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Split Federal Court of Appeals In Washington, D.C., on Friday, he abandoned a contract that allowed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attack, to plead guilty to another effort to end the long-standing legal saga surrounding a male military prosecutor held in Guantanamo Bay.
2-1 The DC Circuit’s decision to cancel the plea deal approved by then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s military counsel and senior Pentagon staff.
The deal would have taken the lives of Mohammed and the two co-defendants without parole statements.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was previously on the most wanted terrorist list. (My/Getty Images)
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Mohammed, a Pakistani citizen, has been accused of spearheading the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and its other commercial jet liners. Crash fell in Pennsylvania.
Austin said decisions on whether to take the death penalty from the table could only be made by the Secretary of Defense.
However, legal concerns stem from whether the original plea agreement is legally binding and whether Austin was too long to dismiss it.
The contract was withdrawn by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc, Getty Images)
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The court found Austin has legal authority to withdraw from the contract as the promises made in the contract were not yet met and the government had no appropriate alternative remedies.
Since the appeals court put the contract on hold, the defendant was not found to have been previously scheduled on Friday, marking a temporary victory for the Biden administration.
Majority judges Patricia Millett and Justice Neomi Rao said the government “stood that Secretary Austin has delayed action to avoid the challenges of illegal impacts, waiting for what type of agreement will arise from negotiations and waiting to determine whether intervention is necessary.”
The court found that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was acting within his legal authority. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)
Citing previous unlawful impact allegations against various government officials, including the Secretary of Defense, Millett and Rao, Austin found it “reasonable” to withdraw from the contract to avoid additional lawsuits.
“The secretary, who properly envisioned the convening authority, deemed a chance for his family and the American public to see the military commission trial,” the judge wrote. “The secretary acted within his legal authority and we refused to recertify his judgment.”
Judge Robert L. Wilkins dissented, insisting that siding with the government was too much.
“The court’s retention is amazing,” Wilkins wrote. “The majority do not just believe in the respondent [prosecutors who negotiated the plea deal] Although they did not begin a performance, the government believes it has established a clear and indisputable right to mandama or warrants of prohibition.
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“It is impossible for the government to conclude that it has shown that it is clearly and uncontroversially entitled to the bailout,” he continued. “That demanding mandama standard is farther from the extent to which the government cannot cite binding on-point precedents to support its claims, and we are constrained to review clear errors both in the military judge’s findings that the PTA covers the application of relevant promises and withdrawal regulations.
