The man accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two of his co-defendants have reached plea agreements that will allow them to avoid the death penalty, the Defense Department announced Wednesday — a dramatic development in the decades-long cases for the prisoners at the U.S. military detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi will all plead guilty, according to a letter sent to families of the victims by a senior U.S. defense official overseeing the cases. A panel of military officials eventually will determine the men’s sentences.
“In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet,” according to the letter, signed by Rear Adm. Aaron Rugh, the chief prosecutor in the cases.
The deals raise the prospect that some of the most significant cases in the Pentagon’s long legal process stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks may finally be over. Human rights organizations and legal experts have criticized the proceedings for their secretive nature, conflicts of interest and repeated delays that have drawn out the effort for years.
The process also has been difficult because of a 2015 law passed by Congress that restricted the U.S. government from allowing detainees at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay to set foot in the continental United States, even for their criminal trials. Lawmakers did so while citing security concerns, even as the Justice Department has continued to try other terrorism suspects in federal court.
The cases also have been complicated by the brutal nature in which the United States detained and interrogated suspects and prisoners, including the federal government’s use of torture at Guantánamo Bay, which it had aimed to keep secret. The U.S. Senate has published reports that include information on waterboarding of some prisoners, including Mohammed.
“At the heart of the commissions’ problems is their original sin, torture,” John G. Baker, a Marine Corps general who served as defense counsel of the Military Commissions Defense Organization, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2021. “The United States chose to secretly detain and torture the men it now seeks to punish.”
Wednesday’s announcements mark a turning point in the prosecution of the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Planes that departed Boston Logan, Dulles and Newark international airports were hijacked and later crashed into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.
The alleged plotters are scheduled to enter their guilty pleas in hearings scheduled for next week or during the September and October sessions of the Convening Authority for Military Commissions, according to Rugh’s letter.
The plea negotiations had been underway for over two years, the letter states. The three men also agreed “to a process to respond to questions submitted” by family members of victims “regarding their roles and reasons for conducting the September 11 attacks,” it adds. Family members may be able to testify during sentencing hearings, which will start in summer 2025 at the earliest, according to the letter.
Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mohammed, called the plea agreement “the right call” and “the only practical solution after nearly two decades of litigation.”
“For too long, the U.S. has repeatedly defended its use of torture and unconstitutional military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay,” Romero said in a statement Wednesday, adding that the plea deal “further underscores the fact that the death penalty is out of step with the fundamental values of our democratic system.”
The three men, alongside two other defendants, were initially charged in 2008, but the cases were dropped in 2010 as the Obama administration sought to try them instead in New York. Military officials refiled charges against all five men in 2011, as the Obama administration shifted gears after failing to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
After the delays in the cases, some family members of victims believed there would never be a trial, said Terry Kay Rockefeller, a member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. In 2017, Rockefeller and other members of the organization began pushing for plea agreements in the cases. They saw the deals as a way toward “judicial finality.”
“We said there has to be a different way to actually obtain some kind of justice and accountability,” Rockefeller said.
Her sister, Laura, an actress and singer, was helping run a conference on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower when a plane struck the building. Wednesday’s announcement was a welcome development, Rockefeller said.
“I would have liked a trial of men who hadn’t been tortured, but we got handed a really poor opportunity for justice, and this is a way to verdicts and finality,” Rockefeller said. “That’s what I consider this.”
James G. Connell III, attorney for Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, another 9/11 defendant at Guantánamo who is not covered by the deal, said Wednesday’s agreements were “a critical step toward judicial finality.”
Gary Brown, who was the legal adviser to the convening authority from 2017 to 2018, Harvey Rishikof, said it’s time to bring the commissions to a close, adding: “They finally got around to recognizing the inevitable — that they were never going to get to a capital sentence.’’
Rishikof and Brown were in the process of negotiating guilty pleas for the 9/11 defendants in exchange for life sentences when they were fired by Pentagon officials, allegedly for mismanagement. Brown has subsequently settled a whistleblower reprisal case, whose terms are confidential.
“The plea deal with life imprisonment is the most appropriate resolution for this case” because of legal structural problems that made a death penalty conviction hard to sustain by an appellate court, Rishikof said. Those legal problems, he said, included the fact that the defense counsel was given access to only summaries of classified evidence, and that waterboarding of the defendants tainted any admissions of guilt.
Zacarias Moussaoui remains the only person convicted in a criminal court in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. He represented himself during dramatic hearings in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. — during which he regularly shouted his allegiance to al-Qaeda — before abruptly pleading guilty in 2005 to conspiring to kill Americans as part of the 9/11 attacks. He is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Colorado.
The conspirators who hijacked and crashed the planes all were killed in the attacks.
Dan Lamothe and Abigail Hauslohner contributed to this report.
