SECDEF AUSTIN’S LATE FAKE TOUGHNESS REGARDING GUANTANAMO BAY TOO LITTLE TOO LATE ON WAR ON TERROR
By John Hughes
January 1, 2025
Public Domain
As 2024 drew to a close, news outlets reported that a military appeals court has rejected the SECDEF’s request to throw out the plea deals granted to three of the masterminds of the 9/11 attack. After the plea deals were announced during the summer of 2024, SECDEF Lloyd Austin announced he was nullifying the order for the plea deal. A military judge agreed with the defense attorneys that SECDEF Austin lacked authority/standing to throw out the plea deals.
This led to the defense department going to an appeals court to overturn the plea deals.1 Austin’s actions are problematic on multiple levels. First, with all of Austin’s ‘experience’ and ‘humility’ it would seem intuitive that he would have consulted with the legions of lawyers in the Department of Defense before he publicly stated he would do something he legally could not. At his December 2024 West Point speech, he preached about humility.
Clearly, he did not believe his own advice. He has acted with arrogance in many other important areas – COVID vaccine mandate, DEI, etc. Second, as both a general and SECDEF, Austin has been the opposite of helpful in the war on terror. As a brigadier general in 2003, he blamed the rising violence after Baghdad fell on ‘meatheads’ and criminals. It is quite amazing that a general had no understanding of the deep sectarian frictions that had just been unleashed by the US invasion of Iraq that led to the toppling of Sunni strongman Saddam Hussein. As a senior general in Iraq and later as CENTCOM commander he existed somewhere between utter mismanagement of the wars and outright lying about the status of the wars.
