Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin intervened and revoked plea deals that had been offered by military commission prosecutors to three alleged co-conspirators involved in the plotting and execution of the deadly 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 who've been detained at the Guantanamo Bay military prison for nearly two decades.

Austin is now reportedly facing "legal objections and political pushback," along with scrutiny of his claimed authority, for withdrawing the proposed plea deals that would have resulted in guilty pleas from the three alleged terrorists in exchange for life sentences instead of the death penalty, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The now-defunct deal, which sparked immediate controversy when first revealed in late July, would also have purportedly required the three alleged 9/11 plotters, including former Al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaik Mohammad, to truthfully answer questions about the attacks from victims' families.

Plea deal for terrorists revoked

On July 31, with no details or explanation, the Pentagon announced that the Convening Authority for Military Commissions, retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, had reached proposed pretrial agreements with alleged 9/11 plotters Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.

It didn't take long before multiple media reports revealed the terms of those agreements, including the removal of the death penalty in favor of life sentences in exchange for guilty pleas for a range of charged crimes, including the murders of nearly 3,000 victims in the coordinated 2001 attacks via highjacked passenger jets.

Just days later, however, Sec. Austin issued an Aug. 2 memo to inform Escallier that "I hereby withdraw your authority in the above-referenced case to enter into a pre-trial agreement and reserve such authority to myself," and added, "Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024, in the above-referenced case."

Austin receives blowback

Yet, according to the Journal, that move by the Defense Secretary in and of itself has sparked controversy among some legal and political figures and 9/11 victims' families who supported the proposed plea deals for the alleged terrorists.

"Everybody must follow the rules, including the secretary of defense," Col. Matthew McCall, a military judge, said during a recent hearing in which he questioned Sec. Austin's authority to intervene and further instructed prosecutors and defense attorneys to file briefs on the matter.

At the same time, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) called upon Austin to reconsider and reverse his decision on the pretrial agreement, as the senator and others believe that the proposed deal is the only "justice" that victims' families will ever receive, given the unlikelihood of success in pursuing death sentence convictions in light of the accusations of CIA torture of the three high-level detainees.

"The best path to achieving justice would have been a fair trial in our federal courts, where hundreds of terrorism cases have been prosecuted successfully," Durbin said. "The Bush Administration, however, made the ill-fated decision to divert from the rule of law and the values that set this nation apart from those who attacked us on 9/11. They tortured detainees, held them incommunicado in black sites, and set up the notorious prison and military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay."

"The decision to torture prisoners and then prosecute them in makeshift, untested military commissions denied the victims of 9/11 the trial and justice they should have received years ago," the senator continued. "Instead, the victims and their loved ones have been waiting for more than two decades for justice, and the trial has not even started. After years of endless pretrial proceedings, it has become painfully clear that these cases are on a road to nowhere."

Some believe the proposed deal was best possibility for "justice"

The Journal observed that despite an abundance of evidence linking the three alleged terrorists to the plotting and execution of the 9/11 terror attacks, prosecutors would have struggled to obtain death sentences, and potentially even guilty verdicts, because of the allegations of torture that have tainted some of that evidence.

As such, a growing number of prosecutors, legal and political leaders, and victims' families have surmised that avoiding a trial with a plea deal and agreed-upon life sentence was the best bet for any sort of "justice" in these cases.

Whether Sec. Austin stands strong against the pressure to reverse himself on revoking the proposed plea deals, not to mention whether his authority is undermined by a military commission judge, is an open question for the time being.