The House Oversight Committee asked President Joe Biden on Friday to provide Congress with information about any role his administration had in plea deal negotiations with three 9/11 suspects.
Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in a letter to Biden that he wanted to understand who was involved in the negotiations and what factors led to the decision to allow the suspects, who are charged with murdering nearly 3,000 people, to avert the death penalty.
Comer’s letter comes two days after the Department of Defense announced that it reached pretrial agreements with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi. The three suspects, who were first charged in 2008 in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and have never gone to trial.
The details of the plea deals have not been disclosed, and Comer also raised questions about what he described as the “complete lack of transparency” regarding them.
“The specific terms of the pre-trial agreements remain undisclosed to the public or families of the victims,” Comer wrote. “You are allowing these terrorists to avoid the death penalty, signaling to our enemies that the United States is reluctant to pursue full justice against those who attack our nation.”
Asked for comment on Comer’s inquiry, a White House spokesperson pointed to national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s remarks from a press briefing on Thursday.
Sullivan said that the prosecutors for the military commission handling the case are the ones who negotiated the plea agreement and that the White House had “no role in that process.”
“The president had no role. The vice president had no role. I had no role. The White House had no role, and we were informed yesterday, the same day that they went out publicly, that this pretrial agreement had been accepted by the convening authority,” Sullivan said.
Plea negotiations with the suspects stretched for about 27 months amid questions about how the CIA’s past use of torture against them could potentially disqualify key evidence against them in a trial, according to the New York Times. A Senate report in 2014 found the 9/11 suspects were subject to waterboarding and other “brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”
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In a letter from the DOD’s Office of Military Commissions to families of 9/11 victims, prosecutors indicated that more details about the plea arrangements would be forthcoming but that the three suspects agreed to plead guilty to all of the charges they were facing in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.
“It is our collective, reasoned, and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case,” they wrote.
