Judge Rejects 9/11 Confession Obtained Through Torture – The Tuesday AM Quickie 9/1/26
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THE BIG NEWS
Judge Rejects Alleged 9/11 Mastermind’s Confession Obtained Via Torture
A confession from accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed can’t be used against him at trial because the US government tortured him to get it. That’s the ruling from a military judge last week that constitutes a “major blow” to the case, the New York Times reported. The ruling could further delay the start of the trial, set for June 5, 2028, nearly three decades after the attacks. The US government has repeatedly tortured him for years. Per the NYT:
He was brutally interrogated by the C.I.A. in the overseas prisons after his capture in 2003 and held incommunicado until his transfer to Guantánamo in 2006. Prosecutors excluded statements from those interrogations, which included 183 rounds of waterboarding, from the case.
But the trial judge, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, went further, concluding that Mr. Mohammed’s subsequent interrogations in 2007 at Guantánamo were also inadmissible.
“The prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammad’s statements to the F.B.I. were voluntarily given,” Colonel Schrama wrote in the conclusion of his 45-page ruling, which was not immediately released to the public but whose unclassified contents were confirmed by several lawyers who had seen it.
Schrama highlighted “unbroken continuation of the C.I.A.’s psychological conditioning and severe coercion” and the fact that “F.B.I. agents intentionally failed to explicitly tell Mr. Mohammed that he had a right to be silent and to consult a lawyer, and that what he told them could be used against him at a trial.”
Prosecutors have five days to appeal and may request an additional five days. Without the confession, they would need to rely on other material, including telephone intercepts and other documents, some of which the NYT noted are also at issue. “But under Guantánamo’s detention doctrine, the United States believes it can hold Mr. Mohammed forever, even without trial and conviction, as part of its war against terrorism.”