9/11 plea agreements
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The 9/11 plea agreements were deals reached during the Biden administration with the most senior Guantanamo detainees accused of plotting the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed among them, and subsequently vacated. John Kiriakou treats them as the predictable end point of the torture programme.

Terms

The defendants agreed to plead guilty to terrorism, to the murder of 2,976 people, in exchange for life without parole. The second element of the bargain, as Kiriakou describes it, was a promise not to transfer them to the supermax facility in Colorado: they said they could not deal with the cold and wanted to remain in Cuba, because it is warm.

The Secretary of Defense vacated the agreements on the grounds that the authority to make such a deal was his alone. The matter went through the courts, which threw the deals out. Kiriakou's observation is that the outcome is unchanged in substance, the men have life without parole either way, and are never going to be released.

Why a plea at all

Kiriakou's explanation for why the government negotiated rather than tried the case is that there was nothing left to try it with. The defendants confessed, but confessed under torture, which makes every statement inadmissible: "there's no evidence against them. None." His allocation of blame is unambiguous, "you have to blame the CIA for that. If the CIA hadn't tortured these guys..."

He extends the point into a general objection to indefinite detention without charge: if the detainees are as dangerous as the government says, then charge them, try them, and sentence them. "We won't even charge people in our country who are committing a crime."

The families

Kiriakou is sympathetic to the 9/11 families' opposition to any deal, "I understand, I get it, I really do", while treating the outcome they want as unavailable: "it's never going to happen. We're a country of laws. We can't just pretend that we're a country of laws except when the laws aren't convenient for us."

What the deal contained

The agreement covered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi and possibly one more. They would plead guilty to terrorism and to conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and accept life without parole; in exchange the government took the death penalty off the table. The only concession the defendants themselves asked for was to serve the sentence at Guantánamo rather than at the supermax in Florence, Colorado, because the weather is so much better.

The deal was thrown out by the Biden administration's defense secretary. Kiriakou's reading of why is that he had not been part of the negotiations and was angry at not having had a say. The defence attorneys sued and lost, leaving the cases, in his words, back where they were in 2002. The underlying reason none of them can be tried in an ordinary sense is that everything they said came out of torture and not a word of it can be used against them in court, which is also why, in his account, nobody has been brought to justice at all.

See also

- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- Guantanamo Bay
- Guantanamo origin
- John Kiriakou
