It Took Five Judges and 25 Years to Get a Trial Date for the 9/11 Attacks

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2003. He has now spent 23 years in American custody, three of them in secret CIA prisons where he was waterboarded, the rest at Guantanamo Bay since 2006. On Wednesday, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, the fifth military judge to preside over this case since Mohammed's capture, finally set a trial date: June 5, 2028. Nearly three decades after al-Qaeda hijackers killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania, the man accused of orchestrating that plot still hasn't stood trial.

This isn't the first date that's been set and missed. A trial was scheduled for January 2021, then pushed back repeatedly as the case worked, and mostly failed to work, through pretrial disputes over evidence obtained while the defendants were held and interrogated in CIA custody. Schrama's own scheduling decision reflects just how unresolved those disputes remain: prosecutors wanted an opening date in early 2027, and the judge turned that timeline down, ruling it wouldn't leave enough room to actually work through what he called "resolution of pretrial evidentiary and compliance motions." A trial can't proceed while the parties are still arguing about what evidence is even admissible, and after two decades, that argument evidently isn't close to finished.

The more recent complication traces back to a 2024 plea agreement that briefly looked like it might resolve the case without ever reaching trial. Mohammed and two co-defendants had accepted a deal that would have taken the death penalty off the table in exchange for guilty pleas, an agreement approved by the Pentagon official who oversees the war court itself. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked it weeks later, after Republican lawmakers objected to the possibility that the man accused of masterminding the attacks might avoid execution. A military judge and the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review both later ruled that Austin's revocation was improper and the deal should stand, but a federal appeals court overturned those rulings last year, blocking the plea agreements outright and sending the case back toward trial.

Michael Lebowitz, who used to prosecute cases in this same commission, offered reporters a description that's hard to improve on: a "Frankenstein's zombie court." His diagnosis wasn't about the strength of the evidence against the defendants, it was about the system itself, a Guantanamo-based tribunal where even routine hearings require judges, prosecutors, and defense counsel to fly in from Washington just to convene, a structural drag on a process that was never built to move quickly and hasn't.

The four men now scheduled for trial are Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. A fifth original defendant was dropped from the case after being ruled too mentally ill to stand trial, a reminder that the passage of time here has changed the case itself, not just its calendar. Whatever June 2028 ultimately brings, families of those killed on September 11 have now waited through five judges, a revoked plea deal, an appeals court reversal, and a quarter century for a courtroom outcome that, as of this week, finally has a date attached to it.