No surprise here. Biden’s handlers likely want this whole thing to go away, as does everyone else, which is why it has gone on so long without these jihadis being tried or sentenced. No one wants to deal with jihadis; they’d rather pretend they don’t exist.
“Sept. 11 Prosecutors Are in Plea Talks That Could Avert a Death-Penalty Trial,” by Carol Rosenberg and Charlie Savage, New York Times, March 15, 2022:
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Prosecutors have opened talks with lawyers for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and his four co-defendants to negotiate a potential plea agreement that would drop the possibility of execution, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.
Guilty pleas in exchange for life sentences could bring to an end the long-running case at the war court, which was set up by the George W. Bush administration and has been mired in pretrial proceedings focusing on the C.I.A.’s torture of the defendants. Nearly a decade after the men were arraigned, the military judge has set no trial start date.
No deal is expected soon. But guilty pleas resulting in life sentences could force the Biden administration to modify its ambition of ending detention operations at Guantánamo Bay and instead rebrand it as a military prison for a few men.
In an earlier, failed attempt at such talks during the Trump administration, the accused plotters demanded that they serve their sentences at Guantánamo, where they are able to pray and eat in groups. They specifically did not want to be sent to the supermax prison in Florence, Colo., where federal inmates are held in solitary confinement up to 23 hours a day.
The five men are accused of directing and training or providing travel arrangements and money to the 19 hijackers who crashed four commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.
A plea deal would undoubtedly disappoint, if not enrage, death-penalty advocates among the victims’ family members. But other family members, including those troubled by the role of U.S. torture in the case and the delays, might see it as a fitting conclusion.