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guantánamo bay
'Betrayal of Justice': US Court Nixes Plea Deals for Tortured 9/11 Defendants
"This decision will ensure nothing but a continued lack of justice and accountability for everyone involved in the 9/11 military trial at Guantánamo," said one critic.
Jul 11, 2025
Human rights defenders on Friday condemned a federal appellate panel's decision upholding former U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's withdrawal of pretrial plea agreements for three men accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Austin, who served under former President Joe Biden, "indisputably had legal authority to withdraw from the agreements; the plain and unambiguous text of the pretrial agreements shows that no performance of promises had begun," the D.C. Court of Appeals panel ruled in a 2-1 decision.
Under the proposed deal, accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and alleged co-conspirators Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash would have been spared execution in return for pleading guilty. The agreement came amid years of stalled legal proceedings in a case complicated by the U.S. government's torture of the defendants and efforts to cover it up.
Austin withdrew the plea agreements last August, explaining that he "long believed that the families of the victims, our service members, and the American public deserves the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out in this case."
However, attorneys for the defendants called the legally dubious military commission regime established at the Guantánamo Bay prison—notorious for detainee torture and indefinite detention—during the George W. Bush administration "obviously corrupt and rigged." During the 2000s, several military prosecutors resigned from the commissions in protest over what some of them called a rigged system designed to ensure there were no acquittals.
"The 9/11 case will never be resolved through a contested trial because the defendants were tortured by the CIA."
Last November, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, a military judge, ruled that Lloyd "did not have the authority to do what he did, asserting that the plea deals "remain valid, and are enforceable," prompting the government's appeal. The following month, a military appeals court also ruled against Austin's bid to ditch the plea deals.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)—which has long represented Guantánamo detainees—called Friday's decision "a betrayal of justice."
"This decision will ensure nothing but a continued lack of justice and accountability for everyone involved in the 9/11 military trial at Guantánamo," CCR senior staff attorney Wells Dixon said in a statement. "The Biden administration's invalidation of plea agreements that would have resulted in convictions and life sentences for the 9/11 defendants is a painful betrayal of 9/11 victims' families."
"The 9/11 case will never be resolved through a contested trial because the defendants were tortured by the CIA," Dixon added. "The only way to resolve this case is for the Trump administration to succeed where every prior administration has failed and negotiate new deals with the 9/11 defendants that will finally close the 'War on Terror' prison at Guantánamo."
There are still 15 men currently imprisoned in Guantánamo, which is located on Cuban land leased to the U.S. in perpetuity by a dictatorship overthrown in 1959. Multiple detainees have been cleared for release, one of them for 15 years.
Some legal experts doubted whether the U.S. government would ever be able to try, let alone convict, the 9/11 suspects. Military judges and prosecutors have cited defendants' torture in declining to proceed with cases against them. Many men and boys were tortured at CIA "black sites," Guantánamo, and military prisons including Abu Ghraib. At least dozens of detainees died.
The three co-defendants were all captured in Pakistan during late 2002 and early 2003. After being turned over the United States, they were sent to CIA black sites, including the notorious "Salt Pit" outside Kabul, Afghanistan, where suspected militant Gul Rahman was tortured to death in November 2002. In 2006, the men were transferred to Guantánamo.
Mohammed was subjected to interrupted drowning, commonly called "waterboarding," 183 times, as well as other torture and abuse approved under the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" program. Hawsawi suffered a shredded rectum resulting from sodomization during so-called "rectal hydration" and has had to manually reinsert parts of his anal cavity to defecate. Bin Attash said he was placed in stress positions for extended periods, beaten, and doused in cold water.
The co-defendants must now decide whether to appeal the ruling to the full D.C. appeals court, the U.S. Supreme Court, or both.
"Putting aside the fantasy that this case is ever going to go to trial—assuming it does go to trial and that there's a conviction—you get to sentencing, and they have a right to put forward evidence... that they were tortured," Dixon told CNN Friday. "That's never going to happen."
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White House Denies Trump Prepping to Send Thousands More Migrants to Guantánamo
Sending more undocumented people there, one lawyer said, would be a "natural extension of the crimes committed at Gitmo for two decades, and also wildly, wildly illegal."
Jun 11, 2025
Citing government documents and unnamed officials, Politico and The Washington Post reported Tuesday that President Donald Trump's administration is preparing to potentially transfer up to thousands of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—though the White House denies it.
"This story is Fake News. Not happening," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on social media Wednesday, sharing a link to the Post. Far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-S.C.) suggested Trump should sue the newspaper.
Rights advocates last week filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration for sending migrants to the "notorious" military base where the U.S. government held and tortured foreigners as part of the so-called War on Terror.
Now, at least 9,000 people are "being vetted for transfer," which "would be an exponential increase from the roughly 500 migrants who have been held for short periods at the base since February," according to Politico.
As the Post detailed:
The foreign nationals under consideration hail from a range of countries. They include hundreds from friendly European nations, including Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey, and Ukraine, but also other parts of the world, including many from Haiti. Officials shared the plans with The Washington Post, including some documents, on the condition of anonymity because the matter is considered highly sensitive.
The administration is unlikely to inform the foreigners' home governments about the impending transfers to the infamous military facility, including close U.S. allies such as Britain, Germany, and France, the officials said.
Politico noted that U.S. State Department officials who deal with Europe are trying to persuade the Department of Homeland Security to ditch the plan. One of them said: "The message is to shock and horrify people, to upset people... But we're allies."
Responding to the Post's reporting on social media, former U.S. diplomat William Gill said that "this is a clear violation of international law. A foreign detainee's government must immediately be notified via its local consulate and has right of access to the detainee to provide assistance/arrange legal representation. Failure to respect this jeopardizes Americans abroad."
Alka Pradhan, an attorney who has represented Guantánamo detainees, said: "Please understand both that this is [a] natural extension of the crimes committed at Gitmo for two decades, and also wildly, wildly illegal. This is not 'complex' or 'difficult' or related to security or defensible in any way."
In the case filed in Washington, D.C. last week on behalf of two Nicaraguan men and other noncitizens now at Guantánamo, rights groups are asking U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, to rule that detaining these migrants there violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, Administrative Procedure Act, and Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
"The government's real reason for holding immigration detainees at Guantánamo is to instill fear in the immigrant population," the complaint declares. "That is not conjecture; it is government policy."
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Rights Groups Sue Over Illegal Detention of Migrants at 'Notorious' Guantánamo
Migrants at the infamous torture site "are surrounded by military officials, deprived of in-person contact with legal counsel, and subject to punitive conditions of confinement," the suit says.
Jun 05, 2025
Immigrant rights advocates on Wednesday launched a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration for detaining migrants at the U.S. naval station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—the site of a "notorious" prison where several foreign men and boys were indefinitely held and tortured as part of the so-called War on Terror.
The class action suit was filed in the District of Columbia by the ACLU's national and D.C. arms, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the International Refugee Assistance Project against the secretaries of defense, homeland security, and state, as well as their departments, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and ICE's acting director.
The coalition brought the case on behalf of two Nicaraguan men previously detained a facilities in Virginia and Louisiana—Yamil Luna Gutierrez and Rafael Angel Lopez Ocon—and other noncitizens the Trump administration is now holding under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in "disturbing" conditions at Guantánamo.
"Immigration detention outside the United States is straightforwardly illegal."
Rather than keeping these migrants in the United States "while making arrangements to effectuate their removal, the government has flown them hundreds of miles away to detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for no legitimate purpose," the complaint states. "Plaintiffs are surrounded by military officials, deprived of in-person contact with legal counsel, and subject to punitive conditions of confinement, including in facilities previously used by the military to hold law-of-war detainees."
The plaintiffs, the filing says, "do not challenge the government's authority to detain them on U.S. soil or to directly remove them to their home country or to another statutorily authorized country. What they challenge is the government's unprecedented and unlawful decision to hold them in a detention facility at Guantánamo—which, under the INA, and for purposes of the application of that statute, is not the United States. Immigration detention outside the United States is straightforwardly illegal under the statute."
"Moreover," the document argues, "the government's use of Guantánamo for immigration detention is arbitrary and capricious, lacks any legitimate purpose, and imposes punitive detention conditions on immigration detainees in violation of their constitutional rights."
"Never before this administration has the federal government moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges to Guantánamo, or to any other facility outside the United States, for the purpose of civil immigration detention. Nor is there any legitimate reason to do so," the document notes. "The government has ample detention capacity inside the United States, which is far less costly and poses none of the logistical hurdles attendant to detaining people at Guantánamo."
Specifically, according to the complaint, "since February 4, 2025, the government has held approximately 500 people in immigration detention at Guantánamo, at a reported cost of more than $40 million, or approximately $100,000 per day per detainee. In contrast, immigration detention at a U.S.-based detention facility costs, on average, $165 per day per detainee."
Previewing the Trump administration's likely arguments in court, the suit says that "in attempting to justify the transfers, the government has claimed that the individuals it is sending to Guantánamo are members of gangs and dangerous criminals—the 'worst of the worst.' That characterization has been proven wrong. Regardless, it is legally irrelevant."
The filing also stresses that "the government's real reason for holding immigration detainees at Guantánamo is to instill fear in the immigrant population. That is not conjecture; it is government policy."
The coalition is asking the court to rule that detaining these migrants at Guantánamo violates the INA, Administrative Procedure Act, and Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and to block the Trump administration from continuing to do so.
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