Pentagon Appeals Panel Rules 9/11 Plotters' Plea Deals Can Go Forward

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A Pentagon appeals panel has upheld a military court judge’s decision that the plea deals reached with the three 9/11 plotters being held at Guantanamo prison last August were valid and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin did not have the authority to rescind the deals with the 9/11 mastermind of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two other terrorists signed off on by prosecutors without Austin’s knowledge.

In the history of American military jurisprudence, there has never been such a monumental screw-up. That it happened with terrorists guilty of the most horrific crime in American history only makes it worse.

Last August, Susan Escallier, the convening authority for military commissions, oversaw the negotiations for plea deals involving the 9/11 terrorists. The talks had been ongoing for more than two years when the defense and prosecutors reached a deal that gave the most infamous murderers in American history life in prison in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.

The explosion of outrage that followed probably convinced Biden and Austin to try to renege on the deal. A military judge ruled, and the appeals court upheld the ruling, that Austin did not have the authority to scotch the plea deal. He acted too late, and the deal had already been put in motion, said the three-judge appeals panel.

Austin tried to make it appear that Susan Escallie had exceeded her authority in agreeing to the plea deal. He shamelessly made his subordinate the fall guy in this botched prosecution.

I commented on the series of events last August.

Austin told Escallier that he was withdrawing her authority and “reserve such authority to (himself).” Making Escallier the fall guy for Austin and Biden’s stupidity is typical of the two men most responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco. They never take responsibility for any of their failings. Any of them. “I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009.”

He didn’t realize the “significance of the decision”? God help this country.

The problem with rescinding the plea deals is that the pretrial agreements, or PTAs, have already begun to be implemented so Austin’s action to take the plea deals off the table came too late.

“We agree with the military judge that the secretary did not have authority to revoke respondents’ existing PTAs because the respondents had started performance of the PTAs,” the three-judge panel wrote in a 21-page decision released Monday.

Sacha Pfeiffer of NPR explains some other bone-head moves by Austun in the case.

The judge says that Austin had already deputized the head of the military court to make plea deals if that person thought plea deals were the right thing to do. And the judge says, once Austin has delegated that authority, he cannot take it back just because he disagrees with the decision. The head of the military court is considered independent. It’s meant to be immune from political pressure. So the judge says Austin acted beyond the scope of his authority and acted too late by trying to reverse the plea deals after they were already made.

This goes back to Barack Obama’s friend and religious “advisor” Jeremiah Wright, pastor of the radical Trinity Baptist Church and friend to the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who referred to 9/11 as America’s “chickens coming home to roost.” The radical left has been trying to make the case that America deserved what happened to it on 9/11, and the terrorists in Guantanamo prison were actually acting in self-defense.

The case has been botched from beginning to end. That is the reason why we are probably going to be hit again and again by terrorists who know they can count on radical left lawyers to either delay the legal proceedings until they die of natural causes or wangle plea deals that let them live out their lives in relative comfort.