Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 9/11 trial is set for 2028, but a ruling barring key FBI statements raises doubts families will ever see a verdict.
Page A2From§Eachthe milkman edition — 12 September 2026
FBI Coerces 9/11 Suspect's Confession, Judge Rules It Too Coerced To Use, Trial Pushed To 2028
As it ran on the front
I want to say something decent about this before I get to the part that isn't. A military judge down at Guantanamo, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, spent the summer with an interrogation file that goes back to 2007, and at the end of it he did what a judge is supposed to do. He read what was put in front of him and he ruled the statement involuntary. He excluded it. Whatever Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the FBI doesn't get to be evidence in his own case anymore. That's not a small thing. That's a man doing the job the way it's written up.
Here's the number that spoils it: 2028.…
…(cont) That's the year Fox News says the trial is now set for — nearly 27 years, by their count, after the attacks the trial is supposed to be about. I read that twice. And the reason it's 2028, and not some year already come and gone, is the same ruling I just told you was done right: the statement the case leaned on for two decades is the statement a judge just took off the table, because of how it was obtained.
I'm sorry to keep circling this — it's just, 2007 keeps snagging me. That's the year the FBI sat him down and got him talking. Six years after the towers came down, they finally had him on paper saying what they needed him to say. It took them six years to get the words. It's taken nineteen more to lose them.
I know, I know — I already said twenty-seven years. I'm sorry. But look at that number from one more seat: it isn't a wait for a verdict, not really. Fox is calling it an open sore, and I believe them — I've had a splinter I couldn't reach, and I know what a wound looks like when you keep checking on it instead of leaving it be. Twenty-seven years is what happens when the thing that opened the case is the same thing that's now holding it shut.
And I'm sorry, one more angle and then I'll leave it alone — the ruling itself came down in August. Nineteen years after they got him talking, one month before the anniversary of the attacks he's charged with.
I keep a car in the garage that hasn't turned over clean since spring. You know the fix: you run another battery's charge through the cables into the dead one, full blast, until the engine catches. It catches. It runs fine after that — you couldn't tell the difference from outside. But you don't then tell your wife the car started up on its own, because you were standing right there holding the cables. I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this too, but that's what I keep picturing when I read "excluded": the engine ran. That part was never in question. The question was what was hooked up to it when it did.
One more thing, since you're already off the porch and halfway to the car —
The FBI's tactics got the statement in 2007. The FBI's tactics are the reason a judge just took that statement back out of the case in 2026. Those are the same tactics; he didn't reach for a different set the second time. So which is it — was the confession good enough to build a case on, or was it involuntary?
“The FBI spent six years getting a confession the hard way, and now the very tactics they used are the reason a judge just threw it out — that's not a technicality, that's the building falling on its own foundation. Nearly three decades after the attacks, families still don't have a trial date they can bank on, because the agency that wanted this case most is the one that broke it. When the shortcut becomes the reason there's no verdict, that's not justice moving slow — that's the government tripping over its own tools.”
“Look, field interrogations after a major attack aren't a law school seminar, you can't expect — wait, this was in custody, by trained FBI agents, in a formal interrogation, that's... that's not really where I wanted to go with that. The point is the system worked, the judge caught it, checks and balances did their job — I just wish it hadn't taken nineteen years and didn't leave families waiting till 2028 to hear it. Did I say "the system worked"? Let's go back to "due process."”
The receipts
· Judge rules Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confession was involuntary and excludes it from 9/11 case from the morgue, 28 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.