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 After an indignant outcry, Biden apparatchik Lloyd Austin rescinded the plea offer, but as is always the case with a decision favorable to Americans, this decision faced a court challenge.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 Whether or not he waited too long, when Austin rescinded the deal, he wasn’t so much experiencing an attack of common sense, much less patriotism, as he was attempting to take a damaging campaign issue off the table.
The deal could have been even more devastating to Kamala Harris’s presidential candidate than Harris herself was, for it removed the possibility of capital punishment for the plotters. The Biden regime offered this plea deal despite the fact that Mohammed and the others for all admitted their role in the 9/11 jihad attacks, penning a lengthy Islamic defense for their actions in which they never denied plotting the hijacking of planes in order to commit mass murder of American civilians, but justified their actions by claiming that the U.S. was the greater terrorist.
The plotters wrote: “We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god’s cause is a great duty in our religion.” They admitted plotting the attack in numerous passages in which they took their involvement for granted, including one that addressed the government’s charge that they engaged in a conspiracy to attack the United States:
This is a very laughable accusation. Were you expecting us to inform you about our secret attack plans? Your intelligence apparatus, with all its abilities, human and logistical, had failed to discover our military attack plans before the blessed 11 September operation. They were unable to foil our attack. We ask, why then should you blame us, holding us accountable and putting us on trial? Blame yourselves and your failed intelligence apparatus and hold them accountable, not us.
Related: Meet the Americans Who Want Iran to Kill Americans
The plotters signed the document “the 9/11 Shura Council.” A shura council is an advisory group; presumably, they meant that they were advising the actual 9/11 jihadis.
On Thursday, “the court found Austin indisputably had legal authority to withdraw from the agreements because the promises made in the deal had not yet been fulfilled, and the government had no adequate alternative remedies.” However, this doesn’t mean that justice will necessarily be served, as late as it is: “Since the appeals court put the agreement on hold, the defendants were not sentenced Friday as previously scheduled, marking a temporary victory for the Biden administration.”
Let’s hope it’s extremely temporary and that the Trump administration moves decisively to administer long-delayed justice in this case to these avowed enemies of the United States.
This story is a classic example of one that the woke media would spin in order to portray the 9/11 plotters as victims. Get a sane take, and get all of our rational takes on the events of the day: Join PJ Media VIP and use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member