As America marks another September 11, the man long identified as the principal architect of the attacks still has not been tried. Last week, a military judge at Guantanamo Bay set June 5, 2028, as the latest trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three alleged co-conspirators. If that date holds — and in this case, dates rarely hold — America will put the alleged 9/11 mastermind in the dock twenty-seven years after nearly 3,000 people were murdered on our soil.
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That is not justice delayed. It is justice mocked.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani national, not an American citizen, stands accused of conceiving and directing the plot that turned civilian airliners into weapons against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the passengers who fought back over Pennsylvania. In March 2007, before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo, Mohammed confessed to being “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.” He has been in U.S. custody since 2003, at Guantanamo since 2006. Prosecutors charged him in 2008, arraigned him in 2012, and now, in the late summer of 2026, the fifth military judge overseeing this case has set a trial for June 5, 2028 — nearly twenty-seven years after the fact.
Making matters worse, that judge, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, has suppressed Mohammed’s 2007 statements to the FBI, jeopardizing a conviction, as if Mohammed were entitled to the full protections of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
Can we imagine the Nuremberg Tribunal suppressing Hermann Göring’s confession?
Certainly not.
As I said on national television last week: a quarter-century delay in a war-crimes prosecution is inexcusable.
Compare Guantanamo with the standard America once set for itself. After Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, President Truman appointed Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson as chief prosecutor of the major war criminals. The Nuremberg Military Tribunal opened on November 20, 1945 — less than seven months after V-E Day. Judgment came in October 1946, and the Tribunal sentenced twelve Nazis to be hanged by the neck. Unlike the Guantanamo fiasco, the Allies did not grant Nazi defendants two decades of pretrial motion practice in a civilian courthouse.
Jackson understood something our liberal legal culture has ignored. A military commission for enemy war criminals is not a federal criminal trial in New York City. It is an instrument of national self-defense and historical accountability. The Constitution does not confer domestic criminal-procedure rights on foreign enemies who slaughter civilians.
Herein lies the disgrace. A liberal legal mentality — embraced across administrations, courts, convening authorities, and a defense bar that treats delay as a strategy — has imported into a war-crimes case every feature of the modern American criminal process: endless discovery fights, classified-evidence wars, successive judges, interlocutory appeals, and the fiction that a non-citizen unlawful combatant is a defendant in a routine homicide in Brooklyn.
This is a liberal system that cannot prosecute the very case it was built to prosecute.
The 2024 plea-deal fiasco made the confusion worse. Pentagon prosecutors and the military commission convening authority reached agreements under which Mohammed and two co-defendants would plead guilty in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked those agreements within days, after Republican members of Congress and many 9/11 families objected. A military judge and a military appeals court initially treated the deals as locked in.
In July 2025, a divided D.C. Circuit held that Austin had authority to withdraw the deals, putting the death penalty back on the table. The accused then asked the Supreme Court to revive the life-sentence agreements. All this points to another year of appellate trench warfare — probably delaying the June 5, 2028, trial date, yet again.
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This sordid spectacle dishonors those who died in those towers, in the Pentagon, and on that Pennsylvania field. Throughout the delay, families have buried parents, spouses, and children. First responders have buried colleagues and then buried one another as the aftereffects of 9/11 continued to kill.
They were promised a reckoning. Instead, they got a seminar.
Defenders of the delay blame the CIA’s interrogation program — waterboarding and other black-site methods used before Mohammed arrived at Guantanamo. Weak procedural rules written for the military commissions handed defense lawyers a generation of suppression motions. Lieutenant Colonel Schrama has excluded Mohammed’s 2007 FBI statements as “involuntary,” finding they were tainted by what came before.
As Schrama treats Mohammed as an American citizen, here is what the left never admits: War criminals are not ordinary criminal defendants. Unlawful enemy combatants — Islamic foreigners who target civilians for massacre — are not owed Miranda warnings, Speedy Trial Act clocks, or the full architecture of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments as if they had been arrested on a street corner in the United States. They are owed a lawful, public, prompt military judgment — and, if convicted of capital war crimes, the sentence the law allows.
We have done the opposite. We built a hybrid court, then allowed every actor in it to litigate the hybrid until the court itself became the story. The story is delay, delay, and more delay.
With the trial originally scheduled for 2021, the judge pushed it to June 2028 so Mohammed’s lawyers could file more pretrial motions. At this inexcusable pace, some of the widows and widowers who waited for a verdict will never live to hear one.
This is not toughness. It is decadence.
A serious country does not spend a generation arguing with itself about whether the man who proposed flying airliners into American buildings should be handled with the manners of a municipal arraignment. A serious country tries him, states the evidence in open court, and lets a panel of officers return a verdict the public can understand.
Nuremberg wasn’t perfect. But Jackson’s generation understood the difference between law and paralysis. They stayed the hand of raw vengeance and still finished the work. We have stayed the hand of judgment itself.
As another anniversary arrives, the United States owes the dead something more than another scheduling order. It owes them a trial. Not delayed until 2028 if we can help it, and under rules fit for a war crime, not for a faculty lounge. If America cannot prosecute the mastermind of the worst attack on the American homeland in modern history, then we should stop congratulating ourselves about the rule of law and admit what we have actually built: a process so favoring the enemy that it has become cruel to the victims.
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Image via Pixabay.