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The alleged mastermind of the September 11 2001 attacks on the US will be spared the death penalty as part of a plea agreement that aims to end years of legal wrangling over his treatment by the CIA and interrogation under torture in Guantánamo Bay.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, who is accused of plotting with the late al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden to hijack planes and fly them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, will now receive a minimum sentence of 2,976 years in a military tribunal, the 59-year-old’s lawyer said on Wednesday.
The Pentagon, which announced the plea deal, said it had also reached agreements with two other defendants, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, who were first charged alongside Mohammed 16 years ago.
The exact terms of their pleas were not disclosed by the US government, but the trio are expected to plead guilty and avoid a full trial.
Mohammed’s lawyer Gary Sowards said there would instead be a sentencing hearing at which the US would present evidence of the Kuwaiti national’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, and ask for a lengthy sentence.
“The defence will then be allowed to present evidence in extenuation and mitigation,” Sowards added. “There will also be an opportunity for the surviving victims and the survivors of victims to testify to the impact that the 9/11 events have had on their lives.”
Mohammed was captured in 2003 in Pakistan, and held at CIA prisons before being sent to Guantánamo Bay. The agency has since been found to have subjected him to waterboarding at least 183 times, a form of torture.
A report by a Senate select committee in 2014 found that “internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of [Khaled Sheikh Mohammed] as evolving into a ‘series of near drownings’.”
Harrowing accounts of such techniques sparked a fierce debate within the US over the legality of cases against Mohammed and other prisoners, and the ongoing litigation became a deeply divisive topic in Washington.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, immediately condemned the agreements on Wednesday, saying they showed the “Biden-Harris administration’s weakness in the face of sworn enemies of the American people”, and “a revolting abdication of the government’s responsibility”.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, also condemned the deals, calling them a “slap in the face” to victims’ families by the Biden administration.
Mohammed, Bin Attash and al Hawsawi were initially charged in 2008 alongside Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Ramzi Bin al Shibh. Mohammed was accused of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda, including the plan to hit buildings with hijacked commercial aeroplanes, while the others were alleged to have played financial or organisational roles.
The attackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people in an act of terror that has profoundly altered domestic security and US foreign policy.
Mohammed has been under the jurisdiction of military commissions at Guantánamo, which were established by the administration of George W Bush to try foreign terrorism suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Barack Obama’s attempts to close it down during his presidency failed.
The proceedings have been marred in legal and ethical controversy over the length of the defendants’ custody without trial and instances of torture. The cases have been bogged down in the pre-trial phase partly over whether the US government was introducing evidence gathered as a result of torture, calling into question the statements that were obtained.
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz and Stefania Palma in Washington
