Judge sets 5 June 2028 for the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tribunal

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael A. Schrama ordered on Wednesday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants stand trial before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay starting on 5 June 2028. Prosecutors had asked for January 2027. Schrama wrote that the earlier date left too little time to finish fights over what evidence can be shown.

The co-defendants are Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. The panel that will hear the case will be made up entirely of U.S. service members. Opening statements are due 30 days after that panel is seated. The defence case is scheduled to start 60 days after the prosecution rests. A sentencing phase follows a verdict.

Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi in March 2003 with al-Hawsawi and has been at Guantanamo since September 2006. The U.S. government charges him with directing the plot that flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that ended in a Pennsylvania field. The charge sheet lists 2,976 dead. He has said in tribunal sessions that he planned the 9/11 operation from A-to-Z.

The case has been in motion and then frozen for two decades. A 2021 trial date was cancelled. In 2024 Mohammed and two co-defendants reached plea agreements that would have produced guilty pleas and life terms without parole, dropping the death penalty. The official who oversees the Pentagon's war court signed them. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the deals last August after Republican members of Congress attacked the bargain. A federal appeals court later refused to force the pleas back into effect.

Schrama's 11-page order is the first firm calendar since that collapse. It is also conditional. If pretrial deadlines slip, the June 2028 start slips with them. The extra 18 months past the prosecution's request are meant for disputes about statements taken after Mohammed was held by the CIA in black sites. Those statements are the core of the evidence fight. Defence lawyers argue they are tainted. Prosecutors argue they can still use parts of the file.

June 2028 is 26 years and nine months after the attacks and 22 years after Mohammed arrived at the base. Most of the original prosecutors and defence counsel have rotated out. Families of the dead have sat through hearings that ended without a verdict. A capital trial in a wartime commission, with a jury of officers, is now the path the court has written down. It is not a promise that the path will be walked on time.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh was cut from earlier groupings for mental-competency reasons. The four men named on Wednesday are the remaining 9/11 capital case. Other detainees at the camp have pleaded or been convicted in smaller dockets. This is the one the government still describes as the central accounting.

The practical consequence of the date is a two-year pretrial grind over classified files, substitution of summaries, and whether a commission jury can hear evidence that a civilian court would exclude. If those motions swallow 2027, the first witness will not sit in 2028 either. Schrama put a date on paper so that both sides have to spend that year on the record instead of on another postponement with no clock.

Family groups that attend the hearings have said for years that they will sit through another delay if the alternative is a deal that takes death off the table without a public record of what Mohammed did. Austin's revocation last August answered that demand and created this calendar. The cost is two more years of pretrial combat over CIA files that both sides have already litigated in pieces.

Guantanamo's courtroom is a physical limit as much as a legal one. Secure video for victims' families, classified terminals for counsel, and a jury of officers who must be pulled off other jobs all have to be booked against a 2028 start. Schrama's order is the booking sheet. It is also the only new fact the case has produced this week. Mohammed will be in his early sixties when the panel is sworn. The families will be more than a quarter-century past the day.