A military judge has set a June 2028 trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and three co-defendants, rejecting prosecutors’ push for a start more than a year earlier.
Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, a military commissions judge, set the trial for June 5, 2028, in an 11-page order issued Wednesday, according to reports on the military commission order. He rejected the Jan. 11, 2027, date the prosecution had sought, calling it “incompatible” with the pretrial litigation still ahead. He wrote that a realistic trial date “must account for the hearing and resolution of pretrial evidentiary and compliance motions.”
Mohammed will be tried alongside Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who are accused of helping plan the attacks. All four have been held at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for years.
The trial date comes after a divided federal appeals court last summer threw out an agreement that would have allowed Mohammed to plead guilty in exchange for being spared the death penalty. With that agreement gone, the government is again pursuing a capital case.
The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Military.com on the charges, the schedule, or the commission’s process.
Why It Is a Military Trial
Mohammed and his co-defendants face a military commission at Guantanamo Bay rather than a civilian federal court. The commissions are a separate system, created after the Sept. 11 attacks to prosecute foreign terrorism suspects.
They are distinct both from civilian courts and from the courts-martial used to try American service members.
Mohammed’s case has become one of the longest-running in the commissions’ history. It has been stalled for well over a decade in pretrial disputes, in part because the system, established during the Obama administration, was being tested for the first time and its rules were repeatedly challenged. Mohammed was first charged years ago, but no trial has begun.
Allegations of Torture
Much of the delay traces to a legal fight over evidence gathered after the defendants were captured. Before they were sent to Guantanamo Bay, the men were held in secret CIA prisons. Their lawyers have argued that the government has worked to keep details of their treatment there hidden.
A 2014 Senate report found that the CIA subjected Mohammed to waterboarding 183 times, in what the report described as “a series of near-drownings.” Questions over whether statements and evidence connected to that treatment can be used at trial are among the issues the court must still resolve, part of the pretrial litigation the judge cited in pushing the trial to 2028.
Still Going Over 20 Years Later
Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003. He has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2006. Accused of orchestrating the plot to crash hijacked passenger planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Charges allege he was part of a coordinated assault that also brought down a fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field.
The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people. Set up in 2002 to hold foreign terrorism suspects after those attacks, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay now holds only a small number of detainees, Mohammed and his co-defendants among them.
Barring further reversals in a case that has seen many, the trial is scheduled to begin June 5, 2028. More than 26 years after the attacks it stems from.
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