Accused 9/11 mastermind agrees to use of disputed confession for life sentence

The man accused of being the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, has agreed to let the US government prosecutors use portions of a 2007 confession that he says were obtained through torture at any future sentencing trial if his case is settled with a life sentence, reports The New York Times.

Defense lawyers have been trying for years to have those confessions excluded from the death-penalty trial against Mohammed and three other men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

According to the NYT report, the lawyers had argued that he was conditioned to answer his captors' questions in a secret CIA prison network where he was waterboarded, beaten and subjected to rectal abuse.

However, an excerpt from his plea deal that was released by a federal court over the weekend shows that Mohammed agreed that prosecutors can use certain portions of his disputed confessions against him at a sentencing trial — if he is allowed to plead guilty.

That deal is in the midst of a heated political and legal controversy that is spilling over into the Trump administration.

On 31 July, after more than a decade of litigation, a senior Pentagon appointee signed separate agreements with Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi to settle their capital case in exchange for their giving up the right to appeal their convictions and challenge certain evidence. Those deals were submitted to a military judge, under seal.

Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd J Austin III moved to withdraw from the deals. He retroactively stripped his appointee, Susan K Escallier, a retired Army lawyer, of the authority to reach the deal and said he wanted the men to face trial.

Now a federal court has halted their entry of pleas while it decides whether Austin had the authority to breach the contract and whether to return the case to a full trial.

The court's release of a few of the excerpts from the plea agreement comes at a pivotal time.

Hearings are still underway at Guantánamo Bay in the case of Ammar al-Baluchi, the fourth defendant in the case.

Military judge Col Matthew N McCall is set to decide whether to exclude Baluchi's confessions from his death-penalty trial, as they were obtained through torture.

Baluchi's case has proceeded without the participation of legal teams for the three men who have sought to plead guilty to avert eventual death-penalty trials.