Twenty-Five Years and No Trial: the 9/11 Case at Guantanamo, More Dead From the Dust Than From the Day, and a Deadline That Closes Today

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Friday, September 11th, 2026. 25 years ago this morning, 2,977 people were killed in New York at the Pentagon and in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. You do not need me to describe that day. You have seen it. Many of you lived it. We are not going to play any audio from that morning on this show, and we are not going to walk you through how anyone died. What we are going to do is the thing this show does, which is follow the law. Because the legal story of September 11th is almost never told, and it is genuinely astonishing. Here is the shape of it. 25 years later, nobody has been tried for it. Not one person.

1:00 The case against the men accused of planning it has been sitting in a courtroom at Guantanamo Bay since 2008, and two weeks ago, a judge finally set a trial date, June of 2028. Meanwhile, more people have now died of illnesses caused by that morning than died on that morning. Last year was the worst year yet for those deaths, and it was worse than the year before it. And the families are still in court. A lawsuit they filed against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been going since 2002. 24 years. It is being argued in front of a federal appeals court next month. 25 years, three legal stories, not one of them is finished. Let me start with a number that I had to check three times before I believed it. June 2nd, 2028. That is the trial date a military judge entered two weeks ago on August 31st for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three co-defendants at Guantanamo Bay.

2:04 If that trial actually happens on that date, it will begin 26 years and nine months after the attacks. It will begin 20 years after these men were first charged. How does that happen? It happens like this. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in March of 2003. He and his co-defendants were held for years in secret CIA facilities. What was done to them there is not in dispute anymore, and I am going to be blunt about it because it is the load-bearing fact in this entire segment. They were tortured. The government has acknowledged the program. A Senate committee documented it. That single fact has consumed 20 years of litigation. Because when you torture a defendant, everything he said afterward becomes legally radioactive. Was a statement made to the FBI in 2007 a fresh voluntary statement? Or was it the fruit of what happened in a black site four years earlier? That question has to be answered for every piece of evidence. And answering it requires litigating what was done, which requires declassifying what was done, which the government has fought for two decades. So the case never moved.

3:09 And I want to give you a sense of the scale of that. Because pretrial hearings is a phrase that sounds procedural and small. There have been dozens of sessions. Judges have rotated on and off the case. The June 2028 order comes from at least the fourth or fifth judge to hold it. Lawyers have retired. One defense attorney was replaced after being appointed to the bench. Witnesses have died. The courtroom itself is a converted building on a naval base in Cuba, and everyone involved has to fly there. Meanwhile, the men have been in custody for more than 20 years, which is longer than many people convicted of murder in this country actually serve. The men were arraigned in 2008.

3:53 Charges were withdrawn and refiled. They were arraigned again in 2012. And then 13 years of pretrial hearings, which is not a typo. One defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shib, was severed from the case entirely in 2023 after a military judge found him not competent to stand trial. The reason he is not competent is what was done to him in custody. Read that again slowly. The United States government's treatment of a defendant made that defendant unfit to be tried by the United States government. Then, in the summer of 2024, something finally broke. On July 31st, the senior official overseeing the military commissions, a retired brigadier general named Susan Escalier, signed pretrial agreements with three of the men. Mohammed, Walid bin Atash, and Mustafa Al-Hausawi. The terms were reported as guilty pleas in exchange for life sentences, taking the death penalty off the table. Letters went out to the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed. Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin withdrew from all three agreements. He wrote that given the significance of the decision, responsibility for it should rest with him. And here is where it becomes a genuinely fascinating legal fight, because the question was no longer about terrorism. It was about whether a cabinet secretary can reach into a prosecution after a deal is signed and unsign it. In November of 2024, the military judge, Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall, ruled that Austin had the

5:24 authority to supervise the process, but not to rescind agreements that had already been executed. The deals were valid. The Court of Military Commission Review agreed. The government appealed to a federal appeals court in Washington. And last year, that court reversed. The pleas were vacated. The death penalty is back on the table. So after all of that, a new judge, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, has set the case for trial in June of 2028. Now, I want to be careful and fair here because there are people who will hear this segment as an argument for one political side, and it is not. The families of the people killed that day are not of one mind about any of it. When the plea agreements were announced, some families were relieved that this would finally end, that there would be an accounting, that they would not have to wait another decade. Other families were furious and said a plea deal robbed them of a trial and of the possibility of a death sentence for the men who planned the murder of their husbands and daughters and parents.

6:27 Both of those reactions are entirely legitimate. There is no correct way to feel about a case that has taken a quarter of a century. But here is what I think is not up for debate. The deadliest crime ever committed on American soil has never been tried. The victim's families are now 25 years older. Some of the people who lost children that day have died waiting. And the reason it never got tried is not that the evidence was thin or the defendants were clever. It is that the government tortured the defendants and then spent 20 years litigating the consequences of having done it. That's not a mistake. That's a choice. It was made in 2003 and every family still waiting is paying the interest on it. 2,977 people were killed that morning. Someone has to say that number out loud and someone has to say that no court has yet returned a verdict about it. When we come back, the number of people killed by that day has passed the number killed on that day. This is the part of the September 11th story that has become almost invisible, and it is the part with something you can actually act on today. When the towers came down, the collapse pulverized about 200,000 tons of steel, concrete, glass, asbestos, lead,

7:58 and everything that was inside two office buildings. That dust hung over lower Manhattan for months. Roughly 400,000 people breathed it. Firefighters and police officers and paramedics. Construction workers who dug through the pile. Office workers who went back. Residents. Teachers. Kids who went to school down there. Within a few years, they started getting sick, respiratory disease, digestive disease, and cancer in numbers that were not normal. Here is where that stands 25 years later. According to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, roughly 9,000 death claims have now been paid for people who died of conditions linked to the attacks. 9,000 against 2,977 on the day itself. More than three times as many people have now died from that morning as died during it. And it is not slowing down. Nearly 1,500 of those deaths were recorded in 2025 alone. That is the highest annual total yet. 25 years on, the deadliest year of the September 11th attacks so far was last year. Now, the legal history here is actually a good story, and I do not get to say that often. The original compensation fund closed in 2004, before most of these illnesses appeared.

9:19 For years, sick responders had essentially nothing. What existed instead was litigation, thousands of individual lawsuits going nowhere slowly. And I want to be precise about why that gap existed, because it was not an oversight. It was a design decision. The original fund was created within 11 days of the attacks, and it was fast, and it was generous, and it had a condition attached. If you took the money, you gave up your right to sue the airlines. That was the trade. Congress was protecting the aviation industry from being litigated out of existence. So the fund was built to close quickly. And it did. And it closed before anybody understood that the dust was going to kill people for the next quarter century. In 2010, Congress passed the James Zadroga 9-11 Health and Compensation Act. James Zadroga was a New York City police detective who worked the pile and died in 2006 at 34. The act created two things.

10:18 the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides monitoring and treatment, and it reopened the compensation fund. It was funded for five years. Then it had to be fought for again in 2015. Then again in 2019. That 2019 fight is the one people remember because of a hearing where a retired NYPD detective named Luis Alvarez, dying of colorectal cancer, testified before Congress the day before his 69th round of chemotherapy. He died three weeks later. The law that passed carries his name, along with James Zadroga's and that of a firefighter named Ray Pfeiffer. It authorized the fund through 2090 and funded it through 2092. The health program, though, was a different fight, and it kept needing money. Congress topped it up in 2022 and again in 2023, and this past February passed legislation to fully fund it. So the structure is finally more or less in place. 24 years after the fact. And now the practical thing, and this is why I wanted this segment on today of all days.

11:25 If you were in lower Manhattan on or after September 11th, 2001, and you have not registered, today may be your deadline. New York State's Registration for World Trade Center Rescue, Recovery, and Cleanup Service, the one that preserves your right to file a workers' compensation claim, has a deadline of September 11th, 2026. That is today. And eligibility is much broader than people assume. It is not just firefighters and police. It covers construction and cleanup workers, volunteers, and survivors, meaning people who lived, worked, went to school, or were present in the dust or the dust cloud in the covered area of lower Manhattan.

12:06 The federal programs are separate and their deadlines run much longer, into the 2090s. You do not need a lawyer to apply to either one, but the state registration closes today. So if you were down there, or your father was, or your aunt was, and nobody ever filled out a form, that is the thing to do this morning. Not this weekend. This morning. There's one more piece of this, and it is an ongoing legal fight that almost nobody covers. For years, advocates have been trying to obtain New York City's records about air quality in lower Manhattan in the weeks after the attacks. What did the city know, and when, about what people were breathing? Members of Congress asked for those documents in 2021. The city declined. It has continued to decline across two mayoral administrations. There is litigation, and there are reportedly settlement talks now. 25 years, and the question of what officials knew about that heir is still being fought over in a courtroom. I am not going to tell you what those records say because nobody outside city government has seen them. That is the entire point. There is a documented history here. Within days of the collapse, federal officials publicly said the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe. An inspector general later found that statement had gone out before there was data to support it.

13:29 People went back to work on that assurance. Some of them are dead now. And the city's own contemporaneous records about what it knew are still sitting in a filing cabinet somebody is fighting to keep closed. James Zadroga was 34. Ray Pfeiffer was 59. Luis Alvarez was 53. Roughly 9,000 more people have died the same way, and almost none of their names are known to anybody outside their own families. Someone has to say that they are still dying. When we come back, a lawsuit filed in 2002 is finally getting argued next month. Segment three, 24 years of one lawsuit.

14:17 In August of 2002, less than a year after the attacks, lawyers filed the first civil case on behalf of 500 survivors and family members. That case consolidated in the Southern District of New York under the caption NRE. Terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 is still going. 24 years. It is old enough to have graduated law school itself. The defendant that matters is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. The families allege that Saudi government employees knowingly provided support to two of the hijackers in California before the attacks. Saudi Arabia denies all of it. It has always denied it. And I want to be extremely clear about something before I go further.

15:04 Nothing in this case has been proven. There has been no trial and no finding of liability. Everything I am about to describe is an allegation that a court has said the families are entitled to try to prove. For most of those 24 years, the case was not about the facts at all. It was about whether it could be brought in the first place. Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, you generally cannot sue another country in an American court. That is not a loophole. It is a rule that exists because we do not want American officials hauled into foreign courts either. Saudi Arabia invoked it and courts dismissed the case. So the families went to Congress and in 2016, Congress passed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which carved out an exception for terrorism on American soil. President Obama vetoed it. Congress overrode the veto overwhelmingly in the only veto override of his presidency. That statute is the only reason this case exists, and it is worth remembering that it was controversial at the time for a reason that had nothing to do with sympathy.

16:13 Critics warned that stripping another country's immunity invites other countries to strip ours, and that American diplomats and service members could end up defendants in foreign courts. That concern was real, and it is still alive. Congress passed it anyway, 97 to 1 in the Senate, because several thousand families showed up and would not go away. It went back to the district court. There was discovery, including something that had reportedly never happened before. A federal court ordering senior officials of a foreign government, including members of the Saudi royal family, to sit for depositions. And in August of last year, Judge George Daniels denied Saudi Arabia's motion to dismiss and ruled that the case could proceed toward trial. In a lengthy decision, he wrote that a reasonable person could infer that two individuals had some knowledge they were assisting the hijackers, and that evidence suggested they were following instructions from senior officials at the Saudi embassy. Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the families whose father was killed in the World Trade Center, said afterward that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable. That ruling is now on appeal.

17:22 The Second Circuit has oral arguments scheduled for October 7th of this year. less than a month from today. Now, here is what I want to say about all of this, and it is the thread that runs through the whole show today. Every one of these three stories is about the same thing. The law is extraordinarily good at grinding and extraordinarily bad at finishing. A criminal case that cannot be tried because of what the government did to the defendants. A public health catastrophe that took 19 years to fund properly and where people are still dying faster each year. A civil case that needed an act of Congress and a veto override just to be allowed to start. And that is still arguing about whether it can go forward.

18:06 25 years. And on all three fronts, the honest answer to what happens next is, we will see. I'm not going to end this episode pretending that is fine. And I'm also not going to end it telling you the system is worthless. Because look at what those families did. They lost husbands and wives and children on a Tuesday morning, and then they got organized. They forced a compensation fund into existence. They forced a health program into existence. They stood in front of Congress, dying, and demanded it be funded. They got a federal statute passed over a presidential veto. They got Saudi princes ordered into depositions. That is not nothing.

18:46 That is one of the most sustained acts of civic pressure in modern American history, carried out by people who had every reason to go home and grieve in private. And they did it while sick. That is the part that gets me. Luis Alvarez testified to Congress the day before his 69th round of chemotherapy. He was not lobbying for himself. He knew he was going to die, and he did. He was lobbying for the next person. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. On September 11th, it turned out to have several thousand widows and orphans with very long memories. 2,977 people were killed 25 years ago this morning.

19:27 Roughly 9,000 more have died since, from the same day. And a number that nobody can count are still sick. Not one of them has yet seen a verdict. Someone has to say their names, and today there are far too many to say. So say the ones you know. That's the show for Friday, September 11th. We do not usually ask for anything at the end. besides a share and a comment. Today, one thing instead. If you or anybody you love was in Lower Manhattan on that day or in the months after, go look up the World Trade Center Health Program and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Both are federal, both are free to apply to, and you do not need a lawyer. And if you were part of the rescue, recovery, or cleanup, the New York State registration deadline is today. Somebody listening to this has an uncle who worked the pile for three weeks in 2001 and has never told a doctor about it. Go call him. We will be back Monday with the courts.

20:25 I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. This episode was recorded before September 11th, 2026, and describes the status of ongoing legal proceedings as of that time. Figures for the number of people killed on September 11th, 2001 vary slightly between official sources depending on whether the hijackers and later attributed deaths are counted. We have used 2,977. On the military commission case, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants have not been convicted of anything. They are charged and they are entitled to the presumption of innocence. The pretrial agreements described here were signed, withdrawn, reinstated by a military judge, and then vacated on appeal. And the case is now scheduled for trial in June of 2028. Trial dates in this case have moved before. Our reference to the treatment of the defendants in CIA custody reflects the United States government's own acknowledgement of that program and the findings of a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study. On the compensation and health programs, figures for death claims and enrollment come from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund's published statistics and reporting on them and are updated regularly, so the numbers we cite are approximate and current only as of recording. Eligibility rules and deadlines differ between the federal programs and New York State's registration, and nothing in this episode is legal advice. Anyone who thinks they may be eligible should contact the programs directly. they are free and

21:57 do not require an attorney. On the civil litigation, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia denies any involvement in the attacks and has never been found liable. The allegations described here are the plaintiff's claims. Judge Daniels' ruling permitted the case to proceed. It was not a finding that the allegations are true. That ruling is on appeal to the Second Circuit, with arguments scheduled for October 7, 2026. This episode discusses a mass casualty attack, terminal illness, and grief. Support is available for anyone affected by September 11th, including through the World Trade Center Health Program. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.