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'Corrupt and Rigged': 9/11 Defense Lawyer Say Austin Broke Rules by Blocking Plea Deals
"We have had an unprecedented act by a government official to pull back what was a valid agreement," said an attorney representing tortured 9/11 suspects imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.
Aug 07, 2024
Attorneys representing alleged 9/11 planners imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay argued Wednesday that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's move to block plea deals for three defendants violated Pentagon rules and belied the corruption of the military commission system established during the George W. Bush administration.
"We have had an unprecedented act by a government official to pull back what was a valid agreement," Walter Ruiz, who represents defendant Mustafa al-Hawsawi, said at a hearing at Guantánamo, according toCNN.
"For us, it raises very serious questions about continuing to engage in a system that seems so obviously corrupt and rigged," Ruiz added.
Last week, the Department of Defense announced that Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, the convening authority for the Guantánamo military commissions, "has entered into pretrial agreements" with al-Hawsawi, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Walid bin Attash.
The long-anticipated agreement—under which the three men would be spared execution by pleading guilty—came amid years of stalled legal proceedings in a case complicated by the U.S.' torture of the defendants and government efforts to cover it up.
While welcomed by advocates of closing the prison and some victims' families, Escallier's move also sparked a firestorm of criticism from numerous U.S. lawmakers, 9/11 first responders, and victims' relatives.
Last Friday, Austin withdrew the plea agreements. Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, he explained that he has "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 his case."
"I'm deeply mindful of my duty to all those whose lives were lost or changed forever on 9/11, and I fully understand that no measure of justice can ever make up for their loss," Austin added. "So this wasn't a decision that I took lightly."
Eugene Fidell, a military law professor at Yale University and co-founder of the National Institute of Military Justice, told CNN that Austin's move "was illegal."
According to the network:
One of the primary issues pointed to on Wednesday by defense counsel was a regulation laid out in the military's Manual for Military Commissions, which says the convening authority can withdraw a pretrial agreement before the accused begins "performance of promises" or if the accused does not hold up their end of the deal. Gary Sowards, a defense attorney for Mohammad, said in court that Austin did not have authority under that regulation because his client had "begun very important, substantive, specific performance.'"
Sowards acknowledged that motions for discovery on the issue of potential unlawful influence by Austin, which would "seek to explore how he was coerced and influenced," could take a year or two to litigate. But the issue of the Manual for Military Commissions regulation is "a simple reading of about 12 lines of text," he said, and a decision on it should be able to be expedited.
Prosecutor Clayton Trivett Jr. told the commission Wednesday that the government needed to "work through the issues raised in these motions" so that the prosecution's position can be "fully articulated."
Sowards retorted, "'We want to consult with people'—that sounds like, 'We want to get our stories together.'"
Some legal experts doubted whether the 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.
Wells Dixon, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represented convicted terrorist Majid Khan, told CNN that the prosecution's unwillingness "to allow evidence about the defendants' torture and abuse to be aired in court" will make it extremely difficult to secure death sentences for the men.
"If Secretary Austin says that a 9/11 case is going to proceed to trial, and a verdict, and possibly a sentencing, then he is either hopelessly ill-informed or is lying to victims' family members," he added.
Accusations of military commission corruption go back decades.
In 2004, three military prosecutors—Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr, and Capt. Carrie Wolf—requested transfers from the commissions after concluding they were rigged.
"They were told by the chief prosecutor at the time that they didn't need evidence to get convictions," Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney who represented more than 70 Guantánamo detainees, toldThe Nation in 2008.
That year, former Guantánamo chief prosecutor Col. Morris Davis said that then-Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes told him that "we can't have acquittals."
Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood asserted this week that "there is a way to clean up this mess."
"Now that Austin has assumed the power of the convening authority, he can restore the agreement he tore up on Friday—to reverse the reversal and bring these sordid proceedings to the end they were until recently already destined for," he wrote. "If he instead wants to extend the life of the commissions, slouching toward a trial that will never happen, then the pointless sacrifice of money and time will continue."
"For the families in search of finality, each minute of delay is a minute stolen, and for the defendants, each is a minute gained," Wood added. "The defendants have already cheated the hangman. The best way to end their run is to take that bitter deal, and bring these commissions to a well-deserved end."
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World-Ending Investments? Inside the $2 Trillion Nuclear Weapon Upgrade Scheme
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons?
Aug 07, 2024
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.
This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.
That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: “We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program.
Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.”
This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.
The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup.
Who Decides? The Role of the ICBM Lobby
A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.
Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.
In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.
Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.
Lobbying Dollars and the Revolving Door
The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.
During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.
While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.
Playing the Jobs Card
The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.
As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a miniscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.
Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.
Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.
A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.
There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.
Unwarranted Influence in the Nuclear Age
Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:
“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”
The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”
Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.
Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.
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'Dirty Move': Pentagon Chief Ditches Plea Deals With Tortured 9/11 Defendants
One lawyer warned it will not only "push 9/11 victim family members over an emotional cliff," but likely lead "prosecutors to resign and defendants to seek dismissal of all charges for unlawful command influence."
Aug 03, 2024
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday withdrew plea agreements the Pentagon had reached with three men accused of planning the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and detained in Guantánamo Bay, the American military prison in Cuba infamous for torture.
"I have determined that... responsibility for such a decision should rest with me," Austin wrote to Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, the convening authority for the legally dubious Guantánamo Bay military commissions. "Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31."
The U.S. Department of Defense confirmed Wednesday that Escallier "entered into pretrial agreements" with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. The Pentagon did not share details of the deal, but it was reported that in exchange for ruling out the death penalty, the suspects agreed to plead guilty and spend the rest of their lives in prison.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which has represented detainees at the prison, stressed that the deals were not only "a substantial step toward ending military commissions and the extralegal nightmare of Guantánamo," but also "inevitable because the 9/11 case was never going to be tried" through a process that has "never provided justice or accountability for anyone."
Others had also emphasized that point. U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on social media Wednesday that "after all these years, the victims of 9/11 and their families deserve justice and closure. The Bush administration's disastrous decision to torture detainees and set up untested military commissions made a fair trial impossible."
As The New York Timesreported Thursday:
Valerie Lucznikowska, whose nephew was killed in the World Trade Center, said she had been to the Guantánamo Bay prison several times to watch pretrial hearings, but had stopped going out of frustration with the legal process.
"The plea agreements should have been done a long time ago," she said. "The system has not worked for a long time."
Ms. Lucznikowska belongs to the group September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, many of whose members oppose the death penalty. Her own opposition was both moral and practical, she said.
"If the death penalty stayed as the prime object of the trial, there was no way it would come to a conclusion within my lifetime," she said.
She added: "Guantánamo Bay prison is a stain on America. How are we going to get rid of the stain? We're not going to. But let's get it over with."
However, other relatives of victims and U.S. lawmakers, as well as the union representing New York City firefighters, had criticized the agreements. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) even launched an investigation into "what involvement the White House had in negotiating and/or approving the recently announced plea deal."
After the Pentagon's Friday announcement, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows released a statement calling out Austin for canceling deals that, while "not the justice originally hoped for," had "offered a path to finality, and a modicum of justice and accountability for the crimes of 9/11."
"That the secretary has now overreached and undertaken direct oversight of the 9/11 commission is cause for enormous concern," the group said. "While we understand there are family members who are opposed to plea agreements, the reality stands that the 9/11 accused were tortured and several were sodomized. If any entity is at fault for the inability to prosecute this case with a slam dunk, it's the torturers. Because of the torture, the 9/11 accused will not be put to death. And any administration official or member of Congress who says otherwise is either uninformed, or politically pandering."
"The men who perpetrated the death of thousands on September 11th; men who have never uttered a word of remorse, should be justly punished. But what happened this week to 9/11 families is emotional whiplash," the group continued. "We will recover. We have been working for justice for the death of our loved ones for 23 years. Our larger concerns today are for this country, for the future of our children and grandchildren when legal principles are compromised. We ask that Secretary Austin meet with the 9/11 prosecution team, learn the deep complexities and flaws in the case, and come to his own conclusion that pretrial agreements will provide the finality and accountability we all deserve."
J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at CCR who specializes in challenging unlawful detentions at Guantánamo, decried the "dirty move" by Austin and accused him of "robbing victim family members of their only chance for justice and accountability for 9/11."
The Pentagon chief's "astounding decision" will not only "push 9/11 victim family members over an emotional cliff," but likely have legal consequences, Dixon warned. "Wait for prosecutors to resign and defendants to seek dismissal of all charges for unlawful command influence."
Daphne Eviatar, director of Amnesty International USA's Security With Human Rights program, similarly said Saturday that "this is a terrible development. The victims of the 9/11 attacks deserve accountability for the horrendous crimes committed after waiting more than 20 years."
"The defendants, who were brutally tortured and mistreated by U.S. agents and then detained without trial for more than 20 years, deserve a fair judicial resolution of their cases," Eviatar argued.
"The death penalty should have been taken off the table long ago," she added. "It is shameful for the defense secretary after all these years to intervene now to prevent the resolution of this case, at a time when the United States should be making every effort to acknowledge, account for, and finally end the abuses of the post-9/11 'war on terror.'"
John Knefel, a senior writer at Media Matters for America, also responded critically to Friday's news, saying that "this development is 100% in alignment with the history of Gitmo in general and the military commission system specifically—ad hoc, arbitrary, capricious. A repulsive apparatus, and one wholly fitting of U.S. empire."
This post has been updated with comment from Amnesty International September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
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