Disastrous 9/11 Plea Deal Highlights DOJ & DOD Dysfunction

Last week, the Defense Department announced that they had reached a plea deal with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the deals had been revoked. This came after tremendous public backlash from the families of victims, politicians, and first responders. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Link - https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/08/02/9-11-plea-deals-rejected-lloyd-austin/

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Last week, the Defense Department announced that they had reached a plea deal with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the deal is revoked. This came after tremendous backlash from the families of the victims, politicians and first responders. I've got Farron Cousins to talk about it. This has had to end like this. Thank God somebody said, are you freaking kidding me? You know this plea deal, it's another story, we talk about all the time about how the Department of Justice, and here it's Department of Defense and the Department of Justice working together, always take the least, the path of least resistance. That's what happened here. Thank goodness Austin was there to say, hell no. No, this isn't going to happen. We're in an election year. He was appointed by Biden, we're in an election year. How's it gonna look for the White House to say, yeah, you killed 3000 people, but we're gonna give you a break.
You've learned your lesson.
Yeah. It's been going on for 20 years to begin with, right?
Yeah. Okay. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Guantanamo Bay, and again, 20 plus years, this guy has been held there. We know who he is. We know what he's done. This prosecution should have happened before George W. Bush even left office.
Oh, of course.
But it didn't. It didn't happen under Obama. It didn't happen under Trump. And now finally it could happen under Biden, and they say, oh, no, let's just do a plea deal. We're tired. We don't want to do this. It's too difficult. Oh, there could be issues with the torture part of it and then we can't admit this evidence. You don't even need any of that. We know what happened here.
Can I tell you, these heads would already be rolling had it been reversed, had they been in Saudi Arabia where they came from, it would've already been over. 20 years these people have had a chance to live, breathe, eat. 3000 family members, they don't. You know? And so we now have, but to me, I just, I almost can't get my arms around it sometimes when I watch the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense here too. You had, what was her name? She, the general, that said, hey, we're gonna.
Susan K. Escallier.
Okay. Susan K. Escallier has been overseeing this whole thing. Right. She's been doing it for years, apparently. And she finally says, eh, it's a lot of work. We don't really want to do this. And she tries to blame it on the idea, well, if we do this, this is gonna cause the potential, additional terrorism activity. We heard that 20 years ago, Susan. So, as I look at this story, there is zero, zero way to justify what they're doing. It's not the torture. There's been plenty of cases they've overcome that already where people have received the death penalty. But thank God Austin said, hell no. Right?
Right. And he removed that general immediately too, said, you're done overseeing any of this, but what a huge political miscalculation here. I mean, we are in the middle of a contentious election that's already been thrown into turmoil four or five times in the last month alone. And then to come out with this in the middle of the week and say, hey, look at this great thing we did. This man's gonna live until a ripe old age.
They're already doing it.
That is dumb.
They're already doing it. They're hanging this around Biden and Harris. This is just another Democratic leadership idea.
Soft on crime.
Soft on crime. We don't have to kill these people who killed 3000 people. Hell, they'd already be dead and probably not even buried if they were in the Saudi Arabia. Thank goodness for what Austin did here. It just took courage and some common sense.