Military trial date set for alleged mastermind of Sept. 11 attacks

A military judge ruled Wednesday that the man accused of being the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks will stand trial starting in June 2028. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be prosecuted alongside others suspected of conspiring in the attacks: Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. Mohammed is accused of orchestrating the plot to crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. A fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania during the attacks. He has been held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006. Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, a military commissions judge, on Wednesday rejected the January 2027 start date proposed by prosecutors and instead set the trial date for about 18 months later. The trial date was announced after a split federal appeals court last summer threw out a potential agreement that would have allowed Mohammed to plead guilty in exchange for sparing him the risk of execution. Mohammed was charged and arraigned in 2008 with war crimes and murder in connection with the nearly 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 attacks. The road to prosecute Mohammed and other conspirators has dragged on for years, with the Obama-era military commissions system being tested for the first time — at times leading to lengthy challenges to its rules. Defense lawyers have also argued that the holdup comes from what they say are the government’s efforts to hide details of torture used against detainees at secret CIA prisons before they were transferred to Guantánamo Bay. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay three years later. A Senate report from 2014 found that the CIA had used what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques” against Mohammed and other conspirators, including waterboarding Mohammed 183 times in what was described as “a series of near-drownings.”