Offer Revoked

For John, BLUF:  The Department of Defense seems to be in administrative chaos.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Defense Secretary Revokes Plea Deal for Accused Sept. 11 Plotters

Here is the sub-headline:

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III assumed direct oversight of the case and effectively put the death penalty back on the table.

From The Old Gray Lady, by Reporter Carol Rosenberg, Reporting from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, 2 August 2024, Updated 8:41 p.m. ET.

Here is the lede plus three:

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday overruled the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices.

The Pentagon announced the decision with the release of a memorandum relieving the senior official at the Defense Department responsible for military commissions of her oversight of the capital case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.

The overseer, retired Brig. Gen. Susan K. Escallier, signed a pretrial agreement on Wednesday with Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi that exchanged guilty pleas for sentences of at most life in prison. In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case. He left Ms. Escallier in the role of oversight of Guantánamo’s other cases.

Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.

This is embarrassing.  Why did SecDef Lloyd Austin not knonw about this before it went public.  This suggests very poor staffing.

The other side of this is that given an offer was made, and accpeted, and should it not have been peremptorily revoked?  It strikes me as going against our tradition of English Common Law.  I will ask a lawyer .

Hat tip to the Citizen Free Press.

Regards  —  Cliff