedly plotted the terror attacks that killed about 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, was captured in Pakistan in 2003.
During the same year, two supposed co-conspirators, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi were captured as well.
All of them accepted plea deals that’ll guarantee they’ll be spared the death penalty. It is not clear where exactly the terrorists will serve out their life prison sentences.
In 2018, Congress decided to restrict the use of funds to transfer Mohammed specifically to the territory of the United States.
Soon after the news broke out, 9/11 victims’ families said that they thought that the men deserved to stand trial and be executed. To avoid even more considerable backlash from the public, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan suggested that Biden was not responsible for the plea deal, even though he previously supported closing the prison.
“The president had no role, the vice president had no role, I had no role and the White House had no role. And we were informed yesterday—the same day that they went out publicly—that this pretrial agreement had been accepted by the convening authority,” he said.
