During a trip this week to the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth looked in on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Mr. Hegseth said the prisoner looked “fine,” deserved the death penalty, “and I hope he finds justice soon.”
And with that, Mr. Hegseth waded into the legal morass in the long-running case at a sensitive time. A federal appeals court is deciding whether Mr. Mohammed has a valid plea deal to settle his case with a life sentence, instead of facing a death-penalty trial one day.
As defense secretary, Mr. Hegseth is the most senior person over the military commission system, the war court at Guantánamo where Mr. Mohammed and four other men have been charged in a death-penalty case.
The comments were aired Wednesday night on the Fox News network. Mr. Hegseth made them a day earlier to a former Fox colleague, Laura Ingraham, who had accompanied him on the trip, but not to the security zone where Mr. Mohammed is held in the Camp 5 prison.
Mr. Mohammed is accused of being the mastermind of the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. He has been at Guantánamo since 2006, and before that was waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture during three years in C.I.A. custody.
Ms. Ingraham asked how he looked.
“I don’t really care,” Mr. Hegseth replied. “But he’s fine, and I hope he finds justice soon. This is one of the rare things I agree with my predecessor on, Lloyd Austin, that he deserves the death penalty, and I hope he finds it soon, through that system.”
For now, Mr. Mohammed’s case in that system is on hold. A federal court is deciding whether the judge in the military commissions case can accept Mr. Mohammed’s guilty plea when he next convenes at Guantánamo Bay on April 23, after Ramadan.
A Biden administration appointee, Susan K. Escallier, signed the plea deal with Mr. Mohammed and two other defendants on July 31, culminating more than two years of negotiations. In it, he waived future appeals and agreed never to reveal secret aspects of his torture in exchange for a life sentence.
Mr. Austin tried to void the deal two days later, but two military courts ruled that he had acted too late and that the settlement was lawful.
Now the question is before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Mr. Austin took back the authority to reach any new deals in Guantánamo’s other cases, a power that Mr. Hegseth assumed as secretary of defense.
Lawyers for another Sept. 11 defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, who has not agreed to plead guilty, are already seeking dismissal of the case. They say other government officials have interfered in the case politically by pushing against a plea agreement.
Mr. Hegseth’s comments could provide additional evidence.
Mr. Hegseth also inherited the sole power to negotiate a plea agreement in the death-penalty case against a Saudi prisoner who is accused of orchestrating Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole warship in 2000. The suicide attack off the coast of Yemen killed 17 U.S. service members.
The defendant in that case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is due back in court on March 10 for pretrial hearings. But this week his lawyers asked the judge to stop all proceedings for more than a year, also claiming political interference in the case.
In a 25-page brief, they said their ability to prepare for a trial currently scheduled to begin on Oct. 6 had been impaired by Trump administration orders, including potential staff cuts and policy changes that had unleashed “chaos” across the federal government.
The lawyers asked the judge to suspend the case until July 4, 2026, or until the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a group formed by Elon Musk, “finishes dismantling the federal government, the Defense Department and the Military Commissions Defense Organization, whichever were to happen sooner.”
During his years as a Fox commentator, Mr. Hegseth expressed frustration at the legal protections that Guantánamo prisoners had received, and in 2017 he called for “expediting military commissions” for people there.
“If we’re at war, we have an enemy, we need to be getting intelligence from them, extracting it and then, hey, if they’re guilty, they’re either executed or detained indefinitely,” he said then.
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