Justice isn’t just blind. Sometimes she wanders off entirely, leaving the rest of us standing in the rubble wondering when she plans to come back. For the families of the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11, 2001, that wait has stretched across a quarter century – through wars, presidencies, birthdays that stopped being celebrated, and grandchildren who only know the towers from photographs.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, was captured in Pakistan in 2003. He was transferred to Guantánamo Bay, where he has remained ever since. Twenty-three years. Let that number sit with you. In all that time, the military commission tasked with prosecuting him has lurched forward and stalled so many times that a former Gitmo prosecutor called it a “Frankenstein’s zombie court.” That description felt generous even before last Friday.
The pretrial phase alone has consumed more time than both World Wars combined. Hearings have been delayed, restructured, and rescheduled so relentlessly that the proceedings resemble less a pursuit of justice than a bureaucratic endurance test – one designed to outlast the patience of everyone involved, especially the people who lost someone that bright September morning.
The ruling
On Friday, military judge Lt. Col. Michael Schrama delivered the latest blow to any hope of timely accountability. He threw out part of Mohammed’s confession, ruling that statements the terrorist made to investigators in 2007 were not given voluntarily.
From Fox News:
In his ruling, military judge Lt. Col. Michael Schrama wrote that statements made by Mohammed to investigators in 2007 were not given voluntarily. The ruling could complicate what has been a decades-long wait for the suspected plotter to stand trial.
Apparently, the mastermind of 9/11 deserves more procedural tenderness than the people who jumped from the 90th floor ever got. The ruling centers on enhanced interrogation techniques used at Guantánamo – methods employed in the desperate aftermath of the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
Look, I understand the legal complexities. I do. But there is something deeply grotesque about a process that has spent over two decades agonizing over the rights of a mass murderer while the families of his victims grow old waiting for something – anything – that resembles closure.
A system that protects the guilty
The military tribunal system was supposed to be the answer. A streamlined path to justice for enemy combatants who didn’t fit neatly into civilian courts. Instead, it became a labyrinth of legal challenges, bureaucratic paralysis, and institutional cowardice. How does a system designed for swift military justice take longer than the war it was created to address?
Meanwhile, the cultural forgetting accelerates. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently instructed its staff not to refer to 9/11 as “terrorist attacks.” You cannot make this up. The world moves on. The legal system shrugs. And the families wait.
What we owe the dead
I was old enough to remember the ash falling. The phone calls that never came. The flags that appeared on every porch in every town in this country, because for one terrible, clarifying moment, we all understood what mattered.
Twenty-five years later, we can’t even get a trial.
The system failed those families again on Friday. The lawyers will file their motions, the hearings will be rescheduled, and the calendar will keep turning. But the rest of us – the ones who remember – owe the dead something the courts apparently cannot deliver: the simple, stubborn refusal to forget what was done to this country, and who did it.
Justice delayed this long isn’t justice at all. It’s abandonment.
Key Takeaways
- A military judge threw out the 9/11 mastermind’s confession after 23 years of delays.
- The ruling prioritizes a terrorist’s procedural rights over justice for nearly 3,000 victims.
- The Guantánamo tribunal system has become a bureaucratic failure spanning multiple administrations.
- Americans owe it to the dead to demand accountability, not endless legal paralysis.
Sources: Fox News
