The Cowardice of Lloyd Austin

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING THE NEXT IRON MAN SERIES FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PREORDER IT, I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! THE STICKERS HAVE ARRIVED FROM THE PRINTER, AND THIS WEEK I'LL BEGIN SENDING THEM TO THOSE WHO PREORDERED! FOLLOW THE PROCEDURE AT THE LINK AND THEY'RE YOURS! AND PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO SEND YOUR MAILING ADDRESS! MANY SUCH CASES!!!

IT TOOK FEWER than two days of criticism for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to overrule the Guantanamo Bay official who reached a plea deal with three of the accused 9/11 conspirators. Austin’s decision easily earns a place on the long list of official acts of cowardice in the face of War on Terror politics. If there's ever a new edition of REIGN OF TERROR, Austin, who was the commander at the terminal phase of the Iraq occupation, will cause me to spill a lot more ink on him.

The plea deal's terms are as yet unrevealed and now minimally relevant, but they spared Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Mustafa Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash the death penalty. That did not sit well with a number of relatives of those killed on 9/11. Avaricious practitioners of 9/11 politics like Mitch McConnell denounced the deal as a "national disgrace." 

In response, Austin on Friday night simply surrendered, without a fight, to the delight of McConnell and Tom Cotton, whose political career began in Iraq. And not only to them. "Thank God," the New York Times quoted Kathleen Vigiano, whose cop husband and firefighter brother-in-law al-Qaeda condemned to death in the World Trade Center. "It was a great birthday present" to her 84-year old mother-in-law, she said.

Vigiano is not alone in the 9/11 families community by a long shot, but neither does she speak for everyone in that community. She and everyone else, whatever they think of the plea deal and its abandonment, has the indisputable right to her feelings, and whether we agree or disagree we should show grace to her and her fellow grievers. But Austin is doing Vigiano and her mother-in-law no favors. 

In his unwillingness to take the heat for bringing the 9/11 military commission to a close, Austin is not holding out for a successful prosecution that will condemn KSM and the others to an execution. The reason for the plea deal, and the reason why Guantanamo military prosecutors have sought one since 2022, is because there will not be a successful prosecution. 

We are in Year 13 of the 9/11 case before the military tribunals—the second 9/11 tribunal, actually; as well as a third process, an aborted prosecution in civilian court that we'll come back to in a moment—because the CIA tortured the 9/11 defendants so severely that they compromised the evidence for these prosecutions. A dozen years of pre-trial hearings amount to legal trench warfare over the admissibility of tainted evidence and attorneys' efforts to bring their clients' torture to light. Those struggles will now continue. Mirroring the irresolution of the War on Terror, they will last for many years more. Guantanamo hosts a rare thing: a kangaroo court that can't jump.

Susan Escallier, the retired one-star Army general and Pentagon official who since 2023 has been responsible for the commissions, handed Austin a way out. Escallier didn't initiate the plea negotiations, she inherited them. Yet Austin scapegoated Escallier for doing her job, removed her on Friday from the case and moved it under his own authority. That means Austin and future secretaries of defense, all of them political appointees, will effectively prevent subsequent attempts at ending the commission with anything other than an execution. If that execution was going to happen, it would have happened many years ago. 

Austin is lying to the 9/11 families who want to see the execution happen. He could have told them the unfortunate truth about how the commission is doomed because of CIA torture, taken a couple more days of heat—particularly, I suspect, when the deal's terms emerged—and stuck with an actual conclusion to the case. He could have shown some spine and defended the plea deal on its merits. 

Escallier certainly did. She and the prosecutors in the case sent victims' families a letter alerting them to the deal, acknowledged the dissatisfaction of many of them, invited their long-delayed testimony for the sentencing stage, and made grief counselors and other resources available. I think the very existence of a military commission for terrorism prosecutions is a stain on American history, but Escallier did not create this institution. Instead she served with integrity within an institution that lacks any. "The decision to enter into a pre-trial agreement after 12 years of pre-trial litigation was not reached lightly; however, it is our collective, reasoned, and good-faith judgment that this resolution is the best path to finality and justice in this case," Escallier and her subordinates wrote. 

By contrast, Austin simply folded on a winning hand. In doing so, he follows a template of Democratic politicians and their Security State-appointees as old as 9/11 itself: liberal complicity in the War on Terror, whether through affirmative decisions that shaped the 9/11 era or through acquiescence to its persistence and expansion. This is a throughline of my 2021 book REIGN OF TERROR, and the history my book recounts is repeating itself. It is hard not to hear the echoes of the Obama administration canceling its own decision to prosecute the accused in a New York federal court—a decision it made and then abandoned when confronted with opposition, and one that began the interminable 9/11 military commission. 

9/11 politics can be defeated. But defeating them requires people of honor fighting back against them, not simply lying down the first moment the going gets tough. There are none within the Republican Party and vanishingly few within the Democratic Party and the Security State. Most prefer to practice 9/11 politics when it suits them.

When 84-year old Jeanette Vigiano passes away before seeing the conviction of the men responsible for the murder of her sons, Lloyd Austin will be to blame. To give false hope to long-suffering 9/11 victims for the sake of political expediency is an act so disgraceful I lack the words to sufficiently denounce it.

I WISH I COULD SAY that was the only disgraceful act of Austin's tenure. It wasn't even his only disgraceful act on Friday. 

On Friday, the Pentagon announced that Austin had surged military assets to the Middle East, including missile-defense batteries, naval destroyers and what Air & Space Forces Magazine reports is an F-22 squadron, "to protect our personnel and interests in the region, including our ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel." In reality, Israel's assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders in Beirut and Tehran last week are why Austin needs to protect U.S. military personnel. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh continued, "The United States also remains intently focused on de-escalating tensions in the region and pushing for a ceasefire as part of a hostage deal to bring the hostages home and end the war in Gaza."

This isn't something Austin alone deserves responsibility for. That's the entire Biden administration’s fault. It's absurd to say the U.S. is "intently focused on de-escalating tensions in the region" when the Israelis get weapons from Washington that escalate those tensions. Nor is the United States actually "pushing for a ceasefire" in conditions where the rejectionist party, Israel, faces no reprisal from its American patron for acts that just this weekend include incinerating tents full of displaced Palestinians sheltering around a hospital and blowing up a school. 

Today I woke to news that the Jewish fascist and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a conference, "Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned." Imagine if an Iranian minister defended starving two million people as "justified and moral." 

Biden reportedly told Netanyahu to "stop bullshitting" him about Netanyahu's commitment to a ceasefire-for-hostages deal. The president with the most foreign-policy experience since George H.W. Bush has zero excuse for not understanding what Netanyahu was doing. Even now, as Israel slaughters desperate Palestinians and takes its war to regional capitals, Biden is arraying the U.S. military for visible support to Israel's counterattack once the Iranian coalition avenges Fuad Shakr and Ismail Haniyeh. Why would Netanyahu stop when his approach is working? 

Meanwhile, the U.S. is in ongoing negotiations with the Iraqi government over the future of U.S. forces there. Singh basically told that government to eat shit when it gets upset about the U.S. bombing positions in its country:

Q:  On the same Iraqi comments, the Iraqi government says that this attack undermines all the efforts and diplomatic and technical discussion with the US government. So what's your comment on that? Has this affected your communication, your discussions with the Iraqi government when it comes to the higher military commission and also all the discussion with the Iraqi government?

MS. SINGH:  We don't believe that it's impacted conversations related to the higher military commission. We have been very, very clear that we will take measures in order to ensure our forces are safe in the region and that's what you saw with that July 30th strike. We were taking measures because we saw that an attack was about to be launched on our forces.

And we've been very clear about that with the Iraqi government both publicly here from the podium, you've heard me say that a number of times, and privately. We will always take measures that we need to in order to ensure our service members' safety in the region. And so we did just that on July 30th.

If needed, we will continue to do that and we've been pretty clear about that from the beginning.

We now await the Iranian reprisal and the continued horrors of a regional war that could end with one phone call from Joe Biden.  

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.