After Nearly 27 Years, the 9/11 Trial Finally Has a Date

Nearly 27 years. That is how long the United States will have waited, if the new order holds, between the September 11 attacks and the start of a trial for the man accused of plotting them ⁶¹⁰. A generation has grown up, gone to war and come home in that span. The courtroom has not even opened ²⁵⁷.

On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, a U.S. military judge set a June 2028 trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused 9/11 mastermind, and three co-defendants at Guantanamo Bay ²⁵⁷. The order restarts what is widely described as the most delayed prosecution in modern American history ²⁵⁷. It does not promise an ending. It promises, at last, a beginning.

The trial will not be in federal court ⁷⁸. It will be by military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a separate system created for Guantanamo detainees with different rules for evidence, jury and death-penalty decisions ⁷⁸. All four men are scheduled to be tried together there ²⁵. For families who have waited through cancellations, retirements and years of pretrial litigation, the distinction matters less than the fact that a judge has finally fixed time to place.

The order came from Military Judge Lt. Col. Michael Schrama ⁷. Beyond that, the reporting does not agree on the precise day. Newsweek specifies June 5, 2028 ⁶. Other outlets report only June 2028 or summer 2028 ²³⁴. The sources disagree on the exact date, and there is no referee in the file to resolve it, so the honest reading is June 2028 with one outlet narrowing it to June 5 ²³⁴⁶. No verbatim language from the judge's order is quoted in the excerpts provided.

The co-defendants are now named as Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi ⁵. That corrects earlier accounts that left the three others unnamed. They stand alongside Mohammed, described as the accused chief conspirator and mastermind ²⁵⁷.

The path to 2028 explains why the calendar reads nearly 27 years after the attacks ⁶¹⁰. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003 ². What followed was CIA custody, including waterboarding, and then transfer to Guantanamo in 2006 ⁵¹¹. Counted from that 2006 transfer to late August 2026, he has been held at Guantanamo for 20 years. An earlier trial date set for 2021 was lost to the ordinary and the extraordinary colliding at once, and proceedings never recovered their momentum.

The central fight will decide what any jury hears ²¹¹. Prosecutors say Mohammed's statements to the FBI are crucial evidence ²¹¹. The defense argues those statements were tainted by torture in CIA custody, including waterboarding, and cannot be admitted ²¹¹. Whether an FBI interview conducted years later can be separated — legally cleansed — from what happened earlier in CIA custody is unresolved ²¹¹. That single question may determine whether the government can sustain a capital case at all.

A former Gitmo prosecutor, quoted by Fox News, likened the delay to a "Frankenstein's zombie court" ⁹. The phrase is cruel and precise. The commission system was built to handle cases that federal courts were deemed unable or unwilling to take, then spent two decades litigating its own foundations. Evidence, interrogation methods, secrecy, health, logistics at an isolated naval base — each became its own trial before the trial.

The death-penalty question turns the delay into something more than procedure ²¹¹. In 2024, the government agreed Mohammed could plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, sparing him execution ²¹¹. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rejected that agreement two days later, leaving the death penalty on the table ²¹¹. With that rejection, the admissibility fight returned to full litigation. The government must now prove it can win a capital conviction with evidence a judge agrees was lawfully obtained.

Time is now fixed, but on terms longer than the government wanted. Prosecutors had hoped for an earlier start, and the June 2028 setting extends by more than a year the wait for testimony, cross-examination and verdict. COVID-19 and the earlier retirement and travel restrictions are cited as contributors to delay, but no fuller accounting of lost years is offered in the excerpts. The practical effect is the same for families: another three Septembers will pass before opening statements, if they begin on schedule.