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The Pentagon said on Wednesday the plea deals had been entered
into but did not elaborate on details. A U.S. official said they
almost certainly involved guilty pleas in exchange for taking
the death penalty off the table.
However on Friday, Austin relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees
the Pentagon's Guantanamo war court, of her authority to enter
into pre-trial agreements in the case and took on the
responsibility himself.
"Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I
hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements...," Austin
wrote in a memo.
Many Republican lawmakers, including House of Representatives
Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell,
strongly criticized the plea deals.
Mohammed is the most well known inmate at the detention facility
in Guantanamo Bay, which was set up in 2002 by then-U.S.
President George W. Bush to house foreign militant suspects
following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked
commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New
York City and into the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they're
known, killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States
into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
Plea deals had also been reached by two other detainees: Walid
Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al
Hawsawi.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali; writing by Costas Pitas; editing by
Eric Beech)
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