Guilty pleas for 9/11 plotters on hold again after government objects – National & International News – THU 9Jan2025

Guilty pleas for 9/11 plotters on hold again after government objects.

Supreme Court to hear TikTok ban case on Friday.

Guilty pleas for 9/11 plotters on hold again after government objects 

In July of last year, three of the men accused of plotting the September 11 attacks on the World trade center agreed to plead guilty to all charges, including 2,976 charges of murder, in exchange for not facing the death penalty. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Bin Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, have all been in US custody, without trial, for over 20 years. They have been held at Guantanamo Bay for most of that time. 

Shortly after the plea agreements were announced last summer, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to block them, although they had been signed by a senior official he had appointed. A military judge and appeals panel later overruled Austin’s objection. 

Now, the Justice Department has weighed in to delay proceedings once more. The DOJ argued that the government would be irreparably harmed if the police were accepted by being denied the opportunity to “seek capital punishment against three men charged with a heinous act of mass murder that caused the death of thousands of people and shocked the nation and the world”. 

The Appeals Court in DC ordered a delay to the plea proceedings, which were to take on Friday, to weigh the DOJ’s argument. The men’s cases are being adjudicated by a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay rather than in civilian court.

Reactions to the plea process from 9/11 families have been mixed. Some are angry over the perceived “leniency” of the agreements which would see the men live out the rest of their lives in prison (though it is not clear where). Others are simply seeking a resolution and are frustrated by the repeated hold-ups in the plea process.

Tainted by torture

If these cases were to come to trial, the defendants would have the right to argue that the confessions used as evidence against them were obtained through torture. They would have the opportunity to detail the tortures they underwent, and potentially even identify some of their torturers. For example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered to be the 9/11 mastermind, is known to have been waterboarded 183 times. The father of another former Gitmo detainee, Majid Khan, also claimed that in 2003, Mohammad’s children, about 6 and 8 at the time, were also detained in Pakistan and tortured for information about their father (Ali Khan affidavit, second page, last paragraph). The plea deals avert the possibility that accounts of these tortures could be heard in court.

Additionally, evidence obtained under torture has been ruled inadmissible in previous military and US civilian court proceedings. Since these confessions are central to the cases against the three men, it may prove impossible to obtain convictions on all counts without them.

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Supreme Court to hear TikTok ban case on Friday

On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance that it should not be forced to sell the online video platform or cease operations in the US. Under a law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden last year, ByteDance has until January 19 to either sell to a non-Chinese company or have the platform banned in the US. 

ByteDance argues that banning the platform in the US would violate the First Amendment speech rights of its US users. Proponents of the bill to ban TikTok in the US cited security concerns about the China-based company. However, lawmakers, including Sen. Mitt Romney, and other high-ranking US officials have said that the driving force in last year’s push to ban the platform arose from objections to speech on the platform. Specifically, lawmakers and Biden administration officials were angry that many content creators on the platform were sharing content critical of Israel’s military assault on Gaza and sharing videos of atrocities committed by the Israeli military.

President-elect Donald Trump, who also tried unsuccessfully to force TikTok’s sale under threat of a ban during his presidency, has called on the Supreme Court to put enforcement of the law on hold, at least until he takes office. Trump has had a change of heart on TikTok after some influencers on the platform bolstered his candidacy. 

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