The man accused of being the main planner the al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has agreed to plead guilty, the Defense Department said Wednesday. After spending almost two decades in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, have agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for sentences of up to life in prison rather than face a death-penalty trial, NPR reports. The settlement agreements with the Pentagon, announced Wednesday, bring partial closure to a case that has dragged on for twenty years and become mired in legal gridlock.
Many family members of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the September 11, 2001, attacks want the 9/11 defendants put to death, but as a trial became increasingly unlikely, plea bargains were widely viewed as the only way to resolve the case. This week's settlement agreements are an acknowledgement of that reality by the U.S. Defense Department. In a letter to victim family members, Guantánamo prosecutors wrote that the decision to settle "was not reached lightly; however, it is our collective, reasoned, and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case." Settlement talks had been underway for more than two years, but appeared to have stalled after the Biden administration rejected some proposed conditions, including a request by defense attorneys that the defendants not be put in solitary confinement. The defendants, who were tortured in secret CIA prisons called black sites, also requested medical care for their lingering injuries.
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