A military judge on Friday threw out a key confession made by the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks — in a major blow to the feds that could derail the already long-delayed case.
Head plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s 2007 statements made to FBI investigators were not voluntarily given, trial judge Lt. Col. Michael Schrama wrote in a bombshell ruling.
The US military did not make the decision public — citing a “security review” — but sources familiar with its contents said the judge axed Mohammed’s confessions from the case in the ruling, saying the admitted terrorist was subject to “severe coercion” from FBI agents.
“The prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammad’s statements to the F.B.I. were voluntarily given,” Schrama concluded, according to the sources.
The decision comes just days after Schrama set Mohammed’s trial for June 2028 — with the 25th anniversary of the world-altering Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, looming in two weeks.
The head military prosecutor overseeing the case, Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, said that he would review the ruling and “make a decision on whether to appeal in the near future.”
An appeal could threaten to delay the long-simmering case yet again, as appeals of similar rulings have taken years to work their way through various courts.
Victims’ families have long feared that Mohammed and his alleged fellow 9/11 plotters could die behind bars at Guantánamo Bay before being found guilty in a court of law. --->READ MORE HERE
FBI agents also didn't tell the Al Qaeda leader he could call a lawyer.
Using the Article III system to try Al Qaeda terrorists was a reasonable solution, the trouble is that military tribunal personnel in this century look nothing like the guys who took a smoke break and sentenced Nazi saboteurs to death during WWII. Their ideal is A Few Good Men, they’re liberals if not outright leftists, and they’re far more likely to be on the side of the terrorists than to be on our side.
The few Islamic terrorists whom Obama and Biden didn’t free from Gitmo were protected by the military judicial system which dragged out the whole thing endlessly, tried to cut a sweetheart deal and now has managed to throw out the confession by the mastermind of 9/11.
We knew what we were getting when Michael Schrama showed up.
Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama was a 19-year-old undergrad at Georgetown University when hijacked plane American Airlines 77 crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, about four miles from campus. That’s a day that the military judge, now in his mid-40s, recalled as “surreal” during his brief voir dire on Monday in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom. Schrama also remembered feeling bad for the victims but said he was “not personally impacted” by the attacks.
“There is nothing about that day that I believe would affect my ability to be impartial in this case,” Schrama, who joined the JAG Corps in 2009, said.
No normal American can be impartial in that regard. Schrama presumably genuinely doesn’t care about 9/11. I suspect he’s quite against Gitmo however and it didn’t take him long to show it.
In a major blow to the U.S. case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, a military judge ruled on Friday that the prisoner’s confessions to F.B.I. agents were not voluntary and cannot be used against him at trial. --->READ MORE HERE
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