The Biden administration has sent a letter to families of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, informing them that defendants in the attack may be spared the death penalty if a plea deal is negotiated.
“The Office of the Chief Prosecutor has been negotiating and is considering entering into pre-trial agreements (PTAs),” the letter said, according to the Associated Press. While no plea agreement “has been finalized, and may never be finalized, it is possible that a PTA in this case would remove the possibility of the death penalty.”
The letter, dated Aug. 1, was received by some families only this week. They have until Monday to contact the FBI’s victim services division in case they need clarifications regarding the potential plea agreement.
There are five defendants in the case, including the suspected mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The suspected terrorists have been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp since 2006.
The Sept. 11 attack was carried out by a group of terrorists who seized control of two planes and plowed them into the two World Trade Center towers. A third plane was flown into the Pentagon.
A fourth plane was headed for the U.S. Capitol or the White House but was diverted by heroic passengers who attempted to storm the cockpit, with the plane eventually crashing into an empty field in Pennsylvania.
The 9/11 attacks, the deadliest in American history, ended up killing 2,977 people. It was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who proposed the idea to Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda terrorist group at the time.
He was then authorized by bin Laden to carry out the attack. The four defendants are alleged to have aided the hijackers.
Some relatives of the people killed on 9/11 have expressed outrage that the case could end short of a verdict.
Speaking to AP, Jim Riches, who lost his firefighter son Jimmy on 9/11, said he laughed bitterly after receiving the letter. “How can you have any faith in it?”
The letter “gives us little hope,” he said. Mr. Riches pointed out that the people who carried out the attacks “are still alive” while “our children are dead.”
The defendants had sought a plea bargain under the Trump administration, stating that they would plead guilty and cooperate with the government’s investigations into al Qaeda and 9/11.
However, the Trump administration ruled out the possibility of entering into plea bargains with the defendants.
The Mastermind Behind 9/11
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, also known as the “CEO of al Qaeda,” is from Pakistan. He was arrested in March 2003 during a raid conducted by a joint U.S.-Pakistani team in a safe house near Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad.
In his interrogation with U.S. officials, Mr. Mohammed admitted that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” according to the New York Post.
During his arraignment, he pleaded guilty for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Mohammed has also admitted to other crimes, including decapitating Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; a nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia; and another attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
In a 2019 interview with the New York Post, Terry McDermott, a co-author of the book, “The Hunt for KSM,” said that the main reason Mr. Mohammed was not brought to trial was due to the torture he underwent while detained by U.S. authorities.
Defense lawyers have insisted that the confessions made by Mr. Mohammed are worthless given that such statements were obtained after CIA operatives tortured him. The confessions were done when he was in Guantanamo Bay.
“The whole thing would have been over pretty quickly if it weren’t for prior torture of the accused,” Mr. McDermott said.
The Case Drags On
Over the years, the case has seen multiple defense lawyers and judges come and go. Much of the hearings were spent on determining how much of the testimony given by Mr. Mohammed and other defendants should be considered inadmissible due to the torture they were subjected to.
Mr. Mohammed is said to have been waterboarded 183 times while in CIA custody. Waterboarding is a torture method involving holding someone’s face upward while water is poured over their face in large quantities, causing the sensation of drowning.
Hearings on the 9/11 case are scheduled to resume on Sept. 18.
Some of the relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11 attack are looking forward to a quicker case resolution given how long it has dragged out.
In an interview with NPR in March, Glenn Morgan, 60, whose father died in the World Trade Center collapse, said that he wants the suspects sentenced to death. But after two decades of the case going nowhere, he wants to at least see a plea deal and justice.
Over the past years, “more people in my family have passed away, and those people have not seen a guilty verdict for these individuals responsible for killing my dad … so the clock is ticking.” Mr. Morgan is worried that the defendants may die without being found guilty if the case drags on more.
“That would be so much more tragic than a plea agreement,” he said. “And that’s a tragedy that’s just completely avoidable. And shame on us if we as Americans, or our politicians, can’t get out of our own [expletive] way.”
From The Epoch Times
