The stunning reversal Friday of a plea deal for the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks and his accomplices won praise and demands for justice from victims groups and Republican lawmakers.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is correct to reverse course after receiving letters from @GOPoversight and @HASCRepublicans launching investigations into this terrible plea deal,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., posted on X after news broke that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had revoked the deal.
“Now deliver long awaited justice for 9/11 families,” he said.
Pentagon prosecutors stoked national outrage Thursday when they announced a plea agreement with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, who are awaiting trial in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The terms and conditions of the deal were never disclosed, but it took the death penalty off the table, three relatives of 9/11 victims were told by the Office of Military Commissions (OMC), the New York Post reported.
BIDEN-HARRIS ADMINISTRATION BACKTRACKS, REVOKES PLEA DEAL FOR 9/11 TERRORISTS
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked a plea deal offered to the masterminds of the 9/11 terror attacks. (Ian Waldie/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The World Trade Center attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in the worst terror attack on U.S. soil in American history. Families of the victims, groups that represent them and lawmakers expressed bewilderment and fury that those who planned the attack might not be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The House Oversight and Armed Services Committees separately announced investigations into the plea deals, which Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., called, “unconscionable.”
However, that deal was rescinded after Austin relieved the official in charge of the military commission who had signed off on the agreement and assumed their authority for himself.
“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority,…
