Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, the alleged plotters have yet to face trial. After rejecting prosecutors’ request to begin the trial in January 2027, a military judge at Guantanamo Bay ordered jury selection for the trial of four alleged 9/11 conspirators, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused main architect of the attacks, to begin on June 5, 2028. “There is significant frustration,” Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93, told CBS News. Felt is the brother of Flight 93 passenger Edward Felt and is leading efforts to share his story and that of the 40 passengers and crew members who fought the hijackers. “We have yet to see justice or accountability. The trials are still in the lead-up to the Guantanamo trial… which has been dragging on and on.” The latest date presents a painful question for victims’ families: After so many missed deadlines and prolonged pretrial proceedings, will this case move forward as planned? The four defendants Four defendants are currently scheduled to be tried together: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ammar al-Baluchi, also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. The men face the death penalty, and prosecutors are seeking charges including conspiracy, murder in violation of the laws of war, terrorism and kidnapping. After a military judge determined he was mentally unfit to stand trial, a fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, is no longer part of the case. Prosecutors allege that Mohammed, commonly known as KSM, developed and directed the plot to hijack commercial airliners, weaponizing them and directing them toward the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and held in secret CIA custody for years before being transferred to Guantánamo in 2006. While KSM’s own statements represent key pieces of the US government’s case against him, they have also been one of the biggest obstacles to bringing the case to trial. War Criminals on the Stand Michael Lebowitz offers a rare perspective. The former Justice Department national security prosecutor and combat veteran spent about a decade working on the 9/11 case as a Guantanamo prosecutor, and also contributed to cases involving the USS Cole bombing and senior al Qaeda figures. The former chief legal counsel for the U.S. Army Cyber Command gave this blunt assessment: The 9/11 case became extraordinarily complicated after the United States chose an extraordinary way to prosecute it. Instead of treating alleged al Qaeda operatives as traditional criminal defendants in the federal court system, the Bush administration developed military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects for alleged war crimes. “The government completely shifted from law enforcement tools to the military option,” Lebowitz explained, adding that Congress and the Supreme Court “modified the system” to create a hybrid one in which “judges came in and out, plus staff came in and out.” The current judge in the 9/11 case, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, is the fifth judge to oversee the case since the defendants were indicted in 2012. Lebowitz recalls that the 9/11 arraignment lasted 13 hours and said it was “the longest arraignment in American history.” The plan to try KSM in Manhattan was abandoned. In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Mohammed and four co-defendants would be tried in federal court in Manhattan, and the Obama administration argued that federal courts were equipped to handle major terrorism cases and could offer a fair trial. That plan collapsed after another Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was prosecuted for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in the East. Africa. Their acquittals on most charges became a point of political tension in the ongoing debate over whether those accused of terrorism should be tried in federal court. He was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of conspiracy on one count, but not on more than 280 counts of conspiracy and murder. Congress subsequently restricted the government’s ability to transfer Guantánamo detainees to the United States for trial, and the 9/11 terrorism case returned to the military commission system at Guantánamo. Guantánamo: a “travelling circus” While a federal court in Manhattan operates every day, Guantánamo maintains a schedule. Lebowitz says military commission litigation was commonly referred to by all sides as a “traveling circus.” “To conduct a hearing at Guantanamo Bay, the entire judicial system has to go to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., and board a charter flight,” Lebowitz said. “And I mean judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses, court staff, victims’ families… we all go on the same flight and fly to Guantanamo Bay to conduct a hearing.” That means that a hearing is not simply a matter of walking into a courtroom and putting a case on the agenda. As personnel move in and out of Guantánamo, logistical obstacles increase. “Every six months to a year, we had to re-litigate very mundane and basic things, like how detainees can get bail and when they meet with their lawyers,” he added. Litigating torture Before KSM set foot in Guantanamo, the alleged war criminal spent years secretly detained by the CIA, subjected to an interrogation program that included waterboarding and coercive treatment that later became central to the legal battle over whether statements he later made to U.S. investigators could be used against him. Prosecutors have routinely advocated using evidence gathered under the CIA program, but the defense argues that such subsequent statements cannot simply be separated from years of coercive detention. The debate has spawned years of hearings on classified information, discovery and the circumstances surrounding all of the defendants’ detention conditions and ongoing interrogations as judges navigate the line between defendants’ rights and the government’s obligation to protect classified national security information. A 2024 plea deal that would have spared Mohammed and two co-defendants the possibility of execution was ultimately abandoned, sending the case back to trial. The defense argued that the statements were still tainted by the coercion KSM had experienced in CIA custody. In August, a military judge ruled that the government had not established that statements KSM made to the FBI in 2007 (after his detention by the CIA) were voluntary and decided to exclude them. “I have looked at every shred of evidence in the 9/11 case, both classified and unclassified, and I am very confident that there is enough evidence to convict KSM and the other 9/11 conspirators without those confessions,” Lebowitz said. Still, the former prosecutor admitted that “it makes the job a little harder to connect the dots of the evidence without the confessions.” Instead, the prosecution will have to rely on other evidence, including documentary and communications evidence linking the defendants to the plot. While prosecutors could have challenged the ruling and tried to get KSM’s FBI statements back into evidence, they decided not to appeal, in part because another appeal battle could jeopardize the June 2028 trial date. Felt supports that decision: “I think it was a good choice because I think [an appeal] “It would have slowed things down significantly.” He added: “I think they have enough evidence to get a conviction without the confession that was in question.” “Many of them were elderly, and many of them were simply hoping that they would live long enough for a court of law to officially determine that KSM and his conspirators are guilty,” he said. Felt expressed some doubt that the trial would proceed as scheduled. “They have set dates before,” he said. “I think the judge needs to make 90 rulings before we can proceed, so I’ll believe it when I see it.” It’s no longer about finding a date on the calendar, but about getting the case into the courtroom and reaching a verdict: “No matter what happens, Ed is gone. He’s been taken, he’s been stolen from his family. But to me, justice is a process of presenting the facts in court,” Felt said, adding that he supports prosecutors seeking the death penalty. Citing the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 and the hundreds of people who died later as a result of the attack, Felt added: “We have lost many more people since that day, not only from cancers and respiratory illnesses that were contracted at the recovery sites and at the three sites here in Somerset, New York and at the Pentagon, but all the military losses that we have suffered over the years. Absolutely, if they can be proven guilty, we need to see the death penalty.” Jaala Brown contributed to this report. More from CBS News Go deeper with The Free Press in:
