Military prosecutors are willing to go without a key confession by the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks — in order to avoid further delaying the long-awaited trial now set for summer 2028. The US government decided not to appeal the recent bombshell ruling by a military judge that barred Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s 2007…
Page A3From§Eachthe supper edition — 7 September 2026
Prosecutors safeguard 2028 trial date by abandoning the confession that built the case, two decades in.
As it ran on the front
The trial proceeds. That is the whole of today's announcement, delivered by military prosecutors with the flat calm of people confirming a bridge is still under construction on schedule. The 2028 trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has called himself the architect of the September 11 attacks, remains fixed on the calendar, and prosecutors have taken the necessary step to protect it. That step was declining to appeal a military judge's ruling that Mohammed's 2007 confession was the product of "severe coercion." The confession is gone. The case is not. This is not a retreat. This is —
this is prosecutors admitting, under a different name, that the confession does not survive scrutiny, and rather than defend it in an appeal, they are cutting it loose before the cutting looks like what it is. You do not amputate healthy evidence. You amputate the part that was already gangrenous, and you call the surgery a strategy.…
…(cont) It is worth saying plainly what that confession was. Extracted in 2007, ruled coerced by a military judge in their own system decades later, it was the load-bearing statement in a prosecution that has now been under construction since Mohammed's 2003 capture, without ever once reaching a courtroom. The government spent twenty-some years building around those words. The government's response to losing them is to keep building as if the wall never needed that brick.
Prosecutors say the 2028 trial date is solid ground, the one thing in this case that has not moved. It is not solid ground. It is a date, and the case around it has been standing since 2003 without the confession it was built to include, and the date is the only thing anyone in this case has managed to keep intact. That is not the integrity of a trial. That is the survival of a scheduling order.
None of this changes June 2028. It only changes what walks into the courtroom that month — a case with a hole where its confession used to be, defended by the same office that extracted the confession and is now the office declining to defend it. They are not protecting the evidence. They gave up the evidence. They are protecting the date, and asking a jury, and the rest of us, to treat the difference as a technicality rather than the whole story.
“They spent twenty-some years building a case on a confession they beat out of a guy, a judge said so in plain words, and now prosecutors just decide they don't need it? That's not a legal system correcting itself, that's a landlord who loses the lease and tells you that you still owe rent. The confession was the case, and when they drop it to save a date on a calendar, ask yourself what exactly they're protecting — because it isn't justice, it's a deadline.”
“Look, the process is working exactly as designed — a judge found irregularities, prosecutors addressed the irregularities, that's the system correcting itself, that's — okay, that's the system continuing without the thing the judge said was coerced, which, when you say it slow, isn't really correcting anything, it's just proceeding around it. But the trial date holds. That's the win. Did I say win? The trial date holds.”
The receipts
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 2007 confession was thrown out over "severe coercion," but prosecutors won't appeal to protect the June 2028 trial date.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.