Admin Able to Temporarily Block Deal   01/10 06:16

   

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Biden administration succeeded Thursday in 
temporarily blocking accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from 
entering a guilty plea in a deal that would spare him the risk of execution for 
al-Qaida's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

   It is the latest development in a long struggle by the U.S. military and 
successive administrations to bring to justice the man charged with planning 
one of the deadliest attacks ever on the United States. It stalls an attempt to 
wrap up more than two decades of military prosecution beset by legal and 
logistical troubles.

   A three-judge appeals panel agreed to put on hold Mohammed's guilty plea 
scheduled for Friday in a military commission courtroom at the U.S. naval base 
in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

   In an unusual move, the Biden administration is pushing to throw out a plea 
agreement that its own Defense Department had negotiated with Mohammed and two 
9/11 co-defendants.

   Mohammed is accused of developing and directing the plot to crash hijacked 
airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Another of the hijacked 
planes flew into a field in Pennsylvania.

   A small number of relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 victims already had 
gathered in Guantanamo to hear Mohammed take responsibility in one of the most 
painful chapters in American history.

   "It's very upsetting," said Elizabeth Miller, who lost her firefighter 
father, Douglas Miller, in the attacks and leads a group of 9/11 families 
supporting the plea agreements and opposing execution for the defendants.

   She sees the deals as "the best way for families to receive finality."

   "It's unfortunate that the larger government isn't recognizing it," she said 
by phone Thursday from Guantanamo.

   But Gordon Haberman, whose daughter, Andrea, was killed at the World Trade 
Center while on a business trip, took heart. "If this leads to a full trial for 
these guys, then I'm in favor of that," he said.

   The appeals panel stressed that its order would hold only as long as it took 
to more fully consider arguments and that it should not be considered a final 
ruling.

   The court scheduled some of the next steps for Jan. 22, meaning the fight 
would extend into the Trump administration.

   Defense lawyers had worked to wrap up the pleas by President-elect Donald 
Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration. It's not clear whether Trump would seek to 
intervene in the military commission's work.

   Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has led the fight to overturn the politically 
divisive plea deals, saying a decision on the death penalty in an attack as 
grave as Sept. 11 should only be made by the defense secretary.

   Defense lawyers said in filings that attempts to throw out the agreement is 
the latest in the government's two decades of "fitful" and "negligent" 
mishandling of the case. They say the deal is already in effect and that Austin 
has no legal authority to throw it out after the fact.

   The fight has put the Biden administration at odds with the U.S. military 
officials it appointed to oversee justice in the attacks.

   The deal, negotiated over two years and approved by military prosecutors and 
the Pentagon's senior official for Guantanamo in late July, stipulated life 
sentences without parole for Mohammed and two co-defendants. It also obligates 
them to answer any lingering questions that families of the victims have about 
the attacks.

   Legal and logistical challenges have bogged down the 9/11 case in the 17 
years since charges were filed against Mohammed. The case remains in pretrial 
hearings, with no trial date set.

   The torture of Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants in CIA custody has posed 
one of the biggest obstacles, potentially rendering their later statements 
unusable in court.

   With that in mind, military prosecutors notified families this summer that 
the senior Pentagon official overseeing Guantanamo had approved a plea deal. 
They called it "the best path to finality and justice."

   Austin unexpectedly announced Aug. 2 that he was scrapping the agreement. 
After the Guantanamo judge and a military review panel rejected Austin's 
intervention, the Biden administration went to the District of Columbia federal 
appeals court this week.

   Mohammed's attorneys argued that Austin's "extraordinary intervention in 
this case is solely a product of his lack of oversight over his own duly 
appointed delegate," meaning the senior Pentagon official overseeing Guantanamo.

   The Justice Department said that if the guilty pleas were accepted, the 
government would be denied a chance for a public trial and the opportunity to 
"seek capital punishment against three men charged with a heinous act of mass 
murder that caused the death of thousands of people and shocked the nation and 
the world."