Pentagon Appeals Court Upholds Plea Deals in Sept. 11 Case

A Pentagon appeals panel on Monday upheld a military judge’s finding that the plea deals in the Sept. 11 case are valid, clearing the way at least for now for a guilty plea hearing next week with the accused mastermind of the attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge in the case, had ruled that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III acted too late and beyond the scope of his authority when he rescinded the three deals on Aug. 2, two days after a senior Pentagon appointee had signed them.

Under the pretrial agreements, or PTAs, Mr. Mohammed and two co-defendants agreed to plead guilty to war crimes charges in exchange for life prison sentences rather than face a death-penalty trial. Their case, accusing them of conspiring with the hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon, has been mired in pretrial proceedings since 2012.

“We agree with the military judge that the secretary did not have authority to revoke respondents’ existing PTAs because the respondents had started performance of the PTAs,” the three-judge panel wrote in a 21-page decision released Monday night.

Sept. 11 family members — both those opposing and those favoring the deals — were anxiously awaiting the panel’s decision before the judge’s trip to the war court at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Saturday for two weeks of hearings to separately examine the pleas of Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al Hawsawi.

Some have described the on-again, off-again nature of the plea deal as agonizing.

Absent an appeal, plea-taking proceedings at Guantánamo Bay in January would be a first step in a monthslong process that would potentially continue throughout 2025 with the selection of a military jury to hear the case, including victim testimony and any mitigating circumstances, and deliberate a sentence.