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The man accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have agreed to plead guilty.
The background: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon in 2001. The September 11 attacks killed nearly 3000 people and plunged the US into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
The key quote: US Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell condemned the plea deals. “The only thing worse than negotiating with terrorists is negotiating with them after they are in custody,” McConnell said in a statement, accusing the administration of Democrat President Joe Biden of “cowardice in the face of terror”.
What else to know: The harsh interrogation techniques used on Mohammed have long been the subject of scrutiny. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” said that Mohammed had been waterboarded at least 183 times.
What happens next: A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the plea deals almost certainly involved guilty pleas in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. The official said the terms of the agreement had not been publicly disclosed but acknowledged a plea for a life sentence was possible. Plea deals were also reached by two other detainees: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, according to a Pentagon statement.