Guantanamo judge bars Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 2007 FBI statements from the 9/11 trial

A United States military judge ruled on Friday that statements Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay in January 2007 cannot be used against him at trial. The 45-page order by Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama is the heaviest blow yet to the government's case against the man prosecutors say designed the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The ruling has not been released to the public. Lawyers who have read the unclassified portions confirmed its conclusion to the New York Times: the prosecution failed to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mohammed's statements were voluntary.

Schrama set a trial date of 5 June 2028 earlier this week for Mohammed and three co-defendants. The 25th anniversary of the attacks falls on 11 September 2026, two weeks from the ruling. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

What the judge excluded

Prosecutors had already agreed not to use statements Mohammed made while he was in CIA custody after his capture in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on 1 March 2003. Those years included waterboarding and other techniques the CIA later described as enhanced interrogation. Mohammed was moved to Guantanamo in 2006.

The FBI interviews in January 2007 were the government's replacement evidence. Agents questioned him over four days at the naval base. Retired FBI agent Frank Pellegrino, who took part, later told CBS News he believed Mohammed spoke of his own will. Pellegrino said he told Mohammed, in explicit terms, that he did not have to talk.

Schrama rejected that account of the session. He wrote that the 2007 questioning was an unbroken continuation of the CIA's psychological conditioning and severe coercion. He also found that FBI agents did not tell Mohammed he had a right to remain silent, a right to consult a lawyer, or that his words could be used at trial.

Mohammed has separately claimed responsibility in other forums. In a March 2007 statement to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal he said he was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z and that he was the operational director for Osama bin Laden. That tribunal record is a different document from the FBI interviews Schrama suppressed.

What happens next

Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, the chief prosecutor, told the New York Times his office will review the order and decide whether to appeal. Schrama gave the government five days, with the option of five more on request. An appeal would send the case back into the military commission system that has already delayed the trial for more than two decades.

Mohammed is held at Guantanamo with several other men charged in the plot. The commissions have produced guilty pleas and a small number of verdicts, but the capital case against the alleged 9/11 planners has stalled through changes of judges, prosecutors, defence counsel and presidential administrations.

Families of the dead have watched that stall for a generation. Some want a public trial with a verdict on the record. Others have said they would accept a plea if it meant they would hear the facts while they are still alive. Mohammed is in his sixties. Several of the original defendants have already died in custody or been removed from the capital case.

Why the 2007 interviews mattered

Once the CIA statements were off the table, the FBI sessions were the government's main account, in Mohammed's own words, of how the plot was organised. Without them, prosecutors must rebuild the case from other witnesses, documents and forensic material assembled since 2001. Some of that record is classified. Some of it has already been litigated in other hearings.

The legal test Schrama applied is not whether Mohammed told the truth. It is whether the government can show the words were given freely. Military commission rules and U.S. constitutional doctrine both treat a statement obtained through coercion as unreliable for a criminal trial, even if parts of it later match other evidence.

That distinction is why Friday's order is narrower than a finding of innocence and wider than a paperwork dispute. The charges remain. The trial date remains. The confession the government planned to read to a jury does not.

The next filing from Rugh's office will show whether the United States will try to restore those pages or proceed without them toward a courtroom in Cuba in 2028.