The Guantanamo prisoners have reached a crucial moment. It has also been the case of September 11. This is what you should know

WASHINGTON – After 23 years, the fate of the last remaining Guantanamo detainees hanging around the world following Al Qaeda’s devastating September 11, 2001 attacks is reaching a pivotal moment this month.

Court battles and the agreements are deciding the future of many of the last men at the US naval base in Cuba, including those accused of some of the most serious attacks of the 21st century.

President Joe Biden’s administration is pushing to resolve as many cases as possible, on its own terms, before Donald Trump takes office on January 20.

Trump in his first term acted to keep Guantanamo open. His nominee for defense secretary has also opposed closing it.

But in the most notable case, the current administration is fighting a last minute fight this week to block a plea deal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and two co-defendants that would spare them the risk of the death penalty. The Department of Defense oversaw the negotiation of the plea deal but later repudiated it.

At its peak, Guantánamo held nearly 800 Muslim men, who had been captured by the United States or its partners in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere, and flown, shackled and blindfolded or hooded, to the special prison. led by the military at Guantanamo Bay as George W. Bush’s administration carried out what it called its war on terrorism.

Many of the foreign detainees had been tortured in CIA custody. That has complicated the legal resolution of their cases and tarnished the reputation of the United States for many. Human Rights Watch says the vast majority of all detainees at Guantánamo were held without charge or trial.

Efforts to reduce The number of detainees has brought the population to its lowest point: 15.

Here’s a look at the Guantanamo cases:

How the detainees ended up in military custody outside the US

The Bush administration’s decision in January 2002 to hold foreigners detained abroad in Guantánamo indefinitely came in response to an attack that tore apart the American and global order. Nineteen Al Qaeda hijackers commandeered planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

As the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and launched military operations elsewhere in response, it looked out to sea, to a swath of Cuba leased by the U.S. Navy for a century, to imprison and try the hundreds it captured, invoking the law of the World War II era. in military commissions. Many prisoners were never proven to have links to extremist groups.

The decision tested US law. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, called the detainees in Guantánamo “the worst of the worst ” and defended the creation of the military commission. The other options were to try the men in the United States, where they would have all the rights granted to them by the American Constitution, or to kill them, Cheney later explained.

A 2008 Supreme Court ruling ruled that the US handling of detainees at Guantánamo had to respect the US Constitution.

Why arrests matter

The US military response succeeded in greatly reducing the ability of Al Qaeda and later the Islamic State group to carry out massive attacks abroad.

But military and security successes were overshadowed by the human and financial costs of those wars, by the torture of detainees in their first years in US custody and their long imprisonment without charge.

Legal experts often call the early torture detainees suffered the “original sin” of the Guantánamo prosecutions, clouding the prospects of any trial.

Human rights groups have estimated Guantanamo’s annual costs at more than $540 million. That breaks down to $36 million per detainee in the current population of 15.

Negotiations with the Taliban

The Biden administration is also trying to bring home three Americans believed to be held in Afghanistan since 2022 and is in negotiations with the Taliban, who returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, two decades after being overthrown by a US-led coalition. United in retaliation for harboring Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The three Americans are Ryan Corbett, who was kidnapped while on a business trip; George Glezmann, an airline mechanic detained by Taliban intelligence services; and Mahmood Shah Habibi, an Afghan-American businessman who worked as a contractor for a Kabul-based telecommunications company.

At the other end of the potential deal, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss secret talks, is an Afghan national held for years at Guantanamo Bay and a central figure in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of the CIA. Torture techniques against suspected terrorists.

It was not immediately clear whether a swap could be completed during the administration’s final days, and one of the two people said it is believed the Taliban will seek the release of additional people from US custody as part of any deal.

What Biden has done to transfer Guantanamo detainees

Biden has reduced the population of Guantánamo 40 since taking office. Much of that is due to extraordinary momentum in his final weeks in office. That includes 11 men from Yemen detained for more than two decades without charge, whose transfers were announced this week after Oman agreed to host them.

The United States has struggled to find other countries that are willing to accept Guantanamo detainees and that offer sufficient certainty that the men will not be abused by the host country or be vulnerable to recruitment by extremists.

In federal court this week, a physically disabled Iraqi prisoner is fighting what his lawyers say are imminent plans by the United States to send him to an Iraqi government prison. In a 2022 plea deal, Nashwan al-Tamir pleaded guilty to charges of war crimes related to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He says the United States would violate that agreement by sending him to Iraq, where he says he would face abuse and poor medical care.

Six of the remaining 15 detainees were never charged, and human rights groups are pressing Biden to release them all before leaving office.

The fate of those accused of the most serious attacks

Seven of the remaining detainees have been charged, including Mohammed and four others, with the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. One was charged with a 2002 Bali bombing that killed more than 200 people, and another with the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen.

With the prosecution for the 9/11 attack dragging on for decades and no conclusion in sight, military prosecutors notified victims’ families this summer that the top Pentagon official who oversees Guantánamo had approved a plea deal after more than two years of negotiations.

The agreement was “the best path toward finality and justice,” military prosecutors told the families at the time.

Mohammed and co-defendants Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty to 2,976 counts of murder in exchange for life in prison. Other conditions included that the men respond to family members’ lingering questions about the attack. A clause in Mohammed’s plea deal prohibits prosecutors from seeking the death penalty again if the deal is thrown out, as long as Mohammed abides by its terms.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has fought unsuccessfully since Aug. 2 to scrap the deal negotiated and approved by his department. He maintains that the decision on the death penalty in an attack as serious as 9/11 should only be made by the Secretary of Defense.

The Biden administration on Tuesday asked a federal appeals court to block the plea deal. Absent a stay from that court or any other intervention, Mohammed is due to plead guilty on Friday. Relatives of 9/11 victims are already in Guantanamo to watch.

His co-defendants would later pursue plea deals.

Uncertainty about Trump and other Republicans

It is unclear how Trump would handle Guantánamo in his second term. Documents filed in the 9/11 plea deal made clear that defense attorneys intended to close the plea deal before the inauguration and even test it against Trump.

In his first term, Trump signed an executive order to keep Guantánamo open, reversing an executive order by President Barack Obama to close it that Obama himself had never managed to comply with.

Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has called in the past to keep Guantanamo open. He has argued that the length of the military commission proceedings makes the United States appear “not serious” and sends a message to extremists that they can “lawyer themselves and be fine.”

Outraged by the 9/11 plea deals, Republican lawmakers have vowed to introduce legislation in the now Republican-controlled Congress that would order death penalty trials at Guantánamo for Mohammed and the other two men. The bill would also require the three to be held in solitary confinement without the possibility of transfer to another country.

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Ellen Knickmeyer has reported on Guantánamo and post-9/11 detainees since January 2002, when she covered the first transfer flights of so-called American Taliban John Walker Lindh and other prisoners from the tarmac of a US-controlled airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan . .

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Eric Tucker contributed.