What's in the plea deal reached with key 9/11 attack conspirators

The man accused as the mastermind behind the September 11 terrorist attacks, and two accomplices, have agreed to a plea deal in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. The development comes 16 years after their prosecutions began. Ali Rogin discussed the latest with Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal and author of “The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay.”

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Geoff Bennett: The man accused as the mastermind behind the September 11 terrorist attacks and his two accomplices have agreed to plea — have agreed to a plea deal in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.

The development comes 16 years after their prosecution started.

Ali Rogin has the latest.

Ali Rogin: The three men, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged leader behind the attacks, and Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, all agreed to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences.

The men have been in custody since 2003 and initially charged in 2008, but there have been years of legal delays due in part to the brutal torture the men were subjected to while in detention.

In a letter, government prosecutors said they recognize the deal would be met with mixed reactions among thousands of family members who lost loved ones, but they called it the best path to finality and justice in this case.

For a closer look, I’m joined by Wall Street Journal reporter Jess Bravin. He’s the author of “The Terror Courts,” an account of military trials at Guantanamo Bay.

Jess, thank you so much for joining us.

How did this deal come to be and why is it happening now?

Jess Bravin, The Wall Street Journal: Well, this deal was under negotiation since 2022, and it wasn’t the first time a deal like this was considered.

For years, prosecutors and officials in the military commission apparatus thought that a deal for life sentences in exchange for guilty plays was — pleas would be the only way out. So an earlier effort was quashed by higher-ups in the Pentagon. This one began, as I said, in 2022 and has continued as some of the detainees, some of the defendants, KSM, as we have called him, and the other two decided they were ready to get some finality for their own fate and move forward.

So it really accelerated in the last two weeks. There was a court session at Guantanamo Bay. Prosecutors and the defense attorneys said they were ready to wrap it up and try to get this case closed.

Ali Rogin: Prosecutors had sought the death penalty, but the alleged torture that the defendants underwent for years complicated those proceedings. How did that all factor into this decision?

Jess Bravin: Well, it was really essential, because, right after 9/11, when reports began emerging about brutal treatment of enemy prisoners, torture, as in fact President Obama called it at one point, began to emerge, there were questions about how would this affect any future trials?

And there were legal experts then who warned that it would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute people if they were severely mistreated by the government while in custody. And that is exactly what has happened.

These detainees wanted to bring in evidence of how they were treated by the CIA. Mohammed had been water-boarded. They’d been beaten. All kinds of things had been done to them that the United States would not tolerate for its own citizens. And they wanted to bring in evidence saying that any statements they made were infected by torture.

So a lot of the pretrial wrangling over more than a decade has been over, what can the defendants introduce about their treatment? And then there was a second factor, which is that under a doctrine sometimes called unclean hands, the government is punished by courts when it commits misconduct in a trial.

And abusing defendants in custody is misconduct. So it is possible that, even if they were convicted and sentenced to death, on appeal, a higher court might sanction the government by taking the death penalty off the table. So the death penalty seemed to be really a bridge too far, given the mistreatment of these prisoners after they were captured by the U.S.

Ali Rogin: And what do we know about how the families of 9/11 victims are responding to this?

Jess Bravin: It is a total mixed bag. There are thousands of families of victims. And as you would expect, there are opinions across the gamut.

There are some who feel that nothing short of death is appropriate for these defendants. And based on their actions, it would be hard to say, if the death penalty is appropriate for anyone, it wouldn’t be appropriate for them. Others simply oppose the death penalty. Many Americans and people around the world just philosophically are morally opposed the death penalty period for anybody.

And some of those are among the victims’ families. And then there are those who really take the prosecutor’s point of view, which is that, ideally, they could pursue capital punishment for these defendants, but it’s just time for closure and it’s time to end this proceeding and move forward.

One of the features of the deal is that there will be a sentencing hearing, where the defendants can testify, but they will have to answer questions from the victim’s families. And for many of those families who are looking for answers, who are looking for some sense of these accused perpetrators, that hearing will be the substitution for a full trial on what happened in the lead-up to 9/11.

Ali Rogin: In the moments we have left, what happens next? Where do these defendants spend their life sentences?

Jess Bravin: Well, again, it hasn’t fully been approved by all the proceedings that have to happen. But the plan is that they will next enter a plea probably within a week or a month of now.

Next year, there will be the sentencing hearing. And after their sentence is confirmed, they likely will spend it right where they are now at Guantanamo Bay. The technical status of their detention will change. They will be sentenced prisoners, but in terms of their day-to-day lives, probably not much will change. They will be looking at the same four walls that they are looking at right now for the rest of their lives.

Ali Rogin: Jess Bravin, covering this every step of the way, thank you so much for joining us.

Jess Bravin: You bet. Thank you.