On Thursday, we learned the shocking news that a plea deal had been reached with the attorneys for 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other Al Qaeda accomplices that would spare them the death penalty, instead receiving sentences of life without parole. Relatives of many of the victims of that tragic day immediately protested, declaring that justice must be served. The uproar must have been too much for someone in the administration, because last night, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stepped into the breach and relieved the person responsible for cutting the deal and canceled it. Austin has now assumed direct control of the Convening Authority for Military Commissions. It's unclear whether Austin took this action on his own authority or if the decision was handed down from the White House, but it appears as if the Biden administration has dodged a politically toxic bullet in the middle of an election season. (NY Post)

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin revoked plea deals on Friday that would have spared the death penalty for the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and two alleged accomplices.

In a memo, Austin, 70, announced that he relieved the official responsible for signing off on the plea agreements from authority and that he assumed control of the Convening Authority for Military Commissions.

“I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial
agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009,” Austin wrote.

It appears that KSM, along with Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, will continue cooling their heels at Gitmo until a new trial date can be set. Under the now-canceled agreement, the hearings to enter guilty pleas would have taken place as early as next week, with sentencing scheduled for some time in 2025. Family members of some of the victims of the terror attacks quickly weighed in, praising the Defense Secretary for his "just and honorable decision."

I haven't been a big fan of Austin ever since he took office for a variety of reasons, but I will definitely offer a tip of my hat to him for making this call. But we're still left to figure out who was responsible for making the original decision to cut a plea deal and what happened to cause yesterday's reversal. Austin reportedly relieved "the official responsible for signing off" on the agreement, but we don't know who that was. If you go to the public website of the OMC and look at the organizational structure, they list titles, but no names. Austin likely relieved either the Director or the General Counsel, but his office has yet to confirm those details.

Keep in mind that the OMC was established in November of 2001 by an executive order signed by George W. Bush. It was created specifically to handle trials of non-citizen terrorists involved in the attack. They haven't kept particularly busy in the more than twenty years since being established, completing only eight convictions since then, with six of them coming as the result of plea deals. Returning to the OMC organizational chart, you will see that the Secretary of Defense and the Undersecretary are at the top of the food chain.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate as to how this all played out. KSM and his two buddies were the biggest fish left waiting for their date with the fryer. Their trials would obviously carry massive political ramifications no matter how they played out and there were questions as to whether or not they could be convicted because all three of them had been waterboarded repeatedly after initially being captured. I find it unlikely in the extreme that either the Director or the General Counsel would have made the decision to cut that deal on their own. At a minimum, the decision would have had to have been run past Lloyd Austin. But particularly this close to an election, I suspect Austin would never have made that call on his own either.

With all of that in mind, I will hazard a guess that someone inside the Biden administration was looking at Joe's sagging poll numbers and thought that bringing home a guilty plea in KSM's case could provide some winning headlines for the boss, so they sent the word down to Austin. If the order was coming from the top, Austin would have passed it along. But when a tide of outrage followed the announcement, the White House realized they had totally screwed the pooch on this so they needed a fall guy. Austin was marched out to "save the day" and somebody at OMC was picked to be the sacrificial goat and be "relieved," likely with the promise of a sweetheart deal if they kept their mouth shut. We may learn the full story one of these days, but I would bet a shiny nickel that it played out just that way.