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A military judge has set June 5, 2028, as the trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the September 11 attacks, nearly 27 years after the hijackings.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: Mohammed, a Pakistani national who studied engineering in the US, is accused of selling Osama bin Laden on the idea of turning hijacked passenger jets into weapons and then training the men who flew them. He has said he planned the operation “from A-to-Z.” He was captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and moved to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006. He was charged with war crimes and murder in 2008 and arraigned in the current case in 2012. Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks. He is being tried alongside Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, among the last detainees at Guantanamo, where roughly 15 prisoners remain.

What’s going on now: Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, the fifth judge assigned to this case, rejected the Jan. 11, 2027, start date prosecutors wanted, calling it incompatible with the trial conduct order and pushing it nearly 17 months later. He said the earlier date left no room to work through what is still outstanding.

The road to get here has been long and ugly. A trial was scheduled for 2021 and canceled. Defense lawyers argue the delays trace to the government’s efforts to bury details of what was done to the detainees in secret CIA prisons before Guantanamo. A 2014 Senate report found the CIA waterboarded Mohammed 183 times, a process the report described as a series of near-drownings.

The most recent collapse involved a plea deal. Two years of talks produced an agreement, signed by a convening authority whom then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had appointed, giving Mohammed and two co-defendants life without parole, in exchange for guilty pleas and a promise to tell victims’ families whatever they still wanted to know.

Austin was reportedly blindsided and moved immediately to revoke it. A divided DC Circuit upheld him 2-1 in 2025. The majority wrote: “Having properly assumed the convening authority, the Secretary determined that the families and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out.”

This all comes as the 2028 date depends entirely on the case hitting every deadline between now and then, which it has never once done.