Italy's Meloni hopes to attend Trump inauguration as she downplays his Greenland and Panama comments

ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni said Thursday she didn’t believe President-elect Donald Trump actually intends to use military force to seize control of Greenland or the Panama Canal, saying she read his comments more as a warning to China and other global players to keep their hands off such strategically important interests.

“I think we can exclude that the United States in the coming years will try to use force to annex territory that interests it,” said Meloni, who travelled last weekend to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate and intends to attend his inauguration.

Rather, she said, Trump’s comments were “a message to some other big global players more than any hostile claim over these countries.”

She identified increased “Chinese protagonism” in the commercially important Panama Canal and resource-rich Greenland as being behind Trump's warning, and said she interpreted his words as part of a “long-distance debate between great powers.”

Meloni was speaking at an annual press conference during which she was peppered with questions about her relations with Trump and Elon Musk. She confirmed she hoped to attend Trump's inauguration Jan. 20, but was checking her agenda before confirming her presence.

“If I can I will gladly participate,” she said.

Trump on Tuesday said he wouldn't rule out the use of military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland which he declared to be vital to American national security.

Analysts say such rhetoric could embolden America’s enemies by suggesting the U.S. is now OK with countries using force to redraw borders at a time when Russia is pressing forward with its invasion of Ukraine and China is threatening Taiwan, which it claims as its own territory.

Meloni has been a firm supporter of Ukraine since Russia's invasion, and said she didn't think the Trump administration would abandon Kyiv. Trump had boasted during the U.S. presidential campaign that he could end the war in one day, raising questions about whether the United States will continue to be Ukraine’s biggest and most important military backer.

“If we're talking about peace today it’s because Russia is a little bit bogged down in Ukraine, and it’s bogged down thanks to the courage of course of the Ukrainian people, but also thanks to Western support,” Meloni said. "Donald Trump understands this well.”

She said Trump had shown in his first administration he was able to use a diplomacy of deterrence, and said she expected he would do so again.

“Frankly I don't see a disengagement and I don't read this in (Trump's) statements,” Meloni said.

Meloni's press conference came a day after her right-wing government scored a major political victory by welcoming home an Italian journalist who had been detained in Iran for three weeks.

The case of Cecilia Sala had become intertwined with that of an Iranian engineer detained in Italy on a U.S. warrant. Mohammad Abedini is wanted by the United States in connection with a 2024 drone attack in Jordan that killed three American soldiers.

Italian commentators had said Iran was holding Sala as a bargaining chip to secure the release of Abedini, and speculation swirled Thursday about what would happen to him now that Sala had returned home. Abedini remains in detention in a Milan prison, with a hearing Jan. 15 on his bid for house arrest pending the extradition process to the U.S.

Meloni described a “diplomatic triangulation” with Iran and the United States as being key to securing Sala's release, confirming for the first time that Washington’s interests in the case entered into the negotiations.

She said she would have liked to have discussed the Abedini case further with President Joe Biden, who had been expected in Rome this weekend but canceled his trip at the last minute to monitor the response to the Los Angeles fires.

“These talks have taken place and will continue,” Meloni said. “It's very complex work and it's not something that ended yesterday."

Regardless, the Abedini case is now awaiting an outcome before the Italian justice ministry, she said.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni waves at the end of the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, flanked by the Italian president of the Order of Journalists, Carlo Bartoli, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, flanked by the Italian president of the Order of Journalists, Carlo Bartoli, left, and Italian national press federation president Vittorio Di Trapani, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni holds the 2024 year-end press conference, in Rome, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are urging a federal appeals panel to let his scheduled guilty plea Friday in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, go forward in a plea agreement that would spare him and two co-defendants the risk of the death penalty in al-Qaida's notorious Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Defense lawyers in a filing late Wednesday described Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's attempts to throw out a plea deal that his own military had negotiated and approved as the latest in two decades of “fitful" and “negligent” mishandling of the case by the U.S. military and successive administrations.

Mohammed is due to enter his plea Friday morning in the attacks, in which 19 al-Qaida hijackers smashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and another crashed into a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people. Family members of some of the victims are gathered at Guantanamo for the moment.

Austin unexpectedly renounced the plea agreement after it was announced this summer, and the Biden administration's Justice Department is seeking to block Mohammed's plea from going forward at a U.S. military commission courtroom.

“An 11th-hour stay will accomplish nothing but more delay and it will reward the government for its — at best — negligent handling” of the 9/11 prosecutions, Mohammed's lawyers argued in a filing to a District of Columbia federal appeals panel just before midnight.

The federal appeals panel appears on track to possibly rule Thursday on the request by the Democratic Biden administration.

Legal and logistical challenges have bogged down the 9/11 case in the 17 years since Mohammed, who prosecutors say conceived the idea of using hijacked planes in the attacks, was first charged. The case remains in pre-trial hearings, with no trial date set.

Years of defense and prosecution testimony are ongoing about how much the sustained torture of Mohammed and other defendants in CIA custody renders their later statements legally inadmissible.

With the prosecution in the Sept. 11 attacks dragging on for decades and no conclusion in sight, military prosecutors this summer notified families of the victims that the senior Pentagon official overseeing Guantanamo had approved a plea deal after more than two years of negotiations.

The deal was “the best path to finality and justice,” military prosecutors told families then. In it, Mohammed and co-defendants Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty to 2,976 murder charges in exchange for life sentences.

Austin unexpectedly announced Aug. 2 that he was nullifying the plea deal, and he has fought since then to scrap it. He argues that a decision on death penalties in an attack as grave as Sept. 11 should only be made by the defense secretary.

Defense attorneys say that the plea agreement is already in effect and that Austin has no legal standing to throw it out after the fact. The Biden administration went to the federal appeals court Tuesday after the Guantanamo judge and a military review panel sided against Austin's request.

Mohammed's attorneys argued in the new filing that Austin's “extraordinary intervention in this case is solely a product of his lack of oversight over his own duly appointed delegate,” meaning the senior Pentagon official overseeing Guantanamo.

The Justice Department's brief earlier this week said that the government would be irreparably harmed if the guilty pleas were accepted for Mohammed and the two co-defendants in the Sept. 11 attacks.

It said the government would be denied a chance for a public trial and the opportunity to “seek capital punishment against three men charged with a heinous act of mass murder that caused the death of thousands of people and shocked the nation and the world.”

FILE - In this April 17, 2019, photo, reviewed by U.S. military officials, the control tower is seen through the razor wire inside the Camp VI detention facility in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

FILE - US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin makes a speech at Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

FILE - This Monday, Dec. 8, 2008 courtroom drawing by artist Janet Hamlin and reviewed by the U.S. military, shows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, center, and co-defendant Walid Bin Attash, left, attending a pre-trial session at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo/Janet Hamlin, Pool, File)