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How the 9/11 Plea Deal Came Undone - The New York Times
How the 9/11 Plea Deal Came Undone
"A case that had mostly drifted from public consciousness in 12 years of proceedings is back in the spotlight and no closer to trial.
By Carol Rosenberg and Eric Schmitt
Carol Rosenberg reported from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Eric Schmitt is a senior correspondent who covers national security issues.
In the space of three days last week, the Sept. 11 case was rocked by two decisions that stunned victims’ families and jolted a political debate.
First, a Pentagon official authorized a plea agreement meant to resolve the case with lifetime sentences. Then, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III abruptly canceled the deal, reviving the possibility that the man accused of planning the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and two accused accomplices could someday face a death penalty trial.
Suddenly, a case that had mostly drifted from public consciousness in 12 years of pretrial proceedings was back in the spotlight and no closer to the trial that some relatives of the nearly 3,000 victims had been aching for at Guantánamo Bay.
This account of those fateful three days is based on interviews and conversations with Pentagon officials, Sept. 11 family members and parties to the case.
Wednesday, July 31
There was no hint of what would come on this day in the mostly forgotten case at Guantánamo Bay.
The court was in a closed hearing — no public, no defendants — as a retired Army officer testified about his time in charge of the secret prison where the defendants were held, beginning in 2006. It was the 51st round of pretrial hearings.
But at some point, in an office near the Pentagon, a senior Defense Department official who is responsible for military commissions approved a plea agreement with Mr. Mohammed and the two accused of being accomplices.
The official, Susan K. Escallier, a retired brigadier general, was a lawyer and had been in the civilian role for about a year.
The contents of the deal are secret, aside from the fundamental reason for a plea agreement in a capital case: The government says it will not seek the death penalty in exchange for the defendants giving up the right to appeal their conviction.
Soon after she signed it, people from the war crimes prosecutor’s office began calling family members of the 2,976 people who were killed in the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. One family member was asked to keep the call confidential and told the agreement was “the best worst option.”
Prosecutors also sent a letter to the victims’ relatives, using a roster of names, email addresses and phone numbers of family members, survivors of the attacks and other victims. They had not reached the decision “lightly,” the prosecutors wrote. “It is our collective, reasoned and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case.”
Grief counselors were on standby for those seeking solace, the letter said.
At the time, Mr. Austin was flying home from the Philippines, wrapping up a weeklong trip to Asia. Toward the end of his 16-hour flight, at about 3 p.m. Washington time, he learned that the agreement had just been signed — and that prosecutors had prepared a letter for family members.
In two hours, the Pentagon would release a two-paragraph statement announcing the deal. “The specific terms and conditions of the pretrial agreements are not available to the public at this time,” it said.
Mr. Austin had not seen the agreement itself and was surprised by the decision. He directed his staff to look into the Defense Department’s options.
By law, the military commissions are overseen by the convening authority, a role given to the defense secretary. But Mr. Austin, like all of his predecessors, had delegated that oversight role to an ostensibly independent lawyer. He appointed Ms. Escallier, who had served 32 years in the Army.
The convening authority approves cases for prosecution and has disapproved some, including charges against a man who was tortured in military custody. He or she decides which cases go forward with the possibility of the death penalty and negotiates or approves plea agreements.
On board his flight, Mr. Austin was dealing with the latest crisis in the Middle East: Israel’s assassination in Tehran of a top leader of Hamas, escalating threats to U.S. military personnel in the region and concerns about a wider war. He had a call with Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
He also discussed the Middle East with Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, before word reached the plane that the deal had been signed.
“The issue did not come up,” said a senior Defense Department official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Defense officials were aware that Mr. Mohammed and the other two men had signed the agreements; they did not anticipate that Ms. Escallier would sign them so soon.
Around the time Mr. Austin’s flight landed, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, condemned the deal as “a revolting abdication of the government’s responsibility to defend America and provide justice.”
“In the same week that Israel eliminated some of Iran’s most trusted terrorist proxies, the administration’s decision to spare these mass murderers from the death penalty is an especially bitter pill,” he said in a statement.
The White House said in a statement that it “had played no role in the process.” But it said it would start asking questions.
Thursday, Aug. 1
Conflicting emotions rippled through the community of Sept. 11 families.
Kathleen Vigiano, whose New York Police detective husband, Joseph Vigiano, and firefighter brother-in-law, John Vigiano, were both killed at the World Trade Center, said she was “mostly angry” over what had happened.
Mrs. Vigiano, herself a retired police officer, had received a call from prosecutors she had known through the years, explaining the deal. But still she wanted a trial and the death penalty to achieve justice.
Terry Rockefeller, whose sister Laura was killed in the towers, felt relieved. She believes that the case is forever tarnished by torture and, as a member of the activist group September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, that a life sentence with guilty pleas and a public sentencing hearing are the only possible resolution.
At Guantánamo Bay, the prosecutor Clayton G. Trivett III formally notified the judge in the case, Col. Matthew N. McCall, that the agreement had been reached and that the sides were eager to move forward with entering pleas in court.
Colonel McCall had been edging closer to making decisions about whether crucial evidence was tainted by torture.
But, with plea deals signed by three of the four defendants in the case, the judge was eager to receive copies to review them, “with alacrity,” he said.
The agreements were delivered to the court and the judge agreed to seal them until a jury was empaneled, perhaps next year.
He also agreed to work through the weekend to prepare questions for the defendants about their understanding of the agreement, to determine whether each plea was voluntary. Both defense and prosecution attorneys were urging him to move soon and to take Mr. Mohammed’s first, possibly on Aug. 14.
By early Thursday afternoon, the issue had begun to energize members of Congress.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris allowing 9/11 terrorists to escape the death penalty is a disgrace,” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said on social media. “The Biden-Harris administration will always choose the side of killers and criminals over law-abiding Americans.”
Within a day he would introduce the Justice for 9/11 Act. The idea was to have Congress reinstate the death penalty in the case through legislation.
The House Oversight Committee was also preparing to open an investigation into whether, in a process that was supposed to be free of political influence, the White House had a role in Ms. Escallier’s decision. The next day, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman, wrote President Biden seeking copies of the agreement and all communications between the White House and the Defense Department.
At the White House, Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, was on the defensive.
“We had no role in that process,” he told reporters. “The president had no role. The vice president had no role. I had no role. The White House had no role.”
The White House was consulting “officials and lawyers at the Department of Defense on this matter,” he said. “Those consultations are ongoing, and I have nothing more to add at this time.”
That night, however, the news shifted to a more immediate drama. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris went to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to greet three Americans freed from Russia in an exchange involving 24 prisoners from six different nations.
Friday, Aug. 2
By Friday, a backlash was building, said Terry Strada of 9/11 Families United, who has led the charge for years on efforts to hold the Saudis accountable in the terrorist attacks.
In interview after interview, she was registering her opposition to the deal. Of particular concern, she said, was that the announcement of the plea agreement coincided with the prisoner swap. If Mr. Mohammed and his accused accomplices were sentenced to life, could they not be released someday in a deal?
“These defendants, they showed no mercy for our loved ones,” said Mrs. Strada, whose husband, Tom Strada, a bond broker, was killed at the twin towers. “They showed no mercy for my husband.” She wanted “the death penalty back on the table because it fits the crime.”
At the Pentagon, members of the defense secretary’s team came up with a solution. Mr. Austin canceled the agreement in a two-paragraph memo with two steps.
Step One: He stripped Ms. Escallier of the power in the Sept. 11 case to reach plea agreements and declared that he was the “superior convening authority.”
Step Two: He used that power to “hereby withdraw” the plea deals with Mr. Mohammed and the other two men.
Right after Mr. Austin signed the memo, Ms. Escallier was notified that she had been relieved of the authority to negotiate plea deals in the Sept. 11 case, according to a defense official.
She remains essentially a junior convening authority with the power to decide other matters in the running of the court — such as funding overtime for the lawyers who specialize in death-penalty cases and deciding what to do about a defendant in the case who has been deemed incompetent to stand trial.
Mr. Austin still had not seen the plea deal because it was under seal at the Guantánamo court, according to the senior defense official.
At Guantánamo, some prosecutors and defense lawyers learned of the decision in a news report that included a copy of the memo.
A social media post appeared on Mrs. Vigiano’s phone as she was driving home from a birthday celebration for her mother-in-law, Jeanette Vigiano.
“BREAKING: The U.S. defense secretary revoked a plea deal with three men accused of plotting Sept. 11, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case.”
She declared it the best birthday present her mother-in-law could have received.
Saturday, Aug. 3
Family members who supported the deal were shocked by the reversal.
“What happened this week to 9/11 families is emotional whiplash,” September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which had supported the deal, said in a statement, adding: “Our larger concerns today are for this country, for the future of our children and grandchildren when legal principles are compromised.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which funds civilian lawyers on Mr. Mohammed’s defense team, also weighed in.
“Secretary Austin is foolhardy in throwing away a bird in the hand to chase a death penalty case he will never achieve in this military commissions,” said Anthony D. Romero, the group’s executive director.
Joel Shapiro, whose wife, Sareve Dukat, was killed at the World Trade Center, is suspicious. “I believe Lloyd Austin’s decision is strictly motivated by election-year politics,” he said. “The agreement would have resulted in a new flashpoint for contentious debate.”
At the Defense Department, officials pointed out that in 2022, Mr. Austin had declined to sign off on conditions sought by the Sept. 11 defendants during an earlier stage of the plea negotiations.
“He has said all along that he believes that the families of the victims, and the American public more generally, must have the opportunity to see these military commissions trials carried out in these cases,” the senior defense official said.
By the time Ms. Escallier took charge, in October 2023, the White House had also declined to endorse them.
Over the weekend, prosecution and defense lawyers were, as one put it, “pounding the law books” to determine their next steps.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002. More about Carol Rosenberg
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported on for more than three decades. More about Eric Schmitt"
Sunday, August 04, 2024
ABC host reportedly received death threats after Trump interview | US elections 2024 | The Guardian
Rachel Scott’s piercing interview at National Association of Black Journalists event left former president fuming
ABC News’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott has reportedly faced threats to her life after her piercing interview of Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention left the former president fuming.
The NABJ’s executive director told members at a meeting on Saturday that “Scott had received death threats following her work asking incisive questions of … Trump at the group’s national convention” three days earlier, Eric Deggans of National Public Radio wrote in an X post published Saturday.
Deggans didn’t elaborate, and the Guardian has asked the NABJ, ABC and Scott for comment.
Scott asked Trump on Wednesday, “Why should Black voters trust you?” given his history of inflammatory comments about Black people. Among other questions, she also quizzed him about whether he believed Vice-President Kamala Harris had risen to the top of the Democratic ticket for November’s White House election solely “because she is a Black woman”.
Trump replied to Scott by accusing her of being “rude” and having presented a “nasty question”. In reference to Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, he said: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black.
“So, I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black?”
Trump’s comments about Harris drew widespread derision at a time when polls, including one Sunday from CBS News, show the pair essentially tied in key battleground states. Notably, on Sunday, US senator Lindsey Graham – one of Trump’s fellow prominent Republicans – urged him to focus on condemning her policies rather than her heritage.
“Every day we’re talking about her heritage and not her … record … is a good day for her and a bad day for us,” Graham said on Fox News Sunday.
Scott’s encounter with Trump added to the former president’s long record of hostility toward reporters. Frequently, he excoriates journalists as unpatriotic enemies of the people, uses his lectern as a platform from which to hurl insults at the press and singles out reporters by name as purveyors of “fake news” – often in the presence of an irate mob of supporters.
Some in his circle even blamed the failed 13 July assassination attempt targeting Trump on news coverage that was critical of the former president, who just in May was convicted in criminal court of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
United Nations experts have previously warned that such vitriol from Trump and his supporters – hundreds of whom attacked the US Capitol after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden – enhances the possibilities of violence against the press.
Black journalists criticized organizers of the NABJ’s convention in Chicago for booking Trump’s appearance, citing his anti-Black, anti-journalist and anti-democracy stances.
The NABJ’s president, Ken Lemon, defended the decision to invite Trump to speak as continuing a tradition of questioning national political figures. But the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah resigned from her position as co-chairperson of the convention’s organizing committee in protest of having Trump address the gathering.
Scott moderated Trump’s session Wednesday at the NABJ convention with co-moderators Harris Faulkner of Fox News and Kadia Goba of Semafor.
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Opinion | Sonya Massey’s Killing Is Black America’s Sorrow
Opinion | Sonya Massey’s Killing Is Black America’s Sorrow
OpinionCharles M. Blow
Sonya Massey’s Killing Is Black America’s Sorrow
“In the days before she was killed, Sonya Massey was having death premonitions. She kept telling her family that she was going to die, that someone was going to kill her. On July 6, a local sheriff’s deputy became the incarnation of her fears: He shot her in the face in her own kitchen.
Massey, a 36-year-old Illinois woman, had called 911 because she thought there was an intruder in her house. Two Sangamon County deputies arrived and entered her home, and one of them, Sean Grayson, began cursing at her and threatening her over a pot of boiling water that she was holding. Grayson shot her at close range as she ducked behind a counter saying she was sorry.
The Associated Press reported that according to her family, Massey had been struggling with mental illness and “had admitted herself to a 30-day inpatient program in St. Louis sometime during the week before her death, but returned two days later without explanation.”
At a news conference on Tuesday at New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago’s West Side, Ben Crump, an attorney for Massey’s family, said “many people said she had a premonition” because when the officers arrived she repeatedly said, “Please, God,” she asked one of the officers to grab her Bible and one of the last things she said before she was shot was, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
Among the first things Massey said when she opened the door for the officers was: “Please don’t hurt me.”
It seems very clear that Massey was in distress, that what she needed was help. What she got was a bullet that hit her face just below her left eye and exited her head behind her ear.
In the wake of so many of these incidents, we see the wreckage of family members struggling to make sense of the senseless, facing the gantlet of news coverage while their emotional wounds are fresh and tender, expected to convert the screams stuck in their throats into coherent calls for justice.
On Tuesday I spoke with Donna Massey, Sonya’s mother, in a meeting room in the back of the church. Donna is a slight woman whose face was gloomy and drawn, like a cloud, still gray, but emptied of rain.
She told me that she has been hearing voices since her daughter was killed and that she now has a nightmare of being killed the same way. When I asked her about the terrible pain of having to bury her child, she burst into tears: “Oh, God. Nobody should have to do it, nobody.”
Sonya Massey’s 17-year-old son, Malachi, described to me the devastation of returning to the house where his mother was killed, how empty it felt, and how empty he felt: “I still feel lost without my mom right now.”
He is just a boy, a motherless child, whose world is now forever shattered.
This kind of devastation has happened so often, to so many families, that it has become a motif of Black existence in this country, an enduring injury, a simmering sadness, an ambient terror.
And America has refused to enact meaningful federal legislation to address the problem.
Had it become law, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was shelved in the Senate in 2021, may well have saved Sonya Massey’s life. One of its provisions, as described on the website of the House Judiciary Committee’s Democrats, was the creation of “a nationwide police misconduct registry to prevent problematic officers who are fired or leave one agency from moving to another jurisdiction without any accountability.”
Grayson had worked at six law enforcement agencies in the last four years and was charged with two D.U.I. misdemeanors, one in 2015 and the other in 2016.
He has been fired from the Sangamon County sheriff’s office and charged with three counts of aggravated murder, one count of aggravated battery with a firearm and one count of official misconduct.
This is an encouraging first step, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. After over a decade of interviewing the families of Black people slain by the police, I have come to the conclusion that what we see in far too many of these situations is the manifestation of a societal sickness that fundamentally devalues Black life.
The Washington Post has been tracking fatal police shootings since 2015. As The Post reports, these shootings have risen in recent years and in 2023 “police killed the highest number of people on record.” A disproportionate number of those killings were of Black people. According to The Post, Black Americans “are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.”
As long as this trend continues, telling us that as a society we still acquiesce to the assignment of value — and threat — on the basis of race, it will continue to short-circuit people’s natural empathetic impulses and pose an outsize danger to Black lives from the police.
Charles M. Blow is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about national politics, public opinion and social justice, with a focus on racial equality and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. @CharlesMBlow • Facebook“
Live Updates: Israel Says It Killed Leader of Hamas’s Armed Wing Last Month
Live Updates: Israel Says It Killed Leader of Hamas’s Armed Wing Last Month
‘The fate of the leader, Muhammad Deif, who was a target in a bombardment that Gazan officials say killed at least 90 people, has been unclear. The announcement, which Hamas has not commented on, came as Iran held funeral prayers for another Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, whose death in a strike this week has amplified fears of a wider regional war.
