Appeals Court Throws Out 9/11 Plotters’ Plea Deal

New in PJ Media:

It has been nearly a quarter-century since the 9/11 jihad attacks, and the fate of the principal plotters of the attack, who have readily admitted their involvement, has still not bee decided. Even worse, one of the many ways in which the Biden regime expressed its hatred and contempt for the American people was to give these jihad masterminds a sweetheart plea deal that spared them the death penalty. After an indignant outcry, Biden apparatchik Lloyd Austin rescinded the plea offer, but as is always the case with a decision favorable to Americans, this decision faced a court challenge. This time, the court got it right.

Fox News reported Friday that a federal appeals court “tossed out an agreement that would have allowed 9/11 terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to plead guilty in another failed effort to end a years-long legal saga surrounding the military prosecution of men held at Guantánamo Bay.” The wheels of justice are grinding exceedingly slowly in this case, far more slowly than there is any justification for, but at least this is a small step in the right direction.

This was a close one. The D.C. Circuit appeals court voted 2-1 to uphold “then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to undo the plea deal approved by military lawyers and senior Pentagon staff.” Austin announced his decision to deep-six the plea deal on Aug. 2, 2024, after a few days of the news cycle being dominated by how the Biden regime was capitulating to the jihad terrorists who had given this nation the biggest blow it ever sustained.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote to Austin, saying that the deal was “unconscionable.” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wrote to Old Joe Biden himself, excoriating him for the White House Security Council’s claim that Old Joe “played no role in the negotiations.”

The same kind of firestorm would likely erupt if the plea deal had been reinstated now, or an even larger one, given the fact that Austin’s rescinding of the plea deal was challenged on a technicality: the “legal concerns” about the deal, Fox explains, “stemmed from whether the original plea deal was legally binding and whether Austin waited too long to get it dismissed.” Whether or not he waited too long, when Austin rescinded the deal, he wasn’t so much experiencing an attack of common sense, much less patriotism, as he was attempting to take a damaging campaign issue off the table.

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