Democrats playing politics with the 9/11 attacks are "despicable," former Navy SEAL Rob O'Neill told Newsmax on Sunday.
O'Neill appeared on "Sunday Agenda" two days after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin overrode a plea agreement reached earlier in the week for the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two other defendants, reinstating them as death-penalty cases.
Austin's announcement came two days after the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, announced that the official appointed to oversee the war court had reached plea deals with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accused accomplices.
Some people have suggested Austin nullified the plea deals amid public outrage to help Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee.
"It's just despicable that we're getting into this," O'Neill told host Lidia Curanaj. "On 9/12, you had a lot of lawmakers on the steps of the Capitol singing 'God Bless America,' and now they're playing politics as usual. They're going to make excuses and blame other people like they always do.
"And they're going to do what most politicians try to do get another term. And that's where we're at, and it's sad. People are still dying from the aftereffects of 9/11."
The plea deals were announced after prosecutors and defense attorneys argued for years over whether evidence obtained through torture is admissible in court, Financial Times reported.
"The fact that there are American lawyers arguing that waterboarding one of the major terrorists in the world responsible for the most atrocious attack on our country, that they're even arguing that we shouldn't have waterboard," O'Neill said. "That's easy. Waterboarding is not torture. It's just inconvenient."
Curanaj asked O'Neill, who appeared with former Secret Service agent and former senior adviser for the Department of Homeland Security Charles Marino, whether Austin overrode the plea deals because President Joe Biden and his team were aware of the agreements or to help Harris.
"I think it's probably a combination of the two," said O'Neill, the man credited with shooting and killing Osama bin Laden. "I don't think the White House knows a lot of what's going on in reality anyway, and it shouldn't have gotten to the point where the Secretary of Defense says, 'Well, I don't agree with this.' He should have been involved with it the entire time.
"He did make the right call to do that but the fact that we're considering a plea deal with the mastermind of 9/11 is insulting anyway."
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