The case against the men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks briefly sputtered back to business this week, with three of the defendants declining to participate as they seek to reinstate a plea bargain to resolve the case with life sentences.
It was the first time in nearly a year that hearings in the case had been convened, with a new judge presiding. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the deadly attack, and his co-defendants Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi and their lawyers sat passively before the judge, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama.
To do otherwise, their lawyers said in both court filings and open court, could risk violating a plea agreement they reached in July 2024 with a senior Pentagon official to avert their death penalty trial. This summer, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declared the contract void in a 2-to-1 ruling. The men are appealing.
“I understand your current position,” said Colonel Schrama, who became the fifth judge to preside in the military commission case. The three men and a fourth defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, are accused of conspiring in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
Based on the little progress and ongoing appeals, there is little chance a trial could begin before the 25th anniversary of the attacks, or at all in 2026.
Guantánamo’s other and longest-running capital case, over the Qaeda bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole, has a start date of June 1. That judge has reserved the one courtroom with a jury box large enough to accommodate a death penalty trial through Dec. 11, 2026.
The Sept. 11 case has gone on so long that the latest judge, Colonel Schrama, entered the Air Force after Mr. Mohammed and the others made their first court appearance in a court of law, after years in secret C.I.A. prisons.
Colonel Schrama was a student on the campus of Georgetown University when hijackers crashed passenger planes into the Pentagon, about four miles away, as well as the World Trade Center and a field in Pennsylvania.
He said he remembered “the day being surreal.” He said he “felt bad for the people associated with the events of the day and for those who lost loved ones.”
But he said he could preside in the case with impartiality.
The only impact on him of the attack, he said, were “conditions that all people experienced, such as tighter security at the airport or street closures in Washington, D.C.”
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At Georgetown, Colonel Schrama was a starting defensive end on the school’s football team. The judge disclosed that an earlier Georgetown player, Joseph A. Eacobacci, 26, was killed in the attack, and one team member wears Mr. Eacobacci’s jersey number “as a remembrance.” The judge had not.
Mr. Eacobacci was a trader for the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald at the World Trade Center. He is the 772nd named victim of the attack on the military commission charge sheet that lists 2,976 victims.
Lawyers for Mr. Baluchi did participate in the proceedings by posing questions to the judge about his legal experience. Mr. Baluchi’s case is in a different posture because he never reached a plea agreement.
But a different appeal is proceeding in his case, this one by the prosecutors. In April, the previous judge suppressed confessions attributed to Mr. Baluchi, ruling that they were derived from torture and isolation during his years in secret C.I.A. detention.
In response to a question from Lt. Matthew Burns, a lawyer for Mr. Baluchi, Colonel Schrama said that he had no previous experience with death penalty cases but that a week earlier, he had attended a special course for judges on how to manage a capital case.
A fifth defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, had a separate court appearance on Wednesday with a different judge, Col. Thomas P. Hynes of the Army. Mr. bin al-Shibh’s case was severed from the others in 2023 after the findings of a military medical panel. The preceding trial judge declared him mentally unfit to face trial, a condition for which his lawyer blames his torture by the C.I.A.
Colonel Hynes has scheduled a hearing for Friday to begin addressing the question of whether the prisoner’s competency has been restored despite no intervening treatment.
The hearings were the first time since Guantánamo began holding two capital cases in 2012 that three judges presided in the same week.
Col. Matthew Fitzgerald, presiding in the Cole bombing case, used a small courtroom to hear from witnesses on hearsay testimony that prosecutors want to use at the trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Mr. al-Nashiri, a Saudi prisoner, is accused of orchestrating the suicide bombing that blew up the destroyer off Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, killing 17 U.S. sailors and wounding dozens of others.
He also heard testimony about the limits of health care at Guantánamo, a base of about 4,000 residents with a small hospital, and heard that it could take 10 to 30 hours to medically evacuate someone from the remote base in southeast Cuba.
At issue is whether he should be holding hearings with the defendant’s capital defense lawyer, Allison Miller, practicing from an annex in Crystal City, Va., rather than in the courtroom itself. She was diagnosed with a pulmonary thrombosis earlier this year and was advised against coming to the remote base in Cuba until her condition cleared. That could take many months.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
The post New Judges Take Charge of Sept. 11 Case at Guantánamo appeared first on New York Times.
