The populist mob is in a predictable uproar this week after Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, the military judge overseeing the 9/11 conspiracy case, set a trial date of June 2028. Prosecutors, seemingly poisoned by the instant-gratification culture of TikTok and Amazon Prime, had publicly demanded an earlier start.
Say what you will about the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, but they refuse to bow to the 24-hour news cycle. In an era where the public demands immediate answers, it takes profound institutional courage to look at the most significant terrorist attack in American history and declare that we will get around to prosecuting it sometime during the next Summer Olympics.
I recently sat on a panel at the Aspen Institute titled The Jurisprudence of Patience, alongside a retired defense contractor and a former drone-strike ethicist. The consensus among the serious adults in the room was clear: a 27-year turnaround for a capital murder trial is actually a blistering pace when you factor in the sheer volume of federal red tape. Yet the partisan commentators continue to howl, demanding that we hastily throw together a tribunal just because the defendants are graying, the victims’ families are passing away, and the original crime occurred when Blockbuster Video was still a viable enterprise.
We must resist this dangerous rush to judgment. A trial of this magnitude requires a delicate, artisanal approach to the law, one that cannot be hurried simply because linear time continues its relentless march.
Consider the logistical realities that the armchair legal scholars on Capitol Hill deliberately ignore. The prosecution has been asked to review thousands of hours of evidence, much of which remains highly classified. Furthermore, Col. McCall has not yet ruled on several complex pretrial motions regarding the defendants' extended stay in various C.I.A. black sites.
These are not minor procedural hiccups. The defense has raised tedious, albeit legally necessary, questions about whether being waterboarded 183 times in a single month constitutes a coercive interrogation environment. Determining the admissibility of confessions obtained while a suspect was confined to a coffin-sized box requires careful constitutional scholarship, not a rushed Friday afternoon ruling just to appease a public hungry for closure.
Over a dry-aged ribeye at The Capital Grille with a source close to leadership at the Department of Defense, I was granted some necessary perspective. The Pentagon is currently facing a massive backlog of entirely avoidable legal crises, and moving the 9/11 trial up to 2026 would cause a catastrophic scheduling conflict with their ongoing efforts to politely lose track of billions in overseas accounting errors.
If we rush to trial a mere quarter-century after the fact, we risk setting a dangerous precedent that the United States military can be pressured by the concept of human mortality.
The impatience of the prosecutors is particularly galling. They argue that waiting until 2028 risks the loss of key witnesses to natural causes. What they fail to appreciate is that witness attrition is a feature, not a bug, of our robust adversarial system. A witness who has passed away of old age cannot be cross-examined, thereby streamlining the proceedings significantly. We should be applauding this natural efficiency, not complaining about it.
Then there is the matter of the courtroom itself. Camp Justice at Guantánamo Bay was constructed at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars nearly two decades ago. Because the wheels of justice have turned with such dignified lethargy, the facility now qualifies for historical preservation status before ever hosting its first actual trial. Rushing a proceeding into a legally protected heritage site requires environmental impact studies, architectural reviews, and a new round of congressional funding just to replace the 2008-era dial-up internet routers.
I am told by a senior aide on K Street that the defense attorneys are equally ill-prepared for a hasty 2028 start. The original generation of military defense lawyers assigned to this case have all honorably retired and are now collecting pensions. The current crop of attorneys handling the motions were in elementary school when the towers fell. They need time to acclimate to the island’s humidity, familiarize themselves with the base’s surprisingly decent scuba diving program, and read through two million pages of heavily redacted C.I.A. transcripts where the word torture has been algorithmically replaced with the phrase vigorous data extraction.
You have to understand the sheer volume of paperwork involved when you spend four years hanging men from the ceiling by their wrists. We need at least until the end of the decade just to find the requisition forms for the chains.
The intelligence community's position is entirely reasonable. The agency has been remarkably transparent about its desire to keep the details of its enhanced interrogation program completely secret forever. Forcing them to produce evidence by 2028 places an undue burden on an apparatus that is currently very busy monitoring the group chats of domestic climate activists. We cannot ask our brave operatives to multitask.
Furthermore, if we accelerate this process, what message does it send to future generations of international terrorists? It tells them that if they attack the United States, we will quickly and efficiently bring them to justice within a reasonable timeframe, denying them the prestige of a three-decade taxpayer-funded legal drama. By dragging this out until 2028, and inevitably delaying it again until 2032, we are demonstrating the terrifying, grinding endurance of the American bureaucratic state. There is no worse punishment than being trapped in pretrial discovery for thirty years.
When I floated this theory to a former cabinet secretary during a gala at the Kennedy Center last weekend, he agreed wholeheartedly, noting that the true strength of our republic lies in our ability to completely forget what we were angry about by the time the court date arrives.
The 2028 trial date is not a delay; it is a testament to the majesty of due process. And let us not forget that the trial is merely the beginning. Once the verdicts are rendered sometime in the mid-2030s, the mandatory appeals process will carry us safely into the 2050s.
By the time the final sentence is carried out, the primary defendants will be a localized collection of dust, and the prosecutors will be conducting their closing arguments via séance. That is not a failure of the system. That is the ultimate triumph of the American legal tradition: turning a clear-cut criminal act into a permanent, multi-generational federal jobs program.