Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was taken in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003, and delivered to Guantánamo in September 2006. He is charged as the principal architect of the September 11 plot that killed nearly three thousand people. A military judge has now set trial for June 5, 2028—more than a quarter century after the attacks, and years later than prosecutors had asked. The extra time is consumed by the same argument that has stalled the case for two decades: how much of the government’s evidence is poisoned by the interrogations that followed his capture.

Those twenty-three and a half years in American custody have become a fiscal and civic embarrassment. The bill, by the accounting offered for this long confinement, exceeds $250 million. Families who lost husbands, wives, and children on that September morning still wait for a verdict that looks like justice rather than process. Successive administrations promised a reckoning and produced instead a commission that moves like a court designed to postpone its own conclusion. Delay has become the substitute for decision.

There is a grim accounting on the other side of the ledger. The CIA applied waterboarding to Mohammed 183 times in March 2003. The technique was intended to break a man who had boasted of planning the operation from beginning to end. What the Republic obtained was a prisoner whose later statements the court now treats as tainted, and a prosecution that must try to prove the most famous crime of the century without the very words extracted under pressure. The families want closure. The calendar offers June 2028. Whether that date holds is another question the last two decades have trained the country not to answer too quickly.

Additional ADNN Articles: 

Hegseth Storms Gitmo, Revives Donroe Doctrine and Demands Swift Justice
9/11 Anniversary: How Bojinka Plot in 1995 Foreshadowed U.S. Vulnerability to Bin Laden’s Attack
CIA-Trained Afghan Assassin Shoots National Guards Near White House
Ex-Al-Qaeda Commander al-Sharaa Lands in US for Historic Trump Summit—CIA’s Decades-Long Grooming Pays Off in White House Deal-Making