Judge Rules Out KSM’s 2007 FBI Statements — Here’s What That Actually Means

In January 2007, FBI agents sat down with the man accused of planning the September 11 attacks and questioned him for four days at Guantánamo Bay. Prosecutors wanted to use what he told them at trial. A military judge has now ruled they cannot.

That is the ruling. The more important question is why.

Who’s involved

The defendant is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — KSM, as he is usually called in coverage of the case. The government accuses him of planning the 9/11 attacks and is seeking the death penalty.

The judge is Lt. Col. Michael A. Schrama. On August 28, 2026, the Office of Military Commissions announced that Schrama had filed AE630BBBBBB, a ruling granting Mohammed’s motion to suppress his FBI Letterhead Memorandum statements because the government had not demonstrated, by a preponderance of the evidence, that they were voluntary.

The ruling came the same week Schrama issued an official trial scheduling order setting jury selection for June 5, 2028 — nearly twenty-seven years after the attacks.

Court filings spell his surname “Mohammad.” News coverage commonly uses “Mohammed.” We follow the news spelling here except when referring directly to a filing.

What happened in January 2007

Before the FBI questioned him, Mohammed had spent years in secret CIA custody. He was waterboarded and subjected to other coercive interrogation methods as part of the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s study of that program later placed those methods in the public record.

Then, in January 2007, FBI agents questioned Mohammed over four days at Guantánamo. The interviews were intended to create a new set of statements that prosecutors could use as evidence — statements obtained by conventional law-enforcement interviewers rather than by the CIA personnel who had interrogated him in secret custody.

Prosecutors argued that the separation mattered: different interrogators, different setting, different methods.

The defense argued that years of coercion did not reset simply because the interrogators changed.

The full opinion is still undergoing security review, so the judge’s detailed reasoning is not yet publicly available. But CBS News, which reviewed the ruling, reports that Schrama found the CIA’s treatment had conditioned Mohammed to fear severe mistreatment if he failed to cooperate. CBS also reports that Mohammed was not given a Miranda warning and was told he could not speak with a lawyer.

That is the finding: not that the FBI agents themselves tortured Mohammed in 2007, but that the effects of what came before had not disappeared. Under the military commission rules governing the motion, prosecutors carried the burden of proving voluntariness. Schrama ruled they had not met it.

This problem has been before the court for years

The January 2007 FBI interviews have been contested for a long time.

In 2018, military judge Col. James Pohl barred prosecutors from using the defendants’ FBI “clean team” statements — the label for interviews intended to create evidence legally separate from the CIA interrogations that came before them — after concluding that restrictions imposed on the defense prevented attorneys from adequately investigating the CIA detention and interrogation program needed to challenge the voluntariness of those later statements. That ruling did not decide voluntariness on the merits; it exposed how difficult it was to separate the 2007 interviews from the classified history that preceded them.

Then, in April 2025, a different military judge, Col. Matthew McCall, suppressed January 2007 FBI statements made by Mohammed’s nephew and co-defendant Ammar al-Baluchi. McCall found that prosecutors had not overcome the effects of al-Baluchi’s earlier treatment in CIA custody. His ruling examined concepts including learned helplessness, conditioning, and coordination between the FBI investigative process and CIA interrogations. The government appealed that decision.

Now Schrama has reached the same bottom-line result for Mohammed’s January 2007 FBI statements: the government failed to establish that they were voluntary.

Put together, the record is no longer a single disputed interrogation. It is a recurring evidentiary problem in the 9/11 prosecution: whether the government could create a legally independent set of statements after years of CIA detention and coercion.

Two different statements in 2007

The January FBI interviews are not the same proceeding as the statement most people associate with Mohammed’s “confession.”

Two months later, on March 10, 2007, Mohammed appeared before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal and declared that he was responsible for the 9/11 operation “from A to Z.” That was a separate proceeding.

Schrama’s August 2026 ruling concerns the January FBI Letterhead Memorandum statements. It does not decide the admissibility, reliability, or weight of Mohammed’s separate March tribunal statement.

The Commission faced a different — but connected — evidence problem

The new ruling also does not suppress anything used by the 9/11 Commission. The Commission completed its report in 2004, three years before the FBI interviews at issue here.

But the Commission’s account of the planning and execution of the attacks relied heavily on earlier detainee interrogation reporting, including reporting attributed to Mohammed.

The Commission said so itself.

In a boxed section titled “Detainee Interrogation Reports”, it explained that Chapters 5 and 7 relied heavily on information obtained from captured al-Qaeda members. Commission staff were not allowed to interview those detainees. They reviewed intelligence reports generated from the interrogation process, submitted questions for interrogators to ask, and were not permitted to speak directly with the interrogators to judge credibility or clarify ambiguities.

That means the Commission was evaluating important parts of the 9/11 narrative through an evidentiary chain it could not directly observe.

The Commission’s access problem went further

There was also evidence from the CIA interrogation program that the Commission never knew existed.

The CIA recorded 92 videotapes involving the detention and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. These were not recordings of Mohammed. In November 2005, after the 9/11 Commission had completed its work, CIA officials destroyed the tapes. Declassified CIA records later documented the sequence leading to their destruction. The National Security Archive has published those records.

The connection to the Commission is direct.

During its investigation, the Commission had made repeated requests for intelligence obtained from detainees and for detailed information concerning interrogations, including those of Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. The CIA did not tell the Commission that videotapes existed.

When the destruction became public, Commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton wrote in their January 2, 2008 New York Times op-ed, “Stonewalled by the C.I.A.”, that those who knew about the recordings and failed to disclose them had “obstructed our investigation.”

911Truth.org preserved that history in 2009 in Report: much of 9/11 Commission, which also documented how heavily the Commission’s most important chapters relied on CIA interrogation reporting.

The tapes do not prove that information attributed to Mohammed or other detainees was false. Their destruction establishes something else: the Commission was asked to assess detainee-derived information without access to the detainees, without direct access to the interrogators, and without being told that recordings existed of interrogations it had specifically sought to understand.

Where the case stands

Jury selection is scheduled to begin in June 2028. Prosecutors are considering whether to appeal Schrama’s suppression ruling. An appeal could add another delay to a prosecution already defined by years of litigation over evidence, classified information, detention conditions, and the CIA interrogation program.

For now, the court’s finding is narrow but consequential: prosecutors cannot use Mohammed’s January 2007 FBI statements because they failed to show that those statements were voluntary.

But the new ruling joins a longer record showing why the provenance of detainee evidence matters. The Commission reconstructed major portions of the 9/11 plot from interrogation reporting while being denied direct access to the detainees and their interrogators. Years later, military judges are still determining how far the effects of that same detention and interrogation system reached.

The full ruling may tell us more.

911Truth.org is monitoring the Office of Military Commissions docket for the full text of AE630BBBBBB and will update this article when the ruling clears security review.

Continue through the record

Pathway 3 — The 9/11 Investigations: Corrections, Conflicts, and Unresolved Evidence →

From the archive

Report: much of 9/11 Commission · Staff · May 14, 2009

9-11 Facts You Have Never Heard: The Facts Speak for Themselves · Jon Gold · Updated May 6, 2010
See Fact #31 for the archive’s earlier treatment of detainee interrogation reporting and the Commission.