Commentary

Twenty-Five Years Later, the Mastermind Still Hasn’t Faced a Jury

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been in American custody since March 2003. He has had lawyers for most of that time. He was charged in 2008. He was arraigned in 2012. A trial date was set for 2021 and then canceled. A plea that would have locked him up for life was signed in 2024 and then torn up. This week a military judge set a new start date: June 5, 2028. That is nearly twenty-seven years after nearly three thousand people were murdered. It is also eighteen months later than prosecutors wanted. The date can slip again.

That is not a legal system. That is a stall.

How We Got a Quarter Century of Nothing

He was grabbed in Pakistan. Then came the black sites. Interrogators used methods that later made every confession a courtroom fight. Waterboarding and the rest produced intelligence and also produced years of motions about what a jury may hear. Defense lawyers treat those sessions as the whole case. Prosecutors treat the plot as the case and the sessions as a problem they have to litigate around. Every year that argument eats the calendar.

Washington then built a special court at Guantanamo instead of using the ordinary federal system that convicts terrorists all the time. New rules. New judges. New appeals paths. Classified evidence. Lawyers flying to Cuba. Judges rotating off the case. One version of this prosecution has already burned through five judges. A 2021 trial date died. Hearings stop for illness, classified leaks, fights over attorney-client rooms, and weather. Capital cases move slowly on purpose. This one was designed to move like cement.

In 2009 the government tried to bring the case to a civilian courtroom in New York. Congress blocked moving the detainees onto U.S. soil. The military commission stayed the only venue. People who wanted a death-penalty trial in Cuba and people who wanted a federal trial in Manhattan spent a decade vetoing each other. The defendants aged. Witnesses died. Memories faded. Families waited.

The Plea That Almost Ended It

In July 2024, Mohammed and two co-defendants agreed to plead guilty for life without parole and skip a death-penalty trial. That would have produced a verdict of sorts and a sentence. Days later the defense secretary revoked the deal. An appeals court later said he had the authority. The defendants asked the Supreme Court to step in. While that hangs, the case is back on a trial track that still has a pile of evidence fights left.

Prosecutors asked for January 2027. The judge said that left too little time to finish pretrial motions about what comes in and what stays out. So June 2028. Jury selection first. Opening statements a month later. Defense case sixty days after the government rests. Then sentencing. Then, if there is a death sentence, years of more appeals.

When Will Families See Justice?

If the June 2028 date holds, opening day will arrive twenty-six years and nine months after the attacks. A verdict would come later. A final, unappealable sentence later still. Many parents of the dead will not live to see it. Some already have not.

There is no honest guarantee the date holds. The same “scaffolding” of motions that pushed the start from 2027 to 2028 can push it again. A Supreme Court ruling on the old plea could scramble the whole path. A new judge could reset the clock. The evidence fight over interrogations has not been finished. It is the same fight that has defined the case since the first charges.

What the victims were owed was a trial while the country still remembered the smoke. What they got was a process that treated the architect of the massacre as a decades-long seminar on procedure. June 2028 is the current promise. Treat it as a date on paper until the first juror is sworn. That is the only standard this case has earned.

Help American Liberty PAC in our mission to elect conservatives and save our nation. Support – American Liberty PAC