Now-retired, Frank Pellegrino tells USA TODAY he believes a judge’s recent ruling throwing out KSM confession won’t derail the military tribunal case
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A military judge recently tossed out former al-Qaeda commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s 2007 confession that he masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that occurred 25 years ago this week. The FBI agent who took Mohammed’s confession says it complicates the long-running case, but that he’s hopeful that justice, someday, will prevail.
Now-retired FBI Special Agent Frank Pellegrino told USA TODAY in an exclusive series of interviews that the Aug. 28 ruling by the trial judge, Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, is a significant setback.
But Pellegrino, who first began tracking Mohammed in 1993, said Schrama’s decision hopefully won’t deny the American public a full public accounting of who is responsible for the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history,
Pellegrino, who spent a total of 14 years pursuing Mohammed before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, said the U.S.-educated Pakistani engineer known informally as KSM is clearly guilty based on his own statements to a “clean team” of FBI agents conducted long after their brutal CIA interrogations in controversial dark site prisons.
Pellegrino said the judge’s ruling “hurts,” as does the U.S. government’s subsequent decision not to appeal it.
Asked whether he believes the prosecution can go forward without KSM’s confession, he said, “We can get over it.”
Pellegrino says incarcerating Mohammed and four accused co-defendants at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, wasn’t the only goal of what has been, by far, America’s biggest and longest running terrorism case.
For the past 20 years, Mohammed and the four alleged accomplices have been sitting in a military brig as prosecutors and defense lawyers wrangle over what evidence is admissible at trial and other legal issues.
They’ll never be released, Pellegrino says, so in a sense they’ve already faced at least some measure of justice.
Without KSM’s confession, which Pellegrino personally elicited over days of questioning, prosecutors lack the centerpiece of their case, he said. But he believes there are other ways to bring in key evidence, including who selected, funded, trained and deployed the 19 suicide hijackers before they rammed commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon.
Will Mohammed stand trial?
Pellegrino isn’t sure whether Mohammed will end up being questioned on the stand about the sprawling plot, saying that is the subject of legal clashes along with many other aspects of the case. But he’s still hopeful the government will get its chance to lay out its evidence in open court, so the American public can finally get a full accounting of what happened on 9/11, and why.
“We owe it to the American people, we owe it to the victim’s families, to explain to everyone the information we have, how we got it and why they’re guilty,” Pellegrino told USA TODAY. “That’s where the justice comes from.”
Pellegrino, who prolonged his FBI retirement for years in the hopes of testifying against Mohammed in a military courtroom, said the public deserves to see the evidence painstakingly gathered against Mohammed and the others by an army of investigators and prosecutors over the past 25 years.
“We don’t arrest people in this country without reason and put them in jail,” he said. “Now let’s show everybody why they’re guilty.”
On Sept. 8, as the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, a U.S. official familiar with the case said the prosecution team does not plan to appeal Schrama’s ruling, in large part because it would further delay a trial that has already been delayed repeatedly over the years since Mohammed and the others were brought to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
The prosecution team is forbidden from discussing the case publicly or with reporters because of the potential adverse impact it would have on the case, the official said.
But like Pellegrino, prosecutors also are confident they can try Mohammed and the others, and win convictions, using other evidence amassed during the long run-up to the trial, said the official, who talked to USA TODAY on the condition of anonymity to discuss the case’s ongoing legal issues.
The Aug. 28 ruling came days after Schrama ruled that Mohammed and three codefendants – Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin ‘Atash, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali – would stand trial starting on June 5, 2028.
FBI agent Pellegrino disagrees with throwing KSM’s testimony out
Pellegrino told USA TODAY he disagrees with Schrama’s decision to throw out Mohammed’s confession because the judge believed it wasn’t fully voluntary.
“We gave (KSM) every opportunity to say, ‘Listen, I don’t want to speak to you.’ And he made the decision. … He felt he wanted to go forward,” Pellegrino said.
A prominent victims’ rights advocate, whose mother perished on the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, said the judge’s ruling − on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the attacks − just add to the families’ long list of frustrations over how long the process has taken.
“Tell me other families that have to wait 25 years to have the people accused of murdering their loved ones have a trial?” said Carie Lemack, co-founder of the Families of September 11, which has represented 1,500 family members of 9/11 victims.
Like Pellegrino, Lemack said the families are hoping a trial will finally allow them to see the details of the case the U.S. government has built using a combination of military and Justice Department investigators and prosecutors.
“We have been waiting for 25 years to get answers to questions that potentially a trial could provide us,” said Lemack, who has worked since 9/11 with terrorism victims around the globe, including as the co-founder of the Global Survivors Network.
“At the end of the day, what we want is justice for those who planned and plotted my Mom’s murder,” Lemack said, “and we want answers to questions, to know who they worked with and who helped them.”
What do KSM and his co-defendants say about their role in 9/11?
For more than two decades after their capture, the case has focused not on whether Mohammed and the four other men were guilty, but rather on defense claims that they were tortured, that evidence against them was inadmissible or that the military court lacks jurisdiction in the case.
Mohammed has on various occasions boasted about his role in orchestrating the coordinated series of suicide plane hijackings that took down the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
A fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew members fought back.
In April 2002, nearly a year before his capture, KSM invited al-Jazeera journalist Yosri Fouda to meet secretly with him and top aide Ramzi Bin al-Shibh in Pakistan, where they discussed the 9/11 attacks at length, Fouda would later report.
“Summoning every thread of experience and courage, I looked Khalid in the eye and asked: ‘Did you do it?'” Fouda wrote in a 2003 story after Mohammed’s capture in Pakistan, adding that the “reference to September 11 was implicit.”
“Khalid responded with little fanfare: ‘I am the head of the al-Qaeda military committee,’ he began, ‘and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation. And yes, we did it.’”
What does the public record show?
Mohammed was described as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks” in a report by the 9/11 Commission in 2004.
And Mohammed made similar admissions to Pellegrino over several days of interviews at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007, he told USA TODAY.
After those interrogations – which Pellegrino says were voluntary − Mohammed himself claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z” during a March 2007 CSRT hearing, along with a long list of other al-Qaeda plots and attacks.
In December 2008, he and his four defendants told a military judge they wanted to confess and plead guilty, embracing martyrdom and execution as opposed to contesting their guilt.
That effort collapsed, in part on procedural grounds but also because lawyers for Bin al-Shibh claimed he was not competent to stand trial due to his harsh treatment and torture while in U.S. custody.
The Obama administration tried to mount a Justice Department prosecution based out of the heavily fortified federal courthouse in Manhattan, where other al-Qaeda members have been tried and convicted.
But after then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009 that Mohammed and the others would be tried in Manhattan, Congress blocked that effort, resulting in the case being moved to the U.S. military base on the island of Cuba.
At their 2012 arraignment, the men either declined to enter pleas and were effectively registered as having plead not guilty. For the next decade or more, lawyers continued to fight over alleged CIA torture and whether their statements and other evidence were admissible.
More than 14 years of legal disputes and delays
For the past 14 years, the military commission proceedings have been delayed repeatedly by disputes over the defendants’ treatment in CIA custody and the admissibility of evidence gathered against them.
Bin al-Shibh was severed from the case in 2023 after a military medical panel found him incompetent to help with his defense.
Prosecutors had appeared to secure a major victory in the case in July 2024 when Mohammed, bin ‘Atash and Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for sparing their lives, according to a Pentagon letter to victims’ families obtained by USA TODAY at the time.
“These three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet, and to be later sentenced by a panel of military officers,” according to the letter from the Office of the Chief Prosecutor for Military Commissions.
The agreement had been accepted by an official overseeing the Pentagon’s Guantanamo war tribunal. But within days, it was revoked by President Joe Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, after criticism from Republican lawmakers.
Prosecutors already had agreed to exclude statements KSM made during his time in CIA custody. But they had hoped to be able to use his admissions of guilt to a “clean team” of FBI agents – including Pellegrino, who had been investigating KSM since 1993 for his suspected role in the first World Trade Center bombing case.
In his Aug. 28 decision, Schrama concluded, however, that those later interrogations by the FBI were tainted by Mohammed’s earlier CIA treatment because he feared he would be subjected to brutal interrogation tactics again if he refused to cooperate.
“Whether viewed as the unbroken continuation of the CIA’s psychological conditioning and severe coercion, or evaluated strictly on the inherently coercive conditions and deliberate denial of rights advisements during the January 2007 FBI LHM questioning itself, the Prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammed’s statements to the FBI were voluntarily given,” Schrama wrote.
On Sept. 4, the director of the Victim Witness Assistance Program for the tribunals wrote to the 9/11 families to say that the Office of the Chief Prosecutor of Military Commissions had decided not to appeal the judge’s decision after “taking into account that an appeal could jeopardize the hard-earned June 5, 2028, trial date and result in the severance of one of more of the Accused into separate trials.”
But the director, Danielle Reddan, also sought to assure the families that the case was moving forward, according to a copy of the email obtained by USA TODAY.
“The coming year will be incredibly active,” she wrote. “… We will continue to provide you with additional information and updates about this case as it becomes available.”
Josh Meyer is coauthor of the 2012 book “The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”