Did Joe Biden get cold feet at the prospect of a sentence short of death for the terrorists who murdered 3,000 Americans? Not exactly, as it turns out. In fact, the death penalty turned out to be one of the conditions of the proposed plea deals for the 9/11 plotters with which the administration had no particular issue.

Rather, the New York Times reported last night, the other demands by al-Qaeda’s operatives became too much to swallow, even with all of the problems facing prosecutors if these cases go to trial:

President Biden has rejected a list of proposed conditions sought by the five men who are accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in exchange for pleading guilty and receiving a maximum punishment of life in prison, according to two administration officials.

An offer by military prosecutors, made in March 2022, that would spare them death sentences if they admitted to their alleged roles in the hijackings, remains on the table, officials said. But Mr. Biden’s decision to reject additional conditions lessens the likelihood of reaching such a deal.

What were the “additional conditions” demanded by the AQ5? For one thing, they want access to civilian medical care for conditions they claim were caused by CIA torture, or what the agency called “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the time. Those conditions include “sleep disorders, brain injuries, gastrointestinal damage or other health problems.”

Perhaps those issues do really exist, but bear in mind that their CIA custody ended seventeen years ago, too. It seems a little late in the day to demand that kind of concession. Then consider the security risks of having civilian access to five member-leaders of an international radical-Islamist terror network, and one has to wonder whether they are trying to set up some avenue for escape and/or one last terrorist operation on the way to the grave. One cannot blame the White House for thinking that was a bad idea.

But the next idea is not only worse, it’s practically unworkable outside of Gitmo:

In talks with prosecutors, defense lawyers said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind, and four other defendants wanted certain accommodations, including assurances they would not serve their sentences in solitary confinement and could instead continue to eat and pray communally — as they do now as detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

How about a nice cup of kiss my ass to go along with that? KSM and the others of AQ5 want the US to set up and fund an al-Qaeda camp for the rest of their lives. If that’s what these five wanted, then they should have stayed in Afghanistan at their previous camp, eating and praying, rather than murdering 3,000 Americans in cowardly attacks on civilian targets.

Ironically, if it weren’t for political pressure in the US to close Gitmo in part driven by the defendants’ claims of maltreatment there too, they’d have that concession by default. Part of the urgency for a plea deal (although not all of it) is to finally empty Guantanamo Bay of its terrorist-detention mission and close that quasi-communal camp. They want the US to re-create it in a civilian-detention setting, which is well nigh unto impossible both financially and logistically. The AQ5 are high-risk, high-value terror detainees and soon-to-be convicts, the kind that require not only maximum internal security but hardened external security as well. That will require a supermax facility like Florence, where their former colleague Zacarias Moussaoui will count down his days until death, rather than Camp Waponiwoo.

These concessions seem so absurd that one has to wonder why prosecutors agreed to them provisionally in the first place, or even passed them along to the White House. The White House probably wonders the same thing. If Biden were at all competent, he’d call Lloyd Austin to the Oval Office for an ass-chewing for dropping this political colostomy bag on him at all.

This plea deal will have to go back to the drawing board, which is probably what the AQ5 wanted all along. They want to drag this out as long as possible, making themselves relevant again for short periods, a luxury afforded to them by Congresses more concerned about clucking tongues in Europe than in fighting a war declared against us by terror networks. Military tribunals should have handled these under the same rules as Nuremberg rather than attempting to make this the purview of the civilian court system. Had we dealt with these terrorists as we should have — as illegal combatants who targeted civilians — they would have been executed long ago.

About the only good thing that one can claim this process has produced is that it has kept the AQ5 from the “martyrdom” they stoked in others but from which they carefully exempted themselves. And that’s thin comfort for 9/11 families.