US secretary of defense Lloyd Austin has revoked a plea deal for three men accused of being involved in the 9/11 attacks, according to a memo sent to the Susan Escallier, who is overseeing the war court proceedings.
The short-lived deal came 16 years after prosecution of the three men began.
On Wednesday, Escallier announced that she signed a deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attack, and two of his accomplices: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi.
In exchange for the trio’s guilty pleas they would be sentenced to life in prison, the New York Times reported.
Austin argued that due to 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”, the memo reads.
For some victims’ families, the deal Escallier entered into destroyed any chance of a full trial that could have ended in death sentences and given people the opportunity to address the men accused of killing their loved ones, according to the Washington Post.
“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,” Terry Kay Rockefeller, 74, whose sister Laura was killed on 9/11, told the Post.
News of the original plea deal elicited sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell and JD Vance, who decried the deal, and the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who accused the Biden-Harris administration of betraying the American people.
But a senior Pentagon official told the New York Times that the president and vice-president had no involvement in Austin’s decision to rescind the controversial deal.
Mohammed and the other defendants had been expected to formally enter their pleas under the deal as soon as next week.
Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
The US military commission overseeing the cases of five defendants in the 9/11 attacks have been stuck in pre-trial hearings and other preliminary court action since 2008. The torture that the defendants underwent while in CIA custody has slowed the cases and left the prospect of full trials and verdicts still uncertain, in part because of the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture.
Associated Press contributed to this report