A military judge just threw out the confession of the man the government calls the 9/11 mastermind — proving that two decades and trillions of taxpayer dollars later, the national security apparatus still can't produce a prosecution that holds up in court.
Lt. Col. Michael Schrama ruled Friday that statements Khalid Sheikh Mohammed made to FBI agents over four days at Guantanamo Bay in January 2007 were not voluntary, CBS News reported. The ruling has not been publicly released. Schrama found that the CIA's earlier handling of Mohammed — which included waterboarding and other tactics widely recognized as torture — instilled in him a fear of severe mistreatment if he didn't comply with interrogators. He was never read his Miranda rights and was told he could not speak to a lawyer.
The retired FBI agent who conducted the 2007 interview disagrees. Frank Pellegrino told CBS News he believes Mohammed spoke voluntarily: "I couldn't have told him in any more explicit a way that he did not have to talk to me." But Pellegrino conceded the legal question was for the courts: "whether that fits within what is required legally, based on other activities, a court's got to decide that."
The prosecutor, Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, told The New York Times the government will "make a decision on whether to appeal in the near future."
Fox News framed the ruling as a fresh obstacle in an already hopeless timeline, noting it "threatens to further delay the case, which has been plagued by postponements and failed efforts to secure plea agreements." CBS buried the broader institutional failure, treating the ruling as simply a procedural setback for prosecutors.
Here's what both outlets soft-pedal: this is a systemic disgrace. Mohammed was captured in 2003. The CIA tortured him. The FBI then sent a clean team to get a confession admissible in court — and that effort just failed, 17 years after the interview and nearly 23 years after the attacks. The trial is now set for June 2028 — if it happens at all.
Fox noted that in 2024, Mohammed and two co-defendants agreed to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences and avoiding the death penalty. The deal would have also required them to answer victims' families' questions about the attacks. The Biden administration withdrew the agreement amid criticism from families, resulting in more litigation.
So the government had a deal that would have delivered some accountability and some answers. Biden's Pentagon killed it. Now the government has no plea deal and a confession a judge just threw out.
Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered on September 11. Their families have waited nearly a quarter century for a legal reckoning. Instead, they've watched the national security establishment burn through billions on a Guantanamo Bay infrastructure and a military commission system that can't survive its own constitutional scrutiny. The same surveillance state that demanded unchecked power after 9/11 has delivered incompetence dressed in institutional prestige.
The question isn't whether Mohammed is guilty. It's whether a republic that abandons its own legal standards can ever hold anyone accountable in a court of law — or whether the security state only knows how to expand, never to deliver.
