GUANTANAMO BAY — FBI agent Frank Pellegrino sat down with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the American naval base in Cuba in January 2007 believing he had been given a straightforward task: interview a man who had already told the CIA everything he knew, through methods that would not pass legal scrutiny, and try again the right way. He read Mohammed his Miranda rights. He conducted the session without threats. “I couldn’t have told him in any more explicit a way that he did not have to talk to me,” Pellegrino said later under oath.
A military judge has ruled that none of it was enough.
Lt. Col. Michael Schrama suppressed the confession on Friday, finding that the CIA’s years of psychological conditioning and coercion had been so thorough that nothing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said afterward could be treated as voluntary. “The prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammad’s statements to the FBI were voluntarily given,” Schrama wrote. His ruling described what the CIA had done as an “unbroken continuation” of severe psychological conditioning and coercion, as CBS News reported.
The ruling lands two weeks before the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001. Mohammed is accused of masterminding the attacks that killed nearly three thousand people that day. A trial against him and three co-defendants is scheduled for June 5, 2028, at the naval base in Cuba. The path to that trial has narrowed.
Mohammed was captured in March 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and held in a network of CIA black sites before his transfer to Guantanamo in 2006, subjected during that period to waterboarding and other techniques that courts have designated as torture. Statements he gave during CIA custody were already excluded from evidence years before Friday’s ruling. Schrama extended that exclusion to the 2007 FBI interrogation, finding also that Mohammed had not been given a Miranda warning and had been denied access to legal counsel before speaking to Pellegrino. The contamination zone, as the judge’s ruling establishes it, reaches forward from the black sites to everything that followed.
Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, the chief prosecutor, said his office would “make a decision on whether to appeal in the near future.” An appeal would extend a prosecution already stretching across decades.
A plea agreement that would have removed the death penalty as a possible sentence was withdrawn last year, after families of September 11 victims objected to any outcome that did not preserve the possibility of execution. With the plea deal gone and now a central interrogation suppressed, the prosecution is working with what remains. The case carries a substantial archive of intercepted communications, physical evidence, and witness testimony developed independently of the suppressed sessions, but prosecutors have not specified publicly how much of that record can sustain the charges on its own. Whether what survives the suppression is sufficient for conviction, the military commission has not indicated. TRT World reported that the court made no immediate comment on the ruling’s scope.
International courts have moved faster on analogous accountability questions. A Syrian court sentenced Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia for war crimes and torture earlier this month, after his government fell and victims gained access to formal legal redress. Turkiye’s formal Interpol request for Netanyahu over genocide charges related to the flotilla attack moved through official channels in weeks. The 9/11 military commission has had the accused in custody, in its own facility, for more than two decades.
The post-September 11 wars that Mohammed’s attacks triggered killed more than 4.5 million people in total, including over 930,000 from direct combat violence, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University. No completed trial has emerged from the chain of legal proceedings meant to answer for the attacks that set those wars in motion.
The ruling can be appealed. The trial date can hold or slip again. Mohammed’s attorneys may seek additional exclusions. The classified annex of Schrama’s decision has not been released, and the public has no view into what evidence the prosecution retains.
What Judge Schrama’s ruling does establish, on the record, is that the CIA’s treatment of Mohammed was coercive enough to reach forward through time and infect an FBI interrogation conducted a full year after that treatment formally ended. It does not resolve whether, twenty-five years after the attacks, the American justice system retains what it needs to hold anyone accountable for them.
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