No Verdict: Twenty-Five Years On, the 9/11 "Trial of the Century" Still Hasn't Started

By Michael Phillips | A Riptide retrospective

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in a pre-dawn raid in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003 — disheveled, reportedly still in his sleepwear, hauled out by intelligence officers after an 18-month manhunt for al-Qaeda’s operational chief. The manhunt took a year and a half. Getting him in front of a judge has now taken more than two decades, and it isn’t over.

As the country marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks, the man the 9/11 Commission identified as the “principal architect” of the plot — along with three co-defendants, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and Ammar al-Baluchi — remains at Guantánamo Bay, still in pretrial litigation, with a trial date now set for June 5, 2028. That would put opening arguments roughly 27 years after the attacks themselves, and even that date is explicitly conditional. The military judge who set it, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, has said as much: it depends on the case clearing a series of remaining deadlines, and it could slip again. It has slipped before — twice on the record, and repeatedly in every informal sense.

This is the story of why — and of what it means that the country’s central criminal case for the deadliest attack in its history has now outlasted the wars it started, the president who launched it, and, for a growing share of the country, living memory of the day itself.

“The manhunt took a year and a half. Getting him in front of a judge has now taken more than two decades.”

A scale problem, before it was a legal problem

It’s worth sitting with how large this case actually is before getting into why it hasn’t moved. The charges against Mohammed alone include 2,977 individual counts of first-degree murder — one for every person killed that day — layered on top of hijacking, terrorism, and material-support charges that carry the death penalty. No American criminal case, military or civilian, has ever tried to prosecute a single event of this magnitude, with this much classified evidence, this many surviving co-conspirators, and this much riding — politically as well as legally — on the outcome. The 9/11 Commission itself, in its 2004 report, called Mohammed the “principal architect” of the attacks, based largely on the same CIA interrogations that would later become the case’s central legal liability. That tension — the country’s own investigative record built on evidence its own courts can’t use — has shadowed the prosecution from the start.

It’s also, quite simply, a case about old men now. Mohammed is in his early sixties. Guantánamo’s medical staff has spent recent years preparing for detainees who will need dialysis, cardiac care, and end-of-life planning rather than courtroom appearances. Defense attorneys have raised, in other Guantánamo cases, whether some defendants will be medically fit to stand trial by the time one is finally scheduled. None of that is unique to this case — it’s what 25 years of pretrial litigation does to any set of defendants — but it means the 2028 date isn’t just a legal target. It’s also a race against actuarial reality that nobody in the case is saying out loud.

“The country’s own investigative record was built on evidence its own courts can’t use.”

The torture problem the system was built to avoid — and couldn’t

Everything about the case’s dysfunction traces back to what happened to Mohammed between 2003 and 2006, before he ever saw Guantánamo.

He was held in CIA black sites and, per the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report, waterboarded 183 times in a single month — March 2003 — along with other interrogation techniques a Senate investigation later concluded amounted to torture. He wasn’t transferred into military custody at Guantánamo until September 2006. He was first arraigned there in June 2008 under charges brought by the Bush administration, but that case never reached trial — it was upended in 2009 when the Obama administration tried, and failed, to move it into civilian court (see below), and the original charges were formally dropped in 2010. Mohammed wasn’t re-charged and re-arraigned under the reconstituted commission system until May 2012 — meaning the case now underway is, procedurally speaking, the second time it has started from arraignment.

The government’s working theory was always that a “clean team” approach could rescue the case: have separate FBI agents re-interview Mohammed later, without coercion, and use those “untainted” statements at trial instead of anything obtained under CIA custody. Prosecutors excluded the CIA-era statements from the case early on. But that theory collapsed in the most consequential ruling of the past year. On August 28, 2026, Schrama suppressed the confession Mohammed gave to FBI agents during a four-day interrogation at Guantánamo in January 2007 — the supposedly clean evidence — ruling in a 45-page order that prosecutors had failed to show the statements were voluntary. His reasoning: the CIA’s earlier treatment had left Mohammed so conditioned by fear that a later interrogation by a different agency, without a lawyer and without a Miranda warning, could not be treated as a fresh start. Two other judges have reached similar conclusions in related Guantánamo cases — Col. Matthew McCall threw out al-Baluchi’s confession, and Col. Lanny Acosta explicitly found that USS Cole defendant Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri had been tortured.

The upshot: a quarter-century in, prosecutors are still trying to figure out what evidence they’re actually allowed to use against the man the government says planned the attack. That is not a footnote to the delay. It is the delay, in the sense that it is the single hardest problem the case has never solved — because it was created before the case existed, by decisions made in secret black sites with no anticipation that a torture-tainted confession would someday need to survive judicial scrutiny.

A system built after the fact, for exactly this case, and it has never worked

The deeper structural issue is that Mohammed isn’t being tried in any court with an established body of precedent. He’s being tried under the military commissions system Congress created via the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — essentially built around this case, with no real precedent, no settled procedural rules, and, crucially, none of the appellate infrastructure that lets ordinary federal criminal law resolve disputes efficiently. Commentators across the political spectrum have converged on the same diagnosis: had this case gone to a normal federal court, it would have had decades of precedent, a single trial judge, established discovery rules, and a functioning appellate structure behind it. Instead, every significant legal question — evidentiary, constitutional, jurisdictional — has had to be litigated essentially from scratch, in a hybrid civilian-military structure that keeps generating unresolved secondary litigation of its own.

The numbers bear this out. Since 2011, prosecutors have brought commission charges against eleven Guantánamo detainees. In the following decade, only two of those cases produced convictions — and both were guilty pleas, not trial verdicts. None of the contested capital cases, including Mohammed’s, has ever reached a verdict.

The case has also cycled through an unusual number of judges, each requiring time to get up to speed on years of prior rulings, and it briefly ricocheted between the civilian and military systems entirely. In November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Mohammed and his co-defendants would be tried in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, blocks from Ground Zero. That decision provoked a bipartisan backlash in Congress and fierce opposition from New York residents, and officials worried about security and cost. By April 2011, Holder reversed course and sent the case back to the military commission system — a reset that took roughly a year and a half to unwind and required prosecutors to re-file charges from scratch. The re-filed charges were referred in February 2011, and Mohammed was re-arraigned in May 2012 — meaning the current, still-unresolved commission case has itself been pending for over 14 years.

“The system created specifically to try this case has spent 25 years failing to try it.”

The counterfactual: the one 9/11 case a federal court actually finished

The starkest evidence that the military commission structure itself is the problem, rather than the underlying facts, sits about 900 miles north of Guantánamo, in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

Zacarias Moussaoui — sometimes called the “20th hijacker,” though prosecutors ultimately built their case on the theory that he could have helped stop the attacks had he not lied to the FBI about his al-Qaeda ties before September 11 — was arrested a month before the attacks, indicted in federal court by December 2001, pleaded guilty in 2005, and was sentenced to life in prison after a jury trial on the penalty phase in May 2006. Start to finish, his case moved through the ordinary Article III federal court system, with an ordinary appellate track, in under five years. He remains the only person convicted in a U.S. court in connection with the attacks.

Moussaoui’s case wasn’t simple — it involved classified intelligence, a defendant who tried to fire his own lawyers and represent himself, and death-penalty litigation of its own. But it had something Mohammed’s case has never had: a single trial judge with settled rules of evidence, a functioning appellate structure above her, and a body of precedent to draw on. It is the version of accountability the military commissions were supposed to deliver faster and more securely than a civilian court could. A quarter-century on, it has delivered neither.

“It is the version of accountability the military commissions were supposed to deliver faster and more securely than a civilian court could. A quarter-century on, it has delivered neither.”

The wider Guantánamo backdrop

Mohammed’s case doesn’t exist in isolation — it sits inside a detention facility that has itself become a 25-year fixture of the post-9/11 landscape, and a monument to the same institutional inertia. More than 700 men have passed through Guantánamo since it opened in January 2002, with a concurrent peak of roughly 680 held at once in June 2003. As of the most recent transfers, about 15 detainees remain. Of those, only a handful — including Mohammed and his co-defendants — are actually charged with crimes; others have been held for years without charge, some cleared for transfer more than a decade ago and still there. The facility’s per-detainee cost has been estimated in recent years at anywhere from roughly $3 million to over $13 million annually, depending on the accounting method used — multiples of what it costs to hold a convicted federal inmate at a maximum-security prison on the mainland. Successive administrations, including Obama’s explicit January 2009 pledge to close the facility within a year, have tried and failed to shut it down, in part because unresolved cases like Mohammed’s give it a continuing reason to exist. The trial’s failure to conclude isn’t just a legal story; it’s part of why the facility built to hold its defendant is still open at all.

The COVID years, and the routine of missed deadlines

Even setting aside the big structural resets, the case has been a case study in incremental delay. A trial date was first set — for the first time in the case’s history — in August 2019, targeting January 11, 2021, nearly two decades after the attacks. Defense attorneys called it unrealistic at the time, and they were right: pretrial hearings were suspended for roughly 18 months during the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing the case further behind a schedule that was already aggressive. By the 20th anniversary in September 2021, family members present at Guantánamo — among them Elizabeth Berry, whose firefighter brother Billy Burke died helping others evacuate the World Trade Center — were still describing the case as stuck in the pretrial phase, with attorneys estimating a trial could still be a year or more away. It was, in fact, more than six years away, and counting.

The plea deal that almost ended it — and the fight that undid the plea deal

The closest the case ever came to resolution wasn’t a verdict. It was a deal.

In late July 2024, military prosecutors and defense counsel for Mohammed, bin Attash, and al-Hawsawi reached pretrial plea agreements: the three men would plead guilty in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table, closing out the capital phase of the case in favor of life sentences. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rescinded the agreements two days later, arguing that a decision of this magnitude — whether the men accused of the deadliest attack in American history would face execution — belonged to him personally, and that victims’ families and the public deserved to see the case go to trial.

What followed was over a year of jurisdictional whiplash. A military judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, ruled in November 2024 that Austin had acted too late and lacked the authority to unwind an agreement the convening authority had already signed. A military appeals panel agreed. The Biden administration — and later the Trump administration, which inherited the case — pushed the fight into the civilian U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. On July 11, 2025, a divided panel ruled 2–1 that Austin had, in fact, acted within his lawful authority, reversing the military courts and voiding the plea deals for good. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which had represented detainees in related litigation, warned that without the plea agreements, the case would likely never reach resolution at all.

Family reaction to the plea deals themselves had been split from the start — a fault line that runs through the entire 25-year saga and complicates any simple story about what “closure” would even look like. Some relatives wanted to see a trial at any cost and opposed a deal that let the defendants avoid a death sentence. Others, exhausted by decades without resolution, said they’d accept guilty pleas and life sentences if it meant the case would actually end. Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles piloted American Airlines Flight 77, said she would never have closure as long as a future president could commute a life sentence or otherwise deal the men away — a possibility a plea agreement, unlike an execution, would always leave open.

With the deals dead, the case reverted to a straight capital prosecution — which is the posture it’s in now, moving toward the newly set June 2028 date.

Where things actually stand now

As of this month, the state of the case is:

Trial date: June 5, 2028 — set on August 26, 2026, and roughly 17 months later than the January 11, 2027, date prosecutors had proposed (reported elsewhere as “18 months,” depending on rounding). Schrama’s order called the earlier date “incompatible” with the pretrial litigation still outstanding.
Evidence: Mohammed’s 2007 FBI confession has been suppressed as involuntary; prosecutors have not said whether they will appeal. His original CIA-era statements were already off the table. What, if anything, prosecutors can use to establish the core of their case against him is now genuinely uncertain — a question that, 25 years in, is still unresolved.
Co-defendants: Rulings on the admissibility of bin Attash’s and al-Hawsawi’s statements are still pending before Schrama; al-Baluchi’s confession has already been thrown out by a different judge.
Charges: All four men still face capital charges — first-degree murder on a count for each of the 2,977 people killed, among other war-crimes charges — with execution a live possibility if the case ever reaches a guilty verdict.
Appeals: It remains unclear whether the defense will seek further review of the D.C. Circuit’s plea-deal ruling, up to and including a request for Supreme Court review.

The piece of 25 years that never closed

Every other thread of the post-9/11 story has, in some fashion, reached an endpoint the country could argue about, mourn, or move past. Bin Laden was killed in 2011. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however messily, ended. The PATRIOT Act’s surveillance provisions were litigated, amended, and finally allowed to lapse this spring. Even the architecture of homeland security — DHS, the intelligence-sharing regime, airport security — has evolved into something with an identifiable, if contested, steady state.

The prosecution of the man the U.S. government itself has identified as the operational mastermind of the attacks has no steady state. It has no endpoint. It has a defendant who has now spent more of his life in U.S. custody without a verdict than most Americans killed on 9/11 had left to live. It has a rotating cast of military judges, each inheriting a docket of unresolved motions from their predecessor. It has a body of family members who have spent a quarter-century traveling to a naval base in Cuba to watch procedural arguments, several of whom have died waiting, as more than one relative has noted publicly, without ever seeing a resolution.

What makes the KSM case different from the rest of the post-9/11 legacy discussed elsewhere in this anniversary coverage isn’t that it was rolled back or repurposed — the fate of the PATRIOT Act’s surveillance tools, or Guantánamo’s slow repointing toward immigration enforcement. It’s that it was never actually built to completion in the first place. The system created specifically to try this case has spent 25 years failing to try it, and every fix attempted along the way — a civilian trial, a plea deal, a new trial date — has been undone by some other part of the same apparatus. The case is not stalled because no one has tried to move it. It is stalled because the institutional machine assembled to deliver a verdict has, at every turn, proven structurally unable to produce one.

Whether June 2028 breaks that pattern, or simply becomes the next date on a list that already includes 2021 and January 2027, is not something anyone involved in the case — judge, prosecutor, defense counsel, or family member — is currently willing to predict.

A generational math problem

There’s one more dimension worth naming plainly on a 25th-anniversary retrospective: the people for whom this case matters most are aging out of it, on both sides of the courtroom.

“A trial delayed long enough stops being merely late. It starts to become a different kind of event altogether.”

Gordon Haberman, who lost his daughter Andrea, has traveled to Guantánamo multiple times over the past two decades to watch pretrial hearings, by his own account leaving frustrated each time. Lee and Eunice Hanson lost their son Peter, their daughter-in-law Sue Kim, and their two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, Christine — the youngest person killed on 9/11 — when United Flight 175 struck the South Tower. Around the tenth anniversary, the Hansons told reporters they doubted they’d live to see a verdict. Lee Hanson did not: he died in November 2018, six years before the plea deals that briefly seemed like they might resolve the case, and ten years before the trial date now on the calendar. Eunice, in her late eighties, has said she isn’t sure she will either, given how many times the case has been pushed back. Elizabeth Berry, a clinical psychologist who lost her firefighter brother and has spent years counseling other victims’ families through what she’s called the case’s “interminable delays,” has made a related observation from the other side of her professional life: much of the country too young to remember the attacks firsthand is now old enough to vote, serve on juries, and — eventually — sit as the general public the case was always nominally being conducted in front of.

“Whatever verdict eventually comes out of Guantánamo, if one ever does, it will land in a country substantially different from the one the attacks happened to.”

That’s the quieter cost sitting underneath every procedural ruling and every pushed-back date. A trial delayed long enough stops being merely late. It starts to become a different kind of event altogether — one whose intended audience, the people who lived through September 11, 2001, as adults with direct memory of it, is itself a shrinking population. Whatever verdict eventually comes out of Guantánamo, if one ever does, it will land in a country substantially different from the one the attacks happened to.

Sources: Reporting and rulings drawn from NBC News, Al Jazeera, CBS News, UPI, the New York Times (via secondary reporting in RedState and the Deseret News), and the Washington Times on the June 2028 trial-date order and the August 2026 confession-suppression ruling; JURIST, NPR, France 24, CBS News, PBS NewsHour, and Fox News on the 2024–2025 plea-deal fight, the rescission by then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and the D.C. Circuit’s July 2025 ruling; the American Bar Association (“Another Decade of Military Commissions”), the International Crimes Database, PBS Frontline, the Christian Science Monitor, and Wikipedia’s entries on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the case’s charging and arraignment history; NPR and Fox News on the 2009–2011 civilian-court detour under Attorney General Eric Holder; Reuters, Yahoo News, Human Rights First, and CNN on Guantánamo’s population and cost figures; and Al Jazeera, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Deccan Herald, and NBC News for family testimony from Gordon Haberman, Lee and Eunice Hanson, Elizabeth Berry, and Debra Burlingame across multiple anniversaries. Figures reported inconsistently across outlets (e.g., the exact month-count between the proposed and ordered trial dates, and total-vs-peak Guantánamo population) are noted as such in the text above.