One-time supporter of Guantnamo's military court now says it was 'doomed'
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Former Solicitor General Ted Olson (2nd left) sits with Bush administration lawyers during the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on Guantnamo detainees on July 11, 2006, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
In a major reversal, a former top Bush administration official who once supported the government's decision to prosecute terrorism suspects at the U.S. military base in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, is now calling that effort "doomed from the start" and urging President Biden to settle the 9/11 case rather than pursue a death-penalty trial.
During an interview with NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer, former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson said Guantnamo's war court is "clearly not working" and that brokering plea agreements with the 9/11 defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is "the only practical resolution" to the case, which has still not gone to trial more than two decades after the September 11th attacks.
"It's an open sore that needs to be resolved," said Olson, whose wife Barbara died in one of the hijacked planes. "It can't go on forever."
"If these individuals are willing to plead guilty to criminal offenses against the laws of the United States, and accept a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole ... then we get to the end of this," he said. "And hopefully that will bring about the conclusion of this long, unending chapter."
Olson's comments are a significant about-face. As solicitor general from 2001-2004, he helped defend President George W. Bush's policy of holding terrorism suspects indefinitely at Guantnamo and denying them basic legal rights. But the military court is widely viewed as irreparably dysfunctional, and since its inception the 9/11 case has been mired in delays, inefficiencies and setbacks, including a judge who quit after two weeks on the job.
In recognition of these problems, settlement negotiations in the 9/11 case began in March 2022. Yet a year later, those talks are in limbo while Guantnamo lawyers wait for the Biden administration to address several key issues, such as what health care the prisoners would receive for injuries from torture and where they would serve their sentences.
A law passed by Congress in 2015 prevents Guantnamo inmates from entering the U.S. for any reason, including imprisonment. But Olson told NPR that he would "support modifying the law to allow these individuals to be kept in maximum-security prisons in the territory of the United States."
Asked if his public comments endorsing plea deals are meant to give President Biden political cover to settle the 9/11 case a move likely to face opposition from some Republicans in Congress Olson said, "that was not part of my motivation, but I hope that that might be a possible outcome of my speaking out."
He added: "Because I was someone whose wife was murdered on that day, and because I was a top-level official in the Justice Department in the Bush administration at that time ... [that] might give people a little bit more comfort in saying, 'Yes, we ought to resolve it in this way.'"
In addition to the five 9/11 defendants, 26 other men are being held at Guantnamo, out of roughly 780 who have passed through its prison since 2002. The majority of the remaining prisoners have never been criminally charged and have been approved for release by a parole-like board, yet remain in confinement while the U.S. searches for countries to take them. They are known as "
Monday, April 3, 2023 at 9:13 am