Military judge throws out confession from alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
A military judge has thrown out the confession that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, gave to FBI agents nearly 20 years ago, CBS News has learned, ruling that it was not given voluntarily.
In a Friday order that has not been publicly released, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama suppressed Mohammed's statements from four days of FBI interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2007. The judge found that Mohammed's earlier CIA detention and interrogation had left him with a genuine fear of severe mistreatment if he did not cooperate. Schrama also determined that Mohammed was not read a Miranda warning and was told he could not speak with a lawyer.
The decision is a setback for the government's long-delayed prosecution of Mohammed, who is charged with helping develop the plot to crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people. Mohammed has been held at Guantanamo Bay along with several other defendants awaiting trial, and Schrama earlier this week scheduled a trial for Mohammed and three co-defendants for June 2028.
Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and held by the CIA, where interrogators subjected him to waterboarding and other techniques widely viewed as torture. Those conditions later became central to defense arguments that any statements he made, including those to a separate FBI team, were tainted by the coercion he had already endured.
The ruling could complicate the military commission case, and prosecutors may now have to weigh an appeal. The prosecutor in Mohammed's case, Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, told The New York Times that the government would “make a decision on whether to appeal in the near future.”
Retired FBI agent Frank Pellegrino, who interviewed Mohammed in 2007, said he believed the confession was voluntary. “I couldn't have told him in any more explicit a way that he did not have to talk to me,” Pellegrino told CBS News. “Now, whether that fits within what is required legally, based on other activities, a court's got to decide that.”
Pellegrino and another former agent, Brian Antol, are featured in the upcoming CBS special “Daughters of 9/11,” which is set to premiere Sept. 11, 2026, on CBS and Paramount+.
If convicted in military court proceedings, Mohammed could face the death penalty. He and two other defendants had reached plea deals in 2024 that would have spared them from capital punishment, but an appeals court tossed out those agreements last year after then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who served under President Biden, overruled them.