I guess the feedback on the plea deal was awful, because Secretary of Defense Austin has said not so fast:
The deal that stirred national outrage and took the death penalty off of the table has been revoked by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III in a terse memo.
Secretary Austin III is now taking the lead on the case for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.
In his order, Austin relieved the official in charge of the military commission who had signed off on the original plea deals. …
No explanation was given on why this was not settled earlier before the deals were signed off and publicly released. …
The powerful House Armed Services Committee announced earlier Friday it was launching an investigation into the plea deals, which Chairman Mike Rogers, R.-La., called “unconscionable.”
Did Austin not know what was going on until it became public? Or did he not realize what outrage it would cause? Who’s minding the store here?
The reason it’s Austin, by the way, is that the trial is a military one and so the military is in charge.
And this is the ostensible reason the plea deal was settled in the first place:
[The defendants’] past torture is largely responsible for bogging down the case, since prosecutors and defense attorneys have been arguing for years over whether evidence obtained through torture is admissible in court. In a recent ruling that did not bode well for 9/11 prosecutors, a judge in another different Guantánamo case — the U.S.S. Cole warship bombing — threw out a confession because he said it was a product of torture.
That legal development may have played a role in the U.S. government deciding to settle the 9/11 case.
Who made the decision to settle?:
In a statement, the National Security Council said that “the President and the White House played no role in this process” and learned of the plea bargains on Wednesday.
No one bothered to tell them? And they didn’t bother to keep tabs on what was happening? Excuse me but, WTF? We are supposed to believe they are mind-bogglingly negligent – or they are just plain lying. They are fully capable of either or both, as we’ve learned many times before.
NOTE: I’ve previously written on the subject of the KSM case. Here’s a post that explains some of the reasons it’s taken so long – including that Obama wanted these people tried in civil courts rather than military courts. Astounding. Fortunately, he lost that fight.
I also have written quite a few posts on the subject of torture: see this one, for example.