A plea deal with the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks has resurrected questions about the future of Guantánamo Bay – the military prison where the US has lodged hundreds of suspected terrorists for more than 22 years.
Successive presidents – including Barack Obama and Joe Biden – have said they want to shutter the site, a relic of the endless “War on Terror” that began shortly after Osama Bin Laden launched his infamous assault on America.
But even though only 30 prisoners remain in the spartan 45-acre camp near Cuba’s eastern edge – including 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two others who also took deals – no president has actually closed it.
“I think it’s largely been a lack of courage and a lack of priority,” Scott Roehm, the policy and advocacy director for the Center for Victims of Torture, told NPR in January when asked why the Biden administration still hasn’t shut down the prison.
“There weren’t nearly enough transfers out of Guantánamo. The administration released a handful of men earlier in the year, and then the transfers stopped,” he said.
“These are men that all of the agencies in the US government with a significant national security function have agreed, unanimously, should be released,” Roehm continued. “They no longer need to continue to be held. Their detention doesn’t serve a national security purpose. In most cases, these decisions were made years ago.”
Mohammed – possibly the prison’s most famous guest – and co-conspirators Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi have been there since 2003, just a year after the facility opened and two years after American forces and local allies stormed into Afghanistan in October 2001.
On Wednesday, federal authorities confirmed they’d finally struck a deal with the three terrorists: Plead guilty to every charged offense, including the murder of 2,976 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and skip the death penalty.
The plea hearings could take place as early as next week, and the sentencing could be sometime next summer, according to the letter sent to victims’ families by prosecutors and obtained by The Post.
Prosecutors said in court Thursday that the accused wanted to enter their guilty pleas next week – though the military judge thought that timeline ambitious, according to sources with knowledge of the case.
Only Mohammed was present in court – the other two waived their right to be there, sources added.
Details of the plea deals — including where Mohammed and two co-conspirators will serve out their sentences — will likely be sealed until the evil trio is sentenced, something that might not happen until next summer.
But even as the terror suspects prepare to learn their fate, the future of the prison remain unclear.
Congress has banned the US Department of Defense from using any funds to “transfer or release” Mohammed or any other Guantanamo detainee as part of a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act – the annual law that sets the Pentagon’s funding and policy priorities.
The provision will expire Dec. 31. But next year’s NDAA calls to extend it until Dec. 31, 2025.
That bill, which has already been passed by the Republican-led House of Representatives, is awaiting Senate approval.
The Trump administration first enacted the funding ban in 2018. It’s been extended each year since.
Despite the hurdles, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said at a Thursday press briefing that Biden is “determined to get done” the facility’s closure.
If he manages it, he’d one up predecessor Obama, who swore on the campaign trail that he’d put an end to what amounts to a secret military prison where suspected terrorists could be held without trial, indefinitely.
“In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values,” he said, according to the New Yorker.
On his second day in office, Obama issued an executive order declaring the prison – which held as many as 780 Muslim men in its tiny, sparse cells – be shut down within the year.
But it never happened.
When asked in 2015 by an Ohio seventh-grader what advice he’d give himself if he could redo his presidency, Obama said, “I think I would have closed Guantánamo on the first day,” the New Yorker said.
But the politics got tough and “the path of least resistance was just to leave it open,” he added.
During its years of operation, Gitmo has housed mostly low-level foot soldiers in al Qaeda’s war against America, the outlet added.
Even some in the Bush administration – which opened the facility on land the US has been leasing from Cuba since 1903 – didn’t want it to continue.
“It was an albatross,” a senior Bush White House official told the New Yorker in 2016. “We really wanted to get it closed—but we didn’t want a political firestorm. A large part of it was the Defense Department. They were against closing it then, and they still are.”
The prison now sits mostly empty – 741 men have been released from Gitmo, as it’s known.
Of the remaining 30 detainees, 11 have been charged with war crimes in the military commissions system, the New York Times said.
Three more have been held in indefinite law-of-war detention, while 16 are being held in law-of-war detention but have been recommended for transfer to another country, the outlet added.
Some hail from terrorist hotspots like Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Iraq. Others are citizens of nations generally friendly to the United States, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, who were captured during fighting in the Middle East.
Mohammed is one of those – the man who boasted that he planned the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z” was captured in Pakistan in 2003, then sent CIA black sites where he was tortured, the Times said.
He was brought to Guantanamo in 2006, and is one of just five defendants who has faced capital charges for the Sept. 11 plot.
In the wake of his plea deal, some – like Daphne Eviatar, a director at the Amnesty International USA rights group – have refreshed their calls to close the prison.
On Wednesday, she urged the Biden administration to abandon Gitmo once and for all.
“The Biden administration must also take all necessary measures to ensure that a program of state-sanctioned enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment will never be perpetrated by the United States again,” she said.
With Post wires