Updated Aug. 29, 2026, 3:16 p.m. ET
A U.S. military judge has thrown out Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s 2007 confession to FBI agents about his alleged lead role in the 9/11 attacks, ruling that it wasn’t given voluntarily and can’t be used against him at trial.
The Aug. 28 ruling by the trial judge, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, throws yet another wrench into the long-running death penalty case on the eve of the 25th anniversary of America’s deadliest terrorist strike that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Last month, a U.S. appeals court refused to allow Mohammed and two of his co-defendants to plead guilty under earlier agreements that would have spared them the death penalty.
Military prosecutors have yet to say whether they will appeal the ruling, which would further delay a potential trial for Mohammed and three alleged co-conspirators. Earlier in the week, Schrama had set a trial date for June 2028.
The ruling strips prosecutors of what they have said is the centerpiece of their prosecution of Mohammed.
Mohammed, known informally as KSM, has on various occasions boasted about his role in orchestrating the coordinated series of suicide plane hijackings that took down the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. A third hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew members fought back.
Mohammed was described as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” in the 2004 report by the 9/11 Commission.
In April 2002, nearly a year before his capture, KSM invited al-Jazeera journalist Yosri Fouda to meet secretly with him and top aide Ramzi bin al-Shib in Pakistan, where they discussed the Tuesday morning attacks at length, Fouda would later report.
“Summoning every thread of experience and courage, I looked Khalid in the eye and asked: ‘Did you do it?'” Fouda wrote in a 2003 story after Mohammed’s capture in Pakistan, adding that the “reference to September 11 was implicit.”
“Khalid responded with little fanfare: ‘I am the head of the al-Qaeda military committee,’ he began, ‘and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation. And yes, we did it.’”
Mohammed made similar admissions to FBI agents over several days of interviews at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007.
But Schrama ruled that those statements were inadmissible because of how they were obtained.
KSM, a Pakistani engineer who went to college in the United States, was subjected to waterboarding and other brutal interrogation measures in secret CIA prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.
In his ruling, Schrama said military prosecutors had failed to prove that Mohammed’s 2007 statements were voluntarily given.
Prosecutors had already agreed to exclude statements that KSM had made during his time in CIA custody. But they were hoping that his admissions of guilt to a “clean team” of FBI agents – including one of the original case agents Frank Pellegrino – would be admissible.
Schrama concluded, however, that those later interrogations by the FBI were tainted by Mohammed’s earlier CIA treatment, in that he feared that he would be subjected to brutal interrogation tactics again if he refused to cooperate, the Times reported.
“Whether viewed as the unbroken continuation of the CIA’s psychological conditioning and severe coercion, or evaluated strictly on the inherently coercive conditions and deliberate denial of rights advisements during the January 2007 FBI LHM questioning itself, the Prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammed’s statements to the FBI were voluntarily given,” Schrama wrote.
Pellegrino, in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY on Aug. 29, confirmed the details of the judge’s ruling and said he disagreed with his conclusion that Mohammed’s confession wasn’t completely voluntary.
“We gave (KSM) every opportunity to say, ‘Listen, I don’t want to speak to you.’ And he made the decision. … He felt he wanted to go forward,” Pellegrino said.
“Listen, I’m not saying that the government hasn’t made mistakes along the way” in the case, including Mohammed’s treatment at the hands of the CIA before being taken to Guantanamo, Pellegrino added. “But (the judge) was clear in his ruling that it was based only on voluntariness … and my view has always has been that it was voluntary.”
The chief prosecutor, Rear Adm. Aaron Rugh, told The Times his team would review the decision before deciding whether to appeal.
The ruling comes days after Schrama ruled that Mohammed and three co-defendants – Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin ‘Atash, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali – will stand trial starting on June 5, 2028.
For the past 14 years, the military commission proceedings have been delayed repeatedly by disputes over the defendants’ treatment in CIA custody and the admissibility of evidence gathered against them.
Prosecutors had appeared to secure a major victory in the case in July 2024 when Mohammed, bin ‘Atash and Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for sparing their lives.
The agreement had been accepted by an official overseeing the Pentagon’s Guantanamo war tribunal. But within days, it was revoked by President Joe Biden’s then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin after criticism from Republican lawmakers.
Mohammed remains the most well-known inmate at the Guantanamo detention facility, which was set up in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush to house foreign militant suspects after the 9/11 attacks.
Josh Meyer is the co-author of the 2012 book, “The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”
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