Accused 9/11 'mastermind' to stand trial in 2028

Twenty-seven years. That's how long it will have been since the towers fell by the time Khalid Sheikh Mohammed actually sees the inside of a courtroom for it. A kid born on September 12, 2001, will be turning 27 himself before a jury hears the case. There is no clean way to explain that delay to the families who buried people in 2001 and have now spent a quarter century waiting for a verdict that keeps sliding further out of reach.

Some of this delay is on the process itself, the endless pretrial fights over torture evidence, over whether statements obtained at black sites can be used, over who gets to see what classified material. Those are real legal questions and we don't dismiss them. But at some point the system has to ask whether it's actually pursuing justice or just perpetually managing a problem it doesn't know how to close out. Guantanamo was supposed to be a holding pen, not a permanent institution with its own generational timeline.

What's striking is how normal this has become. Nobody even reacts with shock anymore when another few years get tacked onto the calendar. That numbness is its own kind of failure. A country that can build a vaccine in under a year during a pandemic apparently cannot finish prosecuting the man who planned the deadliest attack on its own soil in living memory.

The victims' families deserve an actual endpoint, not another date that becomes another delay when 2028 rolls around and someone files a new motion. If the government believes it has the goods on Mohammed, and by all public accounts it does, then the obligation is to get this into a courtroom and get it done, not to let bureaucratic inertia do what defense lawyers couldn't.