PT Cosponsors: America’s Trial: Torture and the 9/11 Case on Guantanamo Bay: A Book Release and Discussion

September 18th, 2025

https://services.nycbar.org/EventDetail?EventKey=MVA091825

“I wonder how they’re going to handle the torture matter,” Peaceful Tomorrows (PT) member Terry Rockefeller said to her husband, Bill in May 2012. At the time, they were viewing the arraignment of the five men accused of planning and supporting the 9/11 terrorist attacks on closed-circuit TV that was provided for 9/11 victim family members at Ft. Devens in Massachusetts. Another family member there to watch the arraignment, who was not a member of PT overheard and asked, “Do you really think it will matter?”

How deeply it mattered was amply demonstrated during a discussion on Thursday evening, 18 September 2025, at the New York City Bar Association on 44 th Street in Manhattan. About 100 people gathered to hear what Terry and John Ryan (an award-winning journalist and founder of lawdragon.com) had to say about John’s new book, America’s trial: torture and the 9/11 case on Guantánamo Bay.

Karen Greenberg, a Future Security Fellow with the New America Foundation, served as moderator. The discussion was organized by Terry, Colleen Kelly (PT co-founder), and Julie Jetton, co-chair of the Association’s Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. Co-sponsors of the event were the Association’s International Human Rights Committee, and September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

What Terry knew and articulated instinctively close to a decade ago, John laid out in systematic, painstaking detail, across more than 400 pages in his brilliant volume. “The inadmissibility of the confessions [due to torture],” he explained during the discussion, “is the issue.” Bush Administration lawyers, pushed by persons like David Addington (V.P. Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, 2005-2009) and Cheney himself, of course, had set the stage for the legal quagmire, constructing justifications for torture defined as “enhanced interrogation” techniques. But the turning point, John insisted, came when the FBI and CIA were talking to those who had been held in other countries at the so-called “black sites,” where prisoners had been subjected to brutal psychological and physical torture hidden from the public eye, but with the full cooperation of the U.S. government. The U.S. government’s attempt to assert that later FBI interrogations without torture could result in “clean” confessions confirming what was coerced through torture became, as John explained, “a dispute between due process and national security.”

Karen Greenberg asked him about the standard government narrative that when torture was apparent in CIA interrogations, FBI personnel pulled out of the operation. John said, “it got a lot more complicated,” as “a number of FBI agents were detailed to black sites and effectively became CIA interrogators for a time.” Terry quickly added another complication: “and there was a blacksite at Guantánamo, too.” A portion of the detention center there was used by the CIA as a blacksite in 2003-2004. Some of those being subjected to later, so-called “clean” re-interrogations there recognized their surroundings, further undermining the argument that the confessions were not tainted by torture or coercion.

John and Terry discussed the on-again-off-again plea bargain arrangements for the five

remaining 9/11 prisoners at Guantánamo who have been charged. The idea was to eliminate the death penalty through guilty pleas after stipulations of fact about the involvement of each of the accused in the attacks. They would also be required to give answers to the questions posed by 9/11 family members. John indicated that some in the Biden Administration did not want the plea bargains to go forward, even before the Secretary of Defense [Lloyd Austin] acted to scupper the deals. Those deals, Terry explained, “the judge and the military commission both said were valid.” Prosecuting attorneys, she added, “said they got everything they wanted, except the death penalty.”

John reminded the audience of a fact likely little-known among the American public: the “plea deals and even the negotiations [for them] were started by [members of] the

prosecution,” not the defense. The prosecutors too, apparently, knew the impossibility not just of securing the death penalty, but of any conviction that would stand up to appeals, due to torture and coercion of defendants and witnesses.

Terry candidly discussed the bitterly competing narratives in her own heart. “My sister was

murdered,” she said, “and I wanted a federal trial.” That’s the first narrative. But now, she

continued, “Khalid Sheik Mohammed is very possibly going to die an ‘innocent’ man. My

government made the trial impossible.” She then closed the session with perhaps the most

remarkable statement of all. “About ten years ago,” she explained, “Peaceful Tomorrows got a bunch of new members: children and grandchildren of those who were killed on 9/11.” And they are, she added, “overwhelmingly more concerned about the torture conducted in their names than about the painful realities they faced since they were toddlers. They believe in accountability.”

The audience on the 18th was treated to an informative and erudite, but gut-wrenching colloquy. The New York City Bar Association plans to make a recording of the discussion available soon. In the meantime, there’s always John’s book, not to mention Terry’s stories and insights.

William V. Hudon

Chair of Friends of Peaceful Tomorrows

Written 21 September 2025

International Day of Peace