Nearly 25 years after the September 11 attacks, the case against alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is losing the evidence prosecutors most wanted to use. A military judge’s ruling has excluded his FBI confessions, leaving a prosecution already slowed by years of litigation facing an even steeper climb.

From the conservative perspective, the decision is a direct evidentiary blow. Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama ruled that Mohammed’s 2007 statements to FBI agents—and statements from later interrogations that year—were inadmissible. The judge wrote that “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.”¹ That finding does not end the case, but it removes testimony prosecutors had expected to present against a defendant accused of helping orchestrate the attacks.

The liberal framing emphasizes a different failure: not merely the loss of evidence, but the extraordinary delay surrounding the proceedings. CBS News reported that Mohammed’s trial is now set for June 2028, nearly a quarter-century after 9/11, and described the ruling as “a major obstacle” to bringing him to justice.² The report also notes that the FBI agents involved in the interrogations appear in an upcoming CBS documentary, placing renewed public attention on the government’s treatment of Mohammed at Guantanamo Bay.

The perspectives converge on the ruling’s significance but diverge in emphasis. One treats it chiefly as a tactical defeat for prosecutors; the other sees it as evidence of a broader institutional breakdown. Either way, the decision underscores the central contradiction of the case: the government’s pursuit of accountability has been repeatedly complicated by the methods it used to obtain evidence.