Judge sets 5 June 2028 for the 9/11 military trial at Guantanamo

A U.S. Air Force judge ordered on Wednesday that the military trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three alleged accomplices will open on 5 June 2028 at Guantanamo Bay. The date is 18 months later than the January 2027 start prosecutors had asked for.

Lt. Col. Michael A. Schrama wrote in an 11-page scheduling order that a 2027 opening would leave too little time to resolve disputes about what evidence can be shown to the panel. The proceedings begin with selection of a jury made entirely of service members. Opening statements follow 30 calendar days after the panel is seated. The defence presents its main case 60 days after the prosecution rests. A sentencing phase comes last.

Mohammed, a U.S.-educated engineer captured in Pakistan in March 2003 with Mustafa al-Hawsawi, has been held at Guantanamo since September 2006. He has said he planned the 11 September 2001 attacks “from A-to-Z.” The government charges him with directing the plot that killed 2,976 people listed on the charge sheet. Walid bin Attash and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali are named with him and al-Hawsawi in the same order.

The plea deal that did not hold

In 2024 Mohammed and two co-defendants reached agreements to plead guilty to every charged offence, including those murders, in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table. The official who oversees the Pentagon’s war court accepted the deals. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked them last August after Republican lawmakers attacked the bargain. A federal appeals court later refused to force the deals back into force.

That left the case on a capital track again, and back in front of a military judge who has to decide what the panel may hear. The hardest fights are about statements taken after Mohammed was waterboarded by the CIA. Defence lawyers argue those statements, and anything derived from them, are tainted. Prosecutors argue they can present a clean case built on later, unwarned or differently obtained material. Schrama’s extra 18 months are mainly for those motions.

A calendar that has slipped for two decades

A trial date was set once before, for 2021, and then cancelled. Mohammed has now been in U.S. custody for 23 years and at Guantanamo for nearly 20. The men on the charge sheet are among the last detainees at the camp. Successive administrations have tried commissions, federal court, and plea bargains. None has produced a verdict.

Schrama warned that the 2028 date still depends on the parties meeting interim deadlines. If the evidence fights overrun, the start slips again. The order builds in time for each side to argue motions for findings of not guilty after the prosecution case, and for prosecutors to reopen if the judge allows it. That structure is closer to a general court-martial than to a civilian capital trial in Manhattan, which is the venue defence lawyers have wanted for years and which Congress has blocked.

Families of the dead have waited through every change of president, every change of defence secretary, and every change of judge. Some want a death sentence. Some want a completed record more than they want a particular penalty. The June 2028 date is the first firm opening on the calendar since the plea deals collapsed. It is also a date that assumes the next two years of motion practice will actually finish. The last two decades do not make that a safe assumption.

Mohammed will be 63 in June 2028 if the trial starts on time. The youngest of the four co-defendants will be in middle age. The panel that hears them will be made of officers and enlisted members who were children, or not yet born, when the planes hit.