Opinion: Media and Public Should Have Acesss to Proposed 9/11 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Plea Agreement

The public has demanded the death penalty for accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others, held and tried by a U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay. The public and media has demanded transparency into the years of litigation to prosecute the organizers of 9/11. After years of procedural rullings and multiple hearings sealed  plea deal was struck. This plea deal unlike most is sealed and nor made available to the media nor the public. 

Many were stunned, as news leaked that the plea agreement may have taken the death penalty off the table and was accepted by the commission. As a result the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin intervened and has abruptly revoked the agreement days after it became public. It  become one of the most fiercely debated chapters in more than a decade of military hearings related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,which killed nearly 3,000 people and triggered a long-running U.S. military invasions in the middle east of which we just recently got out of.

The plea agreement would have spared Mohammed and two co-defendants the risk of the death penalty, in exchange for their guilty pleas in the al-Qaida attacks, according to multiple news sources. 

After news of the deal broke, however, top  lawmakers of both parties denounced the agreement and the White House expressed concerns. Families of the victims variously expressed shock and approval of the plea deal, which was aimed at resolving more than a decade of pre-trial hearings in a legally troubled case for the government.

Secretary Austin said in revoking the military commission's approval of the plea bargain that he had decided the responsibility for any such grave decision and it should rest with him as secretary of defense. Mohammed and the two co-defendants have filed challenges, saying Austin's action was illegal and that the actions by the Biden administration, lawmakers and others amounted to undue outside influence in the case fearing Austin will put the death penalty back on the table. 

Seven news organizations — Fox News, NBC, NPR, The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Univision each challenged the sealing of the plea deal. Every other plea deal in a court trail in the United States is released ad information to the public including all terms and conditions. The public has the right to know on this one of the most important cases on one of the most high profile crimes in US History. 

On Friday a hearing highlighted the ad hoc nature of the military commission, which U.S. leaders created to try accused violent extremists in the wake of the 2001 attacks. The lawyers and judge pivoted Friday between civilian and military legal precedents in arguing for and against making terms of the plea agreement public.

The hearing also highlighted the obstacles facing the public, including news organizations, in obtaining information about proceedings against the 9/11 defendants and the few dozen other remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In civilian courts, a plea agreement is a matter of public record. Even military trials to include removal of commanders from positions of leadership are made public thus this agreement and trail should be transparent. 

Both defense and prosecution lawyers in the case asked the commission judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, to deny the news organizations' request to make the plea deal public.

They argued that allowing the public to know all the terms of the deal that the government struck with defendants Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi could wait. Prosecutors and defense lawyers offered different proposals for how long to wait — until after any rulings on challenges to Austin's overturning of the plea deal, or until after any military sentencing panel is ever seated in the case, or forever.

AlamogordoTownNews.org, KALHRadio.org and a majority of the independent and online news media organizations join the major news outlets and demand that any plea agreement must be made public. Additionally we support Secretary Austins stance that the ultimate decision on accepting and plea agreement should fall to the Secretary of Defense. We also stand with a majority of Americans that the death penalty should not be excluded from consideration in the case of the planners of the 9/11 attacks. 

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