The Pentagon chief was caught off guard by last week’s decision by prosecutors to offer deals to the men.
United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has defended his decision to revoke controversial plea deals agreed between prosecutors and three men accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Speaking publicly for the first time about his decision on Tuesday, Austin said it “wasn’t a decision that I took lightly” and he did so to honour the scale of the loss that occurred that day.
“I have long believed that the families of the victims, our service members, and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commissions, commission trials carried out,” he said at an event with visiting Australian officials in Annapolis, Maryland.
The Pentagon announced on July 31 that plea agreements had been reached with three of five alleged plotters held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, where they stand accused of orchestrating the deadliest attack on US soil in the country’s history.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day as hijacked passenger planes struck targets in New York City and Washington, DC. A fourth crashed into a field as passengers tackled the hijackers.
The deals involved alleged mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad as well as accomplices Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. A fourth defendant did not agree to the terms, while a fifth man was ruled mentally unfit to continue facing trial last year.
In a statement, it described the deals as “pretrial agreements”, without offering further details. US media reports said the men would plead guilty in exchange for receiving a life sentence rather than the death penalty.
The defendants are due to face trial in a military court at the maximum-security facility in Cuba, but their cases have been held up for years amid legal wrangling.
The plea bargains had been welcomed by some as the only feasible way to resolve the long-stalled 9/11 cases, including J Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Dixon, who has represented defendants at Guantanamo and other detainees who have been cleared of wrongdoing, accused Austin of “bowing to political pressure and pushing some victim family members over an emotional cliff” with the reversal.
The plea deals sparked outrage among some victims’ family members and Republican lawmakers, who accused the administration of President Joe Biden of treating the defendants too lightly.
Austin himself was also caught off guard by the decision, Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters on Monday.
“This is not something that the secretary [Lloyd Austin] was consulted on,” she said. “We were not aware that the prosecution or defence would enter the terms of the plea agreement.”
On Friday, a tersely-worded letter from the defence secretary said the plea deals had been withdrawn. Austin added that Susan Escallier, the official in charge of the military commission which had signed off on them, had also been relieved of her authority to enter into pre-trial agreements and he would now assume responsibility in the case.
“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024,” the letter said.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan confirmed that the Biden administration did not play a role in the plea bargains, saying the White House knew the “same day” they were announced.
“We had no role in that process. The president had no role. The vice president had no role. I had no role. The White House had no role,” Sullivan told journalists on Thursday, without explaining why the deals were agreed and announced without consultation.