THE Pentagon has lost its bid to throw out the plea deals for the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and his accomplices.
The move allows the agreement reached by Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks against the United States, and his accomplices Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi in July to move forward.
Mohammad, Attash, and al-Hawsawi pleaded guilty on July 31 in exchange for being spared from the death penalty.
The deal would allow the trio to serve a life sentence on the southern portion of the American Naval base in Cuba.
However, within days of the news of the plea deal, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin quickly filed a motion to a military appeals court to try to halt the agreement.
In his brief, Austin cited the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks and argued that as defense secretary, he should decide on any plea agreements that would save the three men from the death penalty.
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But, the defense attorneys for the suspected terrorists argued Austin had no legal authority to reject a decision that was already approved by the Guantánamo Bay court's top command.
Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall, the military judge overseeing the 9/11 case in the Guantánamo Bay court, sided with the defense and ruled Austin "lacked standing to throw out the plea bargains after they were underway."
McCall's opinion led Austin to file an appeal with a military appeals court, which rejected the defense secretary's motion on Monday.
Austin can take his effort to the US Court of Appeals in Washington DC, where he can file another motion to dismiss the deals.
Prosecutors who offered the agreement said the deal was to bring some "finality and justice to the case," which has been lingering in the judicial process since the three men were arrested by US officials in 2003.
Mohammed was captured on March 1, 2003, in a joint CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence operation in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi.
He was held in secret CIA prisons up until his transfer to Guantánamo Bay in September 2006.
However, before he was moved to Guantánamo, government officials interrogated Mohammed and his accomplices for years, torturing them and keeping them isolated in undisclosed locations.
Mohammed endured 183 rounds of waterboarding - a form of torture where a person experiences the sensation of drowning when water is poured over a cloth covering their face.
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