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How the 9/11 Plea Deal Came Undone
  + stars: | 2024-08-04 | by ( Carol Rosenberg | Eric Schmitt | ) www.nytimes.com   time to read: 1 min
In the space of three days last week, the Sept. 11 case was rocked by two decisions that stunned victims’ families and jolted a political debate. First, a Pentagon official authorized a plea agreement meant to resolve the case with lifetime sentences. Then, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III abruptly canceled the deal, reviving the possibility that the man accused of planning the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and two accused accomplices could someday face a death penalty trial. Suddenly, a case that had mostly drifted from public consciousness in 12 years of pretrial proceedings was back in the spotlight and no closer to the trial that some relatives of the nearly 3,000 victims had been aching for at Guantánamo Bay. This account of those fateful three days is based on interviews and conversations with Pentagon officials, Sept. 11 family members and parties to the case.
Persons: Lloyd J, Austin III, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Organizations: Pentagon Locations: Guantánamo
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday overruled the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices. Gen. Susan K. Escallier, signed a pretrial agreement on Wednesday with Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi that exchanged guilty pleas for sentences of at most life in prison. In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case. He left Ms. Escallier in the role of oversight of Guantánamo’s other cases. Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.
Persons: Lloyd J, Austin III, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Susan K, Escallier, Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al, Austin, ” Mr Organizations: Pentagon, Defense Department Locations: Guantánamo, New York City, Pennsylvania, Brig
Plea Deal in 9/11 Case Is Announced in War Court
  + stars: | 2024-08-01 | by ( Carol Rosenberg | ) www.nytimes.com   time to read: 1 min
The man accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, appeared in court on Thursday, watching silently as the prosecutor who had pursued his capital case since the beginning formally announced that a plea agreement had been reached that would remove the possibility of the death penalty. The prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., also gave the court the sealed and signed agreements between the prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and the Pentagon’s overseer of the war court cases. Disclosure of the agreement in the court at Guantánamo Bay is the first step toward a sentencing hearing before a military panel, which could begin next summer. Prosecutors who had negotiated the agreements with Mr. Mohammed and two accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, disclosed the deal on Wednesday to family members of the nearly 3,000 people who were killed in the attacks.
Persons: Clayton G, Trivett Jr, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al Organizations: Prosecutors Locations: Guantánamo
The Justice Department has denied a request by Zacarias Moussaoui, the only prisoner ever convicted in the United States of having ties to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to serve the remainder of his life sentence in his native France. Mr. Moussaoui had made the application from the supermax prison in Colorado, using a process that is routinely available to foreign nationals held as U.S. prisoners. Then on Wednesday afternoon, two relatives of people killed in the attacks said they were notified by the Justice Department that the request was denied. “Our office appreciates your concerns and comments regarding Zacarias Moussaoui,” the email said. “I am notifying you that Mr. Moussaoui’s application to transfer to France was denied by the United States on July 26, 2024.”No explanation was offered for the delay in notification.
Persons: Zacarias Moussaoui, Moussaoui, Zacarias, , Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Biden, General Merrick B, Garland Organizations: Justice Department Locations: United States, France, Colorado, Florida
The man accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11 and two of his accomplices have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prosecutors said Wednesday. A senior Pentagon official approved the deal for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, according to Defense Department officials with knowledge of the agreement. The men have been in U.S. custody since 2003. But the case had become mired in more than a decade of pretrial proceedings that focused on the question of whether their torture in secret C.I.A. Word of the deal emerged in a letter from war court prosecutors to family members of victims of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Persons: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al, , Aaron C Organizations: Pentagon, Defense, Locations: Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
waterboarded the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency offered explanations of how he withstood the technique 183 times at a secret overseas prison. The prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was strapped to a gurney with his head tilted down and a cloth covering his face. Somehow, the theory went, he realized that his captors would pour water on the cloth for at most 40 seconds at a time. So he used his fingers to count until he could breathe again as he experienced the sensation of drowning. This week, at a hearing in the case, Mr. Mohammed’s lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, offered an alternative explanation while questioning a psychologist who administered the waterboarding.
Persons: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, gurney, Mohammed’s, Gary D
A U.S. military jury on Thursday ordered a former Qaeda commander to a serve a 30-year prison sentence for war crimes carried out by his insurgent forces in wartime Afghanistan in the early 2000s. The military judge excused the panel from the chamber and then announced that, under a plea agreement, the prisoner’s sentence would end in eight years. The outcome was part of the arcane system called military commissions, which allows prisoners to reach plea deals with a senior official at the Pentagon who oversees the war court but requires the formality of a jury sentencing hearing anyway. Mr. Hadi, 63, was aware of the deal that reduced his sentence to 10 years, starting with his guilty plea in June 2022. It was unclear whether victims of attacks by Mr. Hadi’s forces and their family members had been told.
Persons: Abd al, Hadi al, Hadi Organizations: U.S, Pentagon Locations: Afghanistan, C.I.A
The Biden administration was poised to send about a dozen detainees at Guantánamo Bay to Oman for resettlement last year, but it abruptly halted the secret operation amid questions from Congress about security in the Middle East after Hamas attacked Israel, according to administration officials. None of the prisoners have ever been charged with crimes, and all of them had been cleared for transfer by national security review panels. A military cargo plane was already on the runway at Guantánamo Bay ready to airlift the group of Yemeni prisoners to Oman when the trip was called off, people familiar with the military operation said. Belongings they could take with them had been collected, signaling to the prisoners that they would soon be going. Then the plane flew away empty, and their belongings were returned.
Persons: Biden Locations: Guantánamo, Oman, Israel
For years, a thorny question has dominated pretrial hearings in the military commissions case over the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Did the men accused of plotting them voluntarily confess in 2007 after the C.I.A. had stopped torturing them, and could those statements be used as evidence at their eventual death-penalty trial? analyst revealed that in 2009, when the Obama administration was planning to instead try the men in civilian court, federal prosecutors had decided against trying to offer the statements as evidence. The revelation sets in stark relief the contrary decision by military prosecutors to build their case around summoning the F.B.I. It also underlines how that decision has opened the door to years of litigation and contributed to a lengthy delay in getting the case to trial.
Persons: Obama, Mark S, Martins Organizations: Brig Locations: Guantánamo
A Former Guantánamo Prisoner’s New Life
  + stars: | 2024-05-09 | by ( Carol Rosenberg | Natalie Keyssar | ) www.nytimes.com   time to read: +1 min
On the 15th night of Ramadan in a suburb of Belize City, Majid Khan and his family of four sat down for a traditional iftar meal to break the daylight hours fast. There was a leg of a lamb that Majid, a former Guantánamo detainee, had slaughtered himself, sweets brought by a sister in Maryland, dates from Saudi Arabia. The talk was small, about whether the biryani dish was too spicy and how the lamb was perfectly roasted. For two decades, this family meal was not possible. He pleaded guilty and became a government cooperator — and, all that time, his wife waited for him in Pakistan.
Persons: Majid Khan, Majid, Hamza, Rabia, Manaal, Khan, Organizations: Central Locations: Belize City, Maryland, Saudi Arabia, Central American, Al Qaeda, Belize, Indonesia, United States, Guantánamo, Pakistan
Prosecutors and defense lawyers are still negotiating toward a plea agreement for the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despite the Biden administration’s refusal to endorse certain proposed conditions, the lead prosecutor said in court on Wednesday at Guantánamo Bay. “This is all whirling around us,” said Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the prosecutor, discussing key details of the negotiations in open court for the first time. He added that “around the edges we have agreed to do things” and that “the positions that we took at the time are still available.”In mostly secret negotiations in 2022 and 2003, prosecutors offered to drop the death penalty from the case in exchange for detailed admissions by the accused architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four other men who are charged as his accomplices in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. Since then, one of the five men has been ruled not mentally competent to stand trial. The occasion of the briefing was a legal filing by lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the defendants and Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, asking the judge to dismiss the case or at least the possibility of a death penalty because of real or apparent political interference by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and other members of Congress last summer.
Persons: Biden, , Clayton G, Trivett Jr, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ammar al, Mohammed’s, Ted Cruz Organizations: Republican Locations: Guantánamo, Texas
Regardless of the outcome of their someday trial, the men accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, can be held forever as prisoners in the war against terrorism in a form of preventive detention, a military prosecutor told the presiding judge on Wednesday. He has been held since 2003. The argument, in a pretrial hearing in the decade-old Sept. 11 case, was the latest installment over a long-running, unresolved question of whether a prisoner, once he completes a war crimes sentence, is entitled to release from military detention. Col. Joshua S. Bearden, an Army prosecutor, said the answer was no. He urged the judge to reject the request as both premature, because the government is seeking the death penalty in the case, and beyond the scope of his authority.
Persons: Mustafa al, Joshua S, Bearden Organizations: Defense Locations: United States
In a protest over tougher security measures at the Guantánamo Bay prison, a lawyer for the man accused of plotting the U.S.S. Cole bombing asked a judge on Tuesday to have the prisoner unshackled during legal meetings, invoking his torture by the C.I.A. Guards let the man, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, meet his lawyers more than 150 times while he was unshackled from 2019 until late last year, said Lt. Cmdr. Now the change has re-traumatized the prisoner and impeded his lawyers’ ability to communicate and work with him. “We are asking to be in the room with him unshackled as we were for four and a half years,” Commander Piette said.
Persons: Cole, Abd al, Rahim, Cmdr, Alaric Piette, , unshackled, Piette, Nashiri Organizations: Guards, Locations: Guantánamo
wanted him to discuss Al Qaeda’s future plans, not the attacks that had horrified America a year and a half earlier, Dr. James E. Mitchell, the psychologist, said. So when the prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mentioned Sept. 11, they would slam him, naked, into a wall. That month, interrogators would waterboard Mr. Mohammed 183 times at a secret overseas C.I.A. prison in the mistaken belief, Dr. Mitchell said, that a nuclear attack in the United States was imminent. But Mr. Mohammed still was not saying what his captors wanted to hear.
Persons: Al Qaeda’s, James E, Mitchell, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mr, Mohammed, ” Dr Locations: America, United States
On Wednesday, Dr. James E. Mitchell told a stunned courtroom that episode had not happened. “I didn’t say anything about killing his son,” said Dr. Mitchell, a retired Air Force psychologist who in 2003 waterboarded Mr. Mohammed 183 times for the C.I.A. “He didn’t have sons until later.”Dr. Mitchell later acknowledged he had forgotten his threat. But the episode underscores a new challenge for the military court in the case against four prisoners who are accused of conspiring in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001: the fading memories and unavailability of witnesses whose testimony is central to getting the death-penalty case to trial. Testimony and other evidence often deteriorate over time, which is one reason that criminal defendants and their victims are entitled to a speedy trial.
Persons: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, James E, Mitchell, , Mr, Mohammed, ” Dr Organizations: Air Force Locations: U.S
Prosecutors told relatives of victims of the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that the U.S. government made a plea deal with two Malaysian prisoners to try to disentangle the legacy of torture from the eventual trial of the prisoner they accuse of being the mastermind of the Al Qaeda-linked attacks. The two Malaysians provided secret testimony at the time of their sentencing last month. The legacy of torture has complicated prosecutors’ efforts to hold trials in the better known Sept. 11 and U.S.S. Cole bombing cases at Guantánamo. All of it has been fodder for defense lawyers trying to discredit evidence prosecutors hope to use at the war crimes trials.
Persons: Al, Cole Locations: Bali , Indonesia, Al Qaeda, Indonesian, Bali, C.I.A
One of the longest-serving prosecutors in the Sept. 11, 2001, case is stepping down, citing the pressure of his repeated trips to Guantánamo Bay on him and his family. The prosecutor, Edward R. Ryan, is a Justice Department lawyer who served on a team of civilian and military prosecutors who for 15 years have sought to start the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of conspiring in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. Mr. Ryan’s decision was seen as a sign that the case would not be going to trial anytime soon. He represented the government at the prisoners’ original court appearance at Guantánamo in 2008 and participated in nearly all the pretrial hearings since then. On Wednesday, Mr. Ryan told family members of victims of the attacks by email that he was leaving “with the heaviest heart” to return to North Carolina, where he was a federal prosecutor before his Guantánamo assignment.
Persons: Edward R, Ryan, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ryan’s Organizations: Justice Department, Pentagon Locations: New York, Pennsylvania, Guantánamo, North Carolina
Relatives of tourists killed in the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, spoke of endless, devastating grief, and two prisoners who conspired in the attack renounced violence in the name of Islam on Thursday for a U.S. military jury assembled at Guantánamo Bay to deliberate their sentence. The prisoners, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, pleaded guilty last week to war crimes charges for conspiring with an affiliate of Al Qaeda that carried out the attack. He was born after his uncle, Nathaniel Dan Miller, 31, was killed in the bombing and read a statement written by the victim’s mother, his grandmother. Christopher Snodgrass of Glendale, Ariz., said the loss of his daughter, Deborah, 33, in the bombing and other “terrorist activities worldwide” left him despising “over 20 percent of the world population, Muslims. I’m a religious person, and the hate-filled person I have become is certainly not what I wanted.”
Persons: Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, Mohammed Nazir Bin, , Solomon Lamagni, Miller, Nathaniel Dan Miller, Christopher Snodgrass, Deborah, despising, I’m Organizations: Al Locations: Bali , Indonesia, Al Qaeda, London, Glendale, Ariz
Frank Heffernan thought his daughter Megan was in South Korea where she was working as an English teacher when he heard the news of a devastating terrorist attack on the Indonesian island of Bali on Oct. 12, 2002. She had gone there with friends on a vacation. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her,” said Mr. Heffernan, mopping his eyes with a tissue at his home in Florida. In the random, cruel fashion of terrorism, the bombing killed tourists and workers from 22 nations who happened to be in a commercial district, including 38 Indonesians. Among the dead were Australian and British citizens who were there for a rugby match, Americans passionate about surfing — and Megan and two Korean friends, who were out sightseeing when the bombs exploded.
Persons: Frank Heffernan, Megan, Megan Heffernan, , Heffernan Organizations: State Department, Al Locations: South Korea, Indonesian, Bali, Alaska, Al Qaeda, Florida
But pretrial proceedings for four men accused of conspiring in the plot are now in their second decade. For most hearings, the prosecutors bring about 10 people who were injured or lost family members in the attacks to watch the proceedings. Over the years, more than 150 of the people who were killed on Sept. 11 have been represented in the hearings by relatives. Some family members have come looking for answers about why the United States was so vulnerable then. Some come simply to represent a loved one who was killed in an attack that, for some Americans, has become as distant as the one at Pearl Harbor.
Persons: Osama Locations: U.S, United States, Pearl
The move comes as prosecutors have considered new ways to counter claims by defense lawyers that torture by the C.I.A. interrogations of Mr. Mohammed and his accused accomplices to produce confessions the government considers its most important trial evidence. It also shed light on an eavesdropping operation whose existence has until now never been formally acknowledged. vouched for a transcript of Mr. Mohammed describing how he learned when the hijackers would strike. Under a classified prison program, more than a dozen suspected terrorists, who had been subjected to years of solitary confinement and tortured by the C.I.A., were granted an hour of recreation time in earshot of another isolated prisoner.
Persons: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mohammed Locations: Iraqi American, Guantánamo, earshot
A former Guantanamo detainee alleges that Ron DeSantis force-fed him while he was on a hunger strike. But Ron DeSantis was a junior officer as a Navy lawyer at the time. An ex-colonel told the New York Times that DeSantis would have been stuck doing grunt work. download the app Email address Sign up By clicking “Sign Up”, you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . Another lawyer told the Times that DeSantis was doing low-level grunt work at the time.
Persons: Ron DeSantis, , DeSantis, Morris Davis, Mansoor Adayfi, Adayfi, Matthew Rosenberg, Carol Rosenberg, Piers Morgan Organizations: New York Times, Service, Guantanamo, US Navy, Air Force, The New York Times, Times Locations: Guantanamo
A military judge ruled on Thursday that a defendant in the Sept. 11 case who was tortured by the C.I.A. was ineligible for a death-penalty trial, adopting a finding that the prisoner was too psychologically damaged to help defend himself. Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, disqualified Ramzi bin al-Shibh, 51, from what had been a five-defendant conspiracy case in an 11-page ruling on Thursday evening. Mr. bin al-Shibh was charged as an accomplice in the attacks that killed 2,976 people, and is accused of helping organize a cell of hijackers in Hamburg, Germany, whose leader commandeered Flight No. 11 and flew it into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Persons: Matthew N, McCall, Ramzi bin al, bin, Shibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Organizations: World Trade Locations: Hamburg, Germany
Prosecutors have issued a new deadline — Sept. 18 — for four detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to show their willingness to plead guilty to plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and receive a maximum punishment of life in prison. The fifth defendant in the case has been found incompetent to stand trial and is likely to be removed from the case. Without a challenge, the judge is expected to sever him from the case when hearings resume next week after a 22-month hiatus. They describe the deadline as driven by the scheduled Oct. 7 departure of the current overseer of the case, Jeffrey D. Wood. In March 2022, Mr. Wood authorized prosecutors to pursue guilty pleas that would spare the defendants a capital trial to resolve the long-running case.
Persons: Ramzi bin al, Prosecutors, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Jeffrey D, Wood Organizations: Mr Locations: Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
In late 2006, in an effort to turn the page on a legacy of state-sponsored torture, prosecutors for the George W. Bush administration began an experiment at Guantánamo Bay. They set up teams of law enforcement officers to try to obtain voluntary confessions from men who had spent years in brutal conditions in isolated C.I.A. A military judge declared that experiment a failure, at least in one case. In a wide-ranging ruling, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. threw out a confession that federal agents at Guantánamo Bay obtained in 2007 from a Saudi prisoner who is accused of plotting the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. But Mr. Nashiri, who was arrested in 2002, had spent four years in secret C.I.A.
Persons: George W, Bush, Lanny J, Acosta Jr, Cole, Abd al, Rahim, Nashiri, Organizations: Saudi Locations: Aden, Yemen, U.S
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