The announcement that the military commission trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants has been penciled in for June 2028 is treated by mainstream media as a milestone. It is not. It is a monument to bureaucratic failure, a farce masquerading as justice, and an explicit admission that the American national security state broke its own legal framework decades ago and has no idea how to fix it.
Military judge Lt. Col. Michael Schrama rejected the prosecution's push for a January 2027 start and instead selected a date nearly two decades into a detention saga that began when these men were captured in Pakistan back in 2003. By the time opening statements theoretically echo across the wire at Guantánamo Bay in 2028, a quarter of a century will have passed since the towers fell. Meanwhile, you can explore related events here: The Anatomy of Political Recovery: Quantifying the Trade Shock Effect on Executive Approval.
Anyone pretending this constitutes a functioning judicial process is selling you a fairy tale.
The Original Sin of Torture To see the complete picture, check out the recent analysis by NPR.
The lazy consensus in mainstream coverage focuses on the administrative delays, the turnover of judges, and the political ping-pong surrounding plea deals. In 2024, a pretrial agreement that would have taken the death penalty off the table in exchange for guilty pleas was thrown into chaos, eventually canceled after political backlash and subsequent court rulings. Commentators wrung their hands over whether plea bargains or death penalty trials are the proper avenue for closure.
That framing misses the root rot entirely.
The trial is not delayed because of paperwork backlogs or scheduling conflicts. It is paralyzed because the Central Intelligence Agency subjected these defendants to the euphemistically named "enhanced interrogation techniques"—waterboarding, sleep deprivation, spatial humiliation—in black sites across the globe between 2003 and 2006.
Under basic constitutional and international law, statements extracted through torture are inadmissible. When you waterboard a man 183 times, as the government did to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, you do not just extract questionable intelligence; you poison the well of evidence permanently. The entire military commissions system was built on a foundational contradiction: how to use a court of law to try men whose bodies and minds were systematically broken by the government holding them.
Every single legal motion filed over the last twenty years—every debate over classified evidence, every discovery dispute, every interlocutory appeal—is just a symptom of this original sin. The state wants a conviction without exposing the full, unvarnished mechanics of its own illegal interrogation program.
Why 2028 Will Never Happen
Imagine a scenario where June 2028 arrives. Do you honestly believe a trial will commence?
History says no. We have seen trial dates come and go for over a decade. Every time a date is set, new motions regarding the admissibility of tainted evidence bubble up to the appellate courts. Defense attorneys are duty-bound to litigate every single piece of testimony derived from the CIA black sites. Prosecutors are legally cornered into protecting state secrets that, if revealed, would embarrass past administrations.
The military commission system is a broken product. It is neither a true federal court with constitutional protections nor a traditional court-martial. It is an ad-hoc legal purgatory designed to bypass ordinary jurisprudence, and it has collapsed under the weight of its own compromises.
The Fantasy of Closure
The public narrative insists that these trials are necessary to bring closure to the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks. This is a comforting emotional shield, but it is empirically false.
True closure vanished the moment the state chose torture over due process. A trial occurring twenty-seven years after a crime, overseen by a military commission whose rulings are perpetually bogged down in appellate gridlock, does not heal national wounds. It re-inflicts them at regular intervals, dragging victims' families back into the headlines every few years for another cycle of false hope and inevitable delay.
We are forced to maintain this expensive, Kafkaesque theater because admitting the alternative—that the United States compromised its own foundational values, rendered a fair trial impossible, and should have processed these individuals through civilian federal courts from day one—requires an institutional humility that Washington D.C. does not possess.
The 2028 trial date is not a step toward justice. It is another deadline guaranteed to be missed, another postponement of an impossible reckoning, and a permanent indictment of a system that abandoned the rule of law in the panic of 2001 and has been lost in the wilderness ever since. Stop waiting for a verdict that cannot cleanse the system that delayed it.
