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 @HumanR1ghtsCowNewsDaily DiscussionMilitaryPennsylvaniaKILLEDPentagonSaudi Arabiadeath penalty9/11•••7mos ago

Plea Deal For 9/11 Accusers Revoked

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday overruled the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices.

The Pentagon announced the decision with the release of a memorandum relieving the senior official at the Defense Department responsible for military commissions of her oversight of the capital case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.

The overseer, retired Brig. Gen. Susan K. Escallier, signed a pretrial agreement on Wednesday with Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi that exchanged guilty pleas for sentences of at most life in prison. In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case. He left Ms. Escallier in the role of oversight of Guantánamo’s other cases.

Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.

12 Replies

 @TreatyKoalaGreenfrom Maine  commented…7mos7MO

And why does it take over a decade later to sentence them to death?

 @AmnestyFrogVeteran from Tennessee  commented…7mos7MO

O-R-C-H-E-S-T-R-A-T-E-D

 @L0bby1stLlamaAmerican Solidarity from Indiana  commented…7mos7MO

Apparently this happens with these overseers:

”The NYT reports that Mattis fired Obama appt Harvey Rishikof who engaged in plea negotiations that would potentially have spared the Guantánamo defendants the death penalty in exchange for pleading guilty to the September 11 attacks”

 @SteadfastJudicialConstitution from New Jersey  commented…7mos7MO

Was the overseer allowed to make the plea deal decision for 9/11 mastermind without input from the Pentagon/White House, or is this a scapegoating? Either way, it’s bad

 @L0bbyistRalphSocialist from Texas  commented…7mos7MO

Q: the memo said that Austin withdrew the authority from the Commander at Guantanamo….nothing about relief for cause. Did you see a second letter indicating “relief for cause?”

 @ISIDEWITHasked…7mos7MO

Do you believe that the severity of a crime should influence the availability of plea deals for the accused?

 @ISIDEWITHasked…7mos7MO

Should one individual have the power to override plea deals in high-profile cases, or should it be a group decision?

 @ISIDEWITHasked…7mos7MO

Does the revocation of a plea deal in a terrorism case affect your feelings about how terrorism should be legally addressed and punished?

 @ISIDEWITHasked…7mos7MO

What personal or moral boundaries come into play when deciding if a life sentence or the death penalty is more appropriate for a crime?

 @ISIDEWITHasked…7mos7MO

How does the decision to revoke a plea deal impact your view of justice for victims and their families?

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…4mos4MO

Dark Money Moves: Bloomberg’s Quiet $50M Bet on Harris Amid Billionaire Arm-Twisting

Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, under extraordinary pressure from friends and fellow billionaires to do more to help Vice President Kamala Harris, recently donated about $50 million to a nonprofit organization that is supporting her presidential run, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.The donation followed months of arm-twisting from associates such as Bill Gates, investor Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. Mr. Bloomberg recently spoke with Ms. Harris in a private phone call, according to two people briefed on the conversation.Mr. Bloomberg’s decision conforms to a strategy that has become his trademark: Confounding Democratic operatives by refusing to make early investments — only to come in hot and heavy in the homestretch. But unlike his previous big gifts, this one was intended to be kept under wraps, and that secrecy has made unaware Democrats more anxious than they have been most autumns.His contribution was made to Future Forward USA Action, the dark-money vehicle of Future Forward, Ms. Harris’s main super PAC.Mr. Bloomberg, who is 82 years old and has an estimated net worth of $105 billion, is the second largest disclosed individual donor to Democrats in this election cycle, after the investor and philanthropist George Soros. But publicly, Democrats observed that Mr. Bloomberg was donating nowhere close to what he had spent during the presidency of Donald J. Trump.The $47 million he had given in federally disclosed political contributions during this election cycle, before his new nonprofit donation, was less than half of the $95 million he disclosed to help Democrats retake Congress in the 2018 midterms.And so in recent months, frustrated Democrats in his close orbit had urged him to consider a large donation to help Ms. Harris in an election expected to be decided by razor-thin margins. Mr. Bloomberg’s advisers, to say nothing of the man himself, have fielded jittery queries for months about what Democrats saw as his relatively conspicuous absence.

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 @ISIDEWITH submitted…5mos5MO

Mystery Drones Swarm a U.S. Military Bases

U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline.Kelly, a decorated senior commander at the base, got on a squadron rooftop to see for himself. He joined a handful of other officers responsible for a clutch of the nation’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors. For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.Officials didn’t know if the drone fleet, which numbered as many as a dozen or more over the following nights, belonged to clever hobbyists or hostile forces. Some suspected that Russia or China deployed them to test the response of American forces.Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn’t qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway.Reports of the drones reached President Biden and set off two weeks of White House meetings after the aircraft first appeared in December last year. Officials from agencies including the Defense Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon’s UFO office joined outside experts to throw out possible explanations as well as ideas about how to respond.The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.

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