Nearly a quarter-century after U.S. forces captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man long described as the principal architect of the September 11 attacks, a military judge at Guantanamo Bay has set a new trial date: June 5, 2028. The scheduling order, issued by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, means that if the date holds, Mohammed and three alleged co-conspirators will face a military commission some twenty-seven years after hijacked airliners brought down the World Trade Center towers, struck the Pentagon, and crashed in a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Writing in American Thinker, Don Brown argues that the delay is not merely a failure of scheduling but a moral and legal disgrace — one that has allowed a war-crimes prosecution to be swallowed whole by the procedures of an ordinary American criminal case.
The Road to 2028
Mohammed, a Pakistani national, is not a U.S. citizen. According to Brown, Mohammed confessed before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo in March 2007 that he was “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.” He has been in American custody since 2003, held at Guantanamo since 2006, formally charged in 2008, and arraigned in 2012. Schrama is now the fifth military judge to oversee the case.
Brown points to the judge’s suppression of Mohammed’s 2007 statements to the FBI as a decision that jeopardizes any eventual conviction. The statements were excluded as “involuntary,” with the court finding they had been tainted by earlier CIA interrogation practices — waterboarding and other “black site” methods used before Mohammed arrived at Guantanamo. Brown frames the suppression as evidence that the proceedings treat Mohammed as though he were entitled to the full protections of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
“Can we imagine the Nuremberg Tribunal suppressing Hermann Göring’s confession?” he asks, invoking the postwar model he argues America has abandoned.
A Comparison With Nuremberg
After Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, President Truman appointed Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson as chief prosecutor of the major war criminals. The Nuremberg Military Tribunal opened on November 20, 1945 — less than seven months after V-E Day — returned judgment in October 1946, and sentenced twelve Nazis to death by hanging.
Brown’s argument rests on the distinction Jackson’s generation drew: a military commission for enemy war criminals is not a federal homicide trial, but an instrument of national self-defense and historical accountability. The post-9/11 system, in his telling, imported into that framework every feature of modern American criminal process — drawn-out discovery fights, disputes over classified evidence, a rotating cast of judges, interlocutory appeals — and in doing so created a tribunal that cannot prosecute the very case it was built for.
As Brown put it in a recent national television appearance, a quarter-century delay in a war-crimes prosecution is inexcusable.
The Plea-Deal Detour
The path to trial has been further complicated by the 2024 plea agreements. Pentagon prosecutors and the commission’s convening authority reached deals under which Mohammed and two co-defendants would have pleaded guilty in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the agreements within days after objections from Republican members of Congress and many 9/11 families. A military judge and a military appeals court initially treated the deals as binding; in July 2025, a divided D.C. Circuit held that Austin had the authority to withdraw them, putting capital punishment back in play. The accused then asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the life-sentence agreements.
Each round of appellate litigation, Brown warns, makes the June 2028 trial date more likely to slip again.
For the Families, a Seminar Instead of a Reckoning
Brown’s sharpest criticism is reserved for what the delay has cost the people most directly affected. Throughout the years of motions and appeals, families have buried parents, spouses, and children. First responders have buried colleagues and then buried one another as illnesses linked to the attacks continued to claim lives. They were promised a reckoning, Brown writes; instead, they got a seminar.
The trial was once scheduled for 2021. Its push to 2028, he notes, means some widows and widowers who have waited for a verdict will not live to hear one.
The Argument Over Rules
Defenders of the slow pace point to the CIA’s interrogation program and to weak procedural rules that gave defense lawyers a generation of suppression motions to file. Brown does not dispute that the interrogation program is central to the case’s troubles; he disputes the premise that it should be. Unlawful enemy combatants, in his view, are not owed Miranda warnings, Speedy Trial Act clocks, or the architecture of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments as though they had been arrested on a street corner in the United States. They are owed, he writes, a lawful, public, and prompt military judgment — and, if convicted of capital war crimes, the sentence the law allows.
Brown allows that Nuremberg was not perfect. But he insists Jackson’s generation understood the difference between law and paralysis: it stayed the hand of raw vengeance and still finished the work. The American system, he concludes, has stayed the hand of judgment itself.
As another anniversary passes, the argument Brown makes is less about one defendant than about what the country has built in the name of the rule of law — a process that, in his words, has become cruel to the victims.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/a-disgrace-to-the-9-11-victims/