Because of Dick Cheney’s sweet-tooth for torturing people and the eagerness of his underlings to satisfy it, the legal proceedings against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, has become an extended farce. KSM has been imprisoned at Guantánamo for 20 years. Now they're saying he will go on trial before a military commission ... two years from now.
What a mess this has turned out to be. In 2024, KSM and two other suspects struck a deal with the military authorities by which the death penalty would be taken off the table. Then-secretary of defense Lloyd Austin squashed that arrangement.
A military court ruled that Austin did not have the right to do so, but a civilian court reversed that decision, so the three suspects appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which this week ruled in favor of the government. This allows the government to keep the death penalty on the table for KSM and his two fellow defendants. So much of this protracted exercise was directly tied to the fact that the Bush administration made this a country that tortured people.
In August, a judge ruled that, in any future proceeding, the government cannot use the transcripts of FBI interrogations of KSM. From PBS: We also can blame cowardly Republican politicians, especially the late Senator Lindsey Graham, for resisting any plan to try KSM in an American civilian courtroom.
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