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Nov. 7th, 2024 Peaceful Tomorrows member, Elizabeth Miller, commented on Judge McCall ruling that plea agreements were valid for three defendants in the 9/11 case. To listen to the full interview, click here . See copied transcript below: ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Now some Guantanamo news - a judge has ruled that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other men charged with the September 11 terror attacks are allowed to plead guilty and spend life in prison rather than face a death-penalty trial. That's even though Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rescinded those plea deals a few months ago. NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer covers Guantanamo, and she's here to explain. Hey, Sacha. SACHA PFEIFFER, BYLINE: Hi, Ari. SHAPIRO: So has the defense secretary been overruled by a Guantanamo judge? PFEIFFER: Yes, he has. And this is part of a roller-coaster of a legal debate over how to resolve the 9/11 terrorism case, which has still not gone to trial more than two decades after those attacks. It's been gridlocked for years. So this summer, prosecutors and defense attorneys and the person who oversees the U.S. military court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - which is where this case is happening - they all agreed that plea deals or settlement agreements were the best way to end it. In other words, forget about trying to have a trial, which seems hopeless. Instead, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - the alleged mastermind of 9/11 - and his co-defendants would admit guilt and get life sentences. Those plea deals were announced in July. At first, it seemed like finally, finally, this never-ending case was going to end. But two days later, Secretary Austin reversed them. He says he was caught off-guard and thinks there should be a trial. And now a Guantanamo judge says Austin cannot do that retroactively, and the plea deals should go forward. SHAPIRO: But how can a judge at Guantanamo Bay have legal grounds to overrule a decision by his boss, the defense secretary? Like, doesn't Lloyd Austin have the final word in a military court? PFEIFFER: The judge says that Austin had already deputized the head of the military court to make plea deals if that person thought plea deals were the right thing to do. And the judge says, once Austin has delegated that authority, he cannot take it back just because he disagrees with the decision. The head of the military court is considered independent. It's meant to be immune from political pressure. So the judge says Austin acted beyond the scope of his authority and acted too late by trying to reverse the plea deals after they were already made. SHAPIRO: Well, this, as you said, has been going on more than 20 years. So can this judge's decision now be appealed? PFEIFFER: Potentially, but the Pentagon hasn't said yet how it plans to proceed. When the deals were announced, there was some outcry from members of Congress who thought the Biden administration was going soft on terrorists. But for now, the judge said he's going to move ahead with having KSM and those two other men enter guilty pleas. SHAPIRO: You mentioned the political pressure. Could this be wrapped up before President-elect Trump takes office? PFEIFFER: The judge has not given a timeline for taking guilty pleas, so Gitmo lawyers don't know yet whether this will happen before the inauguration. SHAPIRO: So many lives were affected on September 11. About 3,000 people were killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. What are you hearing from their family members? PFEIFFER: There is a group of family members angry about the plea deals because they want the 9/11 defendants put to death, and they think new secrets could come out at trial. There's another group that says, we understand how you feel, but going to trial seems so futile that plea deals are the only practical resolution. One family member I've interviewed many times, Elizabeth Miller, points out that the plea deals do require the defendants to answer questions about their planning of the attacks, and that could yield some of those secrets people hope for. Here is Miller. ELIZABETH MILLER: We will finally know the exact information of the who, what, where, when and why these men did what they did and how they did it. And I think that's something that's really important, that we should all be focusing on, that these plea agreements can give us. PFEIFFER: And Ari, for now, she says she's just hoping the plea deals will stick and that this long legal process will finally end. SHAPIRO: That is NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer. Thank you. PFEIFFER: You're welcome.

ON NOVEMBER 13 AT 7pm EST We are co-sponsoring an event with Reimagine and are featured on their website . Reimagine's mission is to help all people face adversity, loss, and mortality, and channel the hard parts of life into meaningful action and growth. The event on November 13 Let’s Learn: Catastrophe, Care, and Community will feature four speakers: our very own Elizabeth Miller, Jah D Amazi, Dr. Edith Shiro and Luis Gallardo. CLICK HERE to RSVP. To contact the webinar host please send an email to hello@letsreimagine.org . THE BATTLE OF MEMORY: The Contestations of Public and Familial Narratives in Remembering 9/11 is a paper Cheng-Yen Wu published in the Undergraduate Journal at Swarthmore College. Wu's research is inspired by material which reflects our work since 2002 and is located in the Swarthmore Peace Collection . CLICK HERE to read the paper. RULE OF LAW COMMITTEE: Status of Pre-Trial Agreements to be Argued in November;Judge Once Again Pushes Back Date of His Retirement The military judge in the 9/11 case instructed prosecution and defense lawyers to prepare to argue on the legality of the Secretary of Defense’s decision to revoke plea agreements reached with three of the 9/11 defendants, including 9/11 “mastermind,” Khalid Sheik Mohammed, this past summer. Arguments will begin on the first day of the next hearings, November 4, the day before the 2024 presidential election. So, the current judge will almost certainly rule on whether the 9/11 case proceeds, to a sentencing hearing for the three defendants, or whether the case continues on the old uncertain path, with no trial date set. Meanwhile, the current judge again extended his tenure on the bench and announced he would hear closing arguments, during the January hearings, on suppression—whether or not the confessions defendants made to the FBI can be used in a trial. Read more about the September and October 9/11 military commission HERE. A NEW FUNDRAISING OPPORTUNITY: The Copenhagen Half Marathon Next September Thanks to Peaceful Tomorrows' Fundraising Committee member Chanel, we’re excited to announce our participation in the Copenhagen Half Marathon in September 2025! We’ll be enlisting passionate runners to raise essential funds on our behalf. To make this opportunity possible, we need to prepay $1,815 in registration fees for 10 runners at $181.50 each. Each runner will commit to raising a minimum of $550, helping us reach a collective fundraising goal of $5,500 for Peaceful Tomorrows. This charity team fundraiser not only raises vital funds but also increases community awareness and engagement with our mission. If you’d like to support this project, please  CLICK HERE  to reach our office! Every contribution helps a runner get closer to the finish line and strengthens Peaceful Tomorrows’ impact. Thank you for standing with us!

The Battle Over Memory: The Contestations of Public and Familial Narratives in Remembering 9/11 by Cheng-Yen Wu at Swarthmore College Abstract: On September 11, 2001, the four plane crashes marked the three sites of trauma that, to this day, sit in the heart of United States history. The paper examines the contested and often conflicting public and familial narratives at sites of memory and the recurring themes behind commemoration narratives. Drawing on newsletter articles and seven interviews with members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and The Peace Abbey, the paper concludes that national and public remembrances of 9/11 adopted a top-down approach that has repressed familial remembrances in three main ways: by glorifying the victims, co-opting the version told of 9/11 stories, and erasing distinct voices that did not fit the national narrative. By contrast, familial remembrances of the victims built a bottom-up approach to memorialize 9/11 and its victims that valued the holistic representation of their lost loved ones in remembrances. To read the full paper:

Peaceful Tomorrows’ Members Seek to Understand an Increasingly Confusing Future in the 9/11 Case at GTMO Members of PT’s Rule of Law Committee have requested meetings with both the prosecution and the defense to understand new developments in the case against the men charged with planning and supporting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In July, proceedings against the 9/11 accused appeared to be approaching JUDICIAL FINALITY with news that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and two of his co-defendants had signed pre-trial agreements (PTAs), pleading guilty in exchange for life sentences rather than the death penalty. Then, Secretary of Defense Austin revoked the agreements encountering significant criticism. Two PT members traveled to the Guantanamo Naval Base in September, where the 9/11 hearings resumed focus on the long-standing issue of the impact of torture on the defendants’ “confessions” to FBI “clean teams.” Meanwhile, the judge called for briefs on the questionable legality of Sec. Austin's revocation of 3 pretrial agreements. Then recent news suggested that the death penalty may be off the table no matter what the status of the PTAs is, because prosecutors may be unable to reinstate a capital case. "Court itself happens on this old abandoned airstrip that's sort of pushed off to the side of the base, where everything goes on in these offices that they've built in what I can only describe as the most highly securitized temporary trailers you've ever seen. As an NGO observer, they put you in a tent to stay for the week. They're big tents, not pitched on the ground. But it's very obvious, when they were creating this complex that they didn't expect it to still be going on years and years later. I think they probably would have built more permanent structures. But it's a testament to just the lack of foresight that was going on." Aidan Salamone LISTEN TO THE ENTIRE WEBINAR: On September 12th, two members who were children on 9/11 offered their perspectives on the ongoing  pretrials  at Guantánamo and the many challenges of military commissions. More Guantánamo related webinars are currently being planned. You can watch the recording using the link and passcode below. https://jsi.zoom.us/rec/share/ .ErOra-RZnt-A9cR4 Passcode: b.F01cdU ANNUAL INTERFAITH PICNIC September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrow supports and co-sponsors the Palo Alto Interfaith Picnic organized by Samina Sundas of the American Muslim Voice Foundation . FROM OUR FUNDRAISING COMMITTEE: For over 20 years, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows has been working to make our world safer and more just: promoting nonviolence, creating dialogues and reaching out to others whose lives were touched by terrorism. Through our activism we have affected many lives and had an impact on policy.We find ourselves needing funds to bridge the gap after losing our underlying grant. Individual donations are needed more than at any time in our history. You can help us maintain our core functions while we continue our activism.

NEW WEBINAR ON SEPTEMBER 12:       You are invited to attend our next webinar when two of our second generation members discuss their recent and first trips to Guantánamo Bay as witnesses of the 9/11 pretrial hearings. Both, Chanel Shum and Aidan Salamone, who both lost their fathers in the attacks, will share their observations on their trips as well as their personal reflections on the dysfunctional Military Commissions process that is in its 13th year. The webinar will be moderated by Elizabeth Miller.       REGISTER IN ADVANCE and join the webinar on September 12, 2024 at 7pm by CLICKING HERE  or on the image to the left. The meeting passcode is 117281.   ********************************************************************************** A NEW PARTNERSHIP     We are thrilled beyond words to be chosen as partners in 2025 along with Doctors Without Borders , by the Scottish charity, DONT WALK  !     DONT WALK was established in 2001 by a group of international students at the University of St. Andrews who sought to respond to the harrowing attacks on 9/11 from thousands of miles away. It was founded on the principle of not walking past problems in society, but instead, taking action through bold artistic expression.     Their main goal is to make a positive impact on the world, stating that they refuse to remain complacent during times of discrimination, oppression and adversity. They do this by bringing together the most creative, passionate and provocative students on campus to create a platform for discussion and inspire positive action.     Each year the students work with fashion designers to present a runway show using bold artistic expression to attract sponsors and raise funds. Alexandra Rayner, the 22-year-old Head of Fashion, spends a year handpicking every designer, from streetwear and lingerie to the avant-garde. The end product is an incredibly diverse group of 26 designers, based everywhere from Hungary to Nigeria.   This partnership will give us the opportunity to talk about our advocacy to a wider audience, and share in the proceeds from their annual Charity Fashion Show!   This year’s gala event will take place on March 15, 2025. From Our Fundraising Committee:     We find ourselves at a critical point in our history.   For many years, Open Society Foundation (OSF), other foundations as well as family foundations, plus individual donors have very generously supported us, making our activism possible. Unfortunately, OSF has shifted its priorities, leaving us with enough from individual donors and the last Institute for Socioeconomic Studies grant to pay staff and office expenses through February 2025, when we celebrate our 23rd birthday.  This is why we are appealing to you now.   Individual donations are needed more than at any time in our history to bridge the gap while we strive to procure much needed funds. One-time donations or monthly support withdrawn automatically from your bank account will give us a foundation we can depend on to help us maintain our core functions and support our activism.      Be as generous as you can.

By Bill Tammeus Special to The Star September 10, 2023 5:03 AM When the 9/11 terrorists murdered my nephew, Karleton Fyfe, and nearly 3,000 other people 22 years ago this week, the families of victims had no immediate idea who had done it or why. In many ways, we still don’t. Once the plot leaders were captured (and sometimes tortured), we learned very little about what motivated them and who exactly did what. Today, the five plotters still held in the prison at Guantanamo Bay have yet to be brought to justice in a setting in which such questions could be resolved. My hope — and the hope of many 9/11 families, especially those of us connected with September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows — has been that plea bargains, called pretrial agreements, would provide answers by allowing the perpetrators to plead guilty and to describe their roles and motives in exchange for the removal of the death penalty as their punishment. That possibility seemed to edge closer and closer until a few days ago, when President Joe Biden elected not to go along with certain aspects of the agreements. As first reported by The New York Times, Biden “accepted a recommendation by the secretary of defense to decline the additional conditions” of the agreements. But, as Carol Rosenberg and Charlie Savage reported, “an offer by military prosecutors, made in March 2022, that would spare them death sentences if they admitted to their alleged roles in the hijackings, remains on the table.” Biden should find a way to get the plea deals done and should ignore such vengeful voices as that of Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, who, in one of his typical pro-death-penalty rants, declared that accepting plea deals “would have been outrageous.” Information about CIA torture still classified No. What’s outrageous is that after all this time the case still is in pretrial hearings. Mostly that’s because our government classified what’s known about how the defendants were tortured at so-called Central Intelligence Agency “black sites” before they were imprisoned at Gitmo. What’s outrageous is that people like Cruz imagine that the death penalty will solve anything or provide any answers about exactly what happened on 9/11 and why. What’s outrageous is that when I recently visited Karleton’s parents (my sister and her husband) and one of Karleton’s sisters and her children in the Boston area, our family still had received nothing that looks like justice for the spectacular death of a wise, loving, young husband, father, son, brother, nephew. . . Beyond that, the continued operation of the Gitmo prison has stained America’s soul. As I wrote recently on my “Faith Matters” blog, “What has happened — and continues to happen — at Guantanamo in our name as Americans has been a stream of flagrant violations of basic human rights and a repudiation of almost every good thing American citizens think our country stands for — the rule of law, basic human rights, humane treatment of prisoners, a rejection of torture as a tool and simple human decency.” pointed readers to a recently released report from a United Nations special investigator that described in horrifying detail what I called “the profound human rights violations that have occurred there and their reparable harms to the lives and health of the 780 Muslim men who have been detained there, including 30 men who remain.” Ted Cruz’s bloodthirsty howls only hurt What the world knows now about the 9/11 hijackings and the deaths that resulted is that a small group of men claiming to be followers of Islam followed, instead, a radically twisted version of that ancient and honorable religion that was spoon-fed to them by the late Osama bin Laden. But we deserve to know exactly who did what that malevolent day and why. Biden’s rejection of conditions for potential plea agreements is not helping. The bloodthirsty howls of Cruz and others just make things worse. Karleton’s widow, their two now-adult sons (one born some eight-plus months after his father’s death), other members of our family and thousands of other families deserve to know the detailed truth about why our people were murdered and who was responsible. Now. Not another 20-plus years from now when many of us also will be gone. Bill Tammeus, a former Kansas City Star columnist, now writes for Flatland, KCPT-TV’s digital magazine. His latest book is “Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9-11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.” Email him at wtammeus@gmail.com CLICK HERE to read the entire article.

By Barbara Miller Broadcast Sun 10 Sep 2023 at 5:00pm AUDIO HERE

Our member, Terry Kay Rockefeller, granted an insightful interview on the eve of September 11 on CNN, The source with Kaitlan Collins.

On May 16th, 2024, Serial Season Four aired their final episode. Episode 9 features Peaceful Tomorrows, specifically our advocacy and member Colleen Kelly's story and thoughts. The season explores the history of the Guantanamo Detention Center. Read the transcript below, or listen on Spotify , or directly on The New York Times website . Episode 9 — This Is the Weirdness The criminal case against the men accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks is the one aspect of Guantánamo that would seem to make sense – until you start watching it. Episode 9 Transcript This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. SPEAKER Previously on "Serial." RECORDING 1 It was a "ticket out of jail" card, basically. It's like, you can't put a person 50 years in prison and plus torture. Right? ARCHIVED RECORDING 2 So when you are tortured by someone who doesn't believe in torture, how can this guy who believes in human rights do this to me? ARCHIVED RECORDING 3 Well, it's exhausting because you're pretending. Everything is pretend. ARCHIVED RECORDING 4 That's what -- ARCHIVED RECORDING 3 We're in a play, and we're playing our part. ARCHIVED RECORDING 5 Everybody seems to think that the intelligence mission to Guantánamo was to build cases against these detainees for their continued detention. And I'm here to tell you that wasn't the friggin' mission. [MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH KOENIG From "Serial" Productions and "The New York Times," this is "Serial," season 4, Guantánamo, one prison camp told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. And this is our final episode. [MUSIC PLAYING] Every couple of weeks, at the bland hour of 5:00 PM on a Tuesday, a group of people you've never heard of clicks into a Zoom meeting. They're all family members of people who died on September 11. SPEAKER 1 Hi. SPEAKER 2 Hi, everyone. SPEAKER 3 Hi, everybody. SARAH KOENIG There's Colleen, a nurse practitioner in the Bronx, and Terry, a retired documentary filmmaker in Boston. Dianne, in Savannah, a retired ordained minister. Valerie, who used to work in nonprofits, and her omnipresent feline. VALERIE Trying to get the cat's tail out of my face. SARAH KOENIG Barry, a graphic designer in Oregon. BARRY Hey there. SARAH KOENIG Oh, Barry got a haircut. SARAH KOENIG And Phyllis, in New York, a retired teacher who recently turned 80. SPEAKER 4 You are not 80. PHYLLIS I know. I'm not. I'm not. SARAH KOENIG They've known each other a long time, many of them for a decade or more, through career changes and new grandchildren and health troubles. SPEAKER 5 Well, well, well. Yeah. What would we do without each other, huh? SPEAKER 6 Yeah. SARAH KOENIG The first meeting I sat in on, June of 2022, I assumed they'd be like a support group. Instead, the topic that day was the physical and mental well-being of the five men accused of orchestrating the attacks that killed their relatives. If the men don't get the death penalty -- and there's a very real possibility they won't -- what should the men's punishment be? SPEAKER 7 I think we're hearing that the 9/11 defendants don't want to leave Guantánamo. VALERIE No, because they think they're going to Florence, Colorado, which is very uncomfortable, or worse, compared to Guantánamo. SARAH KOENIG Florence, Colorado is the site of a federal supermax prison. Unless you're a federal crime buff, I'm guessing you might not be able to name anyone incarcerated in Florence, Colorado. These guys can. VALERIE Massoui. COLLEEN Massoui, Hansen, Zernoff. SPEAKER 8 Kaczynski. COLLEEN Ted Kaczynski. SARAH KOENIG That's Colleen. She tells the group she'd be fine with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, ending up in a place like Florence. She doesn't want him put to death or tortured, but solitary for the rest of his life would be OK with her. Valerie agrees. Others think Florence is too harsh. SPEAKER 8 It's awful. I think it's like being buried alive, in a sense. You know? You're underground 23 hours a day with the light on in your cell, and you get an hour outside if you behave. It's a really inhuman place. VALERIE It's very, very strict, yeah. SARAH KOENIG Everything about this call seemed upside down, that this group of people would care about a humane future for the 9/11 defendants, that the defendants might want to remain at Guantánamo, that the last people you'd think should be dealing with any of this end up dealing with all of this. And they weren't just doing a thought experiment here. Their positions matter. This group is called September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, after a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote -- "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." All the members are peaceniks. That's what brought the original members together in the first place -- their opposition to the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan a month after the September 11 attacks. Of the many family groups that formed after 9/11, this is the only one closely monitoring the trial of the 9/11 accused, the only one whose members travel to every court session held for the case. Collectively, they've watched hundreds of hours of court proceedings, filed multiple amicus briefs. They research deeply, stake out common sense but often unpopular positions, and lobby aggressively for those positions. And especially right then, spring of 2022, this group had some political juice. The 9/11 case was at a turning point. It had been in pre-trial hearings for 10 years already, 10 years of waiting for someone to be held responsible for the deaths of their family members. And now a solution was maybe in sight. Peaceful Tomorrows had long pushed for this, for an ending. Liz, one of the younger members, tells the group she's a little conflicted. She's always been for closing Guantánamo. It's been one of the group's steadfast positions -- close it. But then she visited the base again recently, took in the whole clattering machine of the case, and now she's not sure. Maybe it does make more sense for the 9/11 defendants to serve out their sentences at Guantánamo, to not close down the facility. LIZ It did make me question what closing it would mean and what all of this -- like, what's next? What's next for us? What's next for the detainees, the attorneys? And what does justice look like for us, but what does justice also look like for them? SARAH KOENIG Yeah. LIZ Something that I never even thought that I would sit there and think about. Like, I never in my life thought I would be concerned about five people who were responsible for [LAUGHS]: doing what they did. I never thought that that would happen. SARAH KOENIG Liz was six years old when her father, a firefighter, was killed at the World Trade Center. And now here she was, 27, working as a city councilperson in her home town, planning her wedding on the side, and on the side, side, trying to think through one of the most morally and legally complex criminal cases in American history. [MUSIC PLAYING] Most aspects of Guantánamo can fairly be described as perverse, to wit previous eight episodes of this series. But the one thing that at least seemed logical about Guantánamo was the 9/11 trial. The idea of it was clear. We held in our custody the men we believed were behind the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. If anyone was our enemy at Guantánamo, it was these men. If any justice was to be had, it was through this trial. But remember how, at the beginning of this series, I said Guantánamo was the craziest criminal justice story we'd ever seen? The 9/11 case is largely what I had in mind. When I plot it out, it describes a knot so Gordian and a national psychology so convoluted, it changed my animating question about the trial, which used to be, how will it end? Now my question is, will it end, ever? Colleen Kelly, the nurse practitioner, was my main guide for the 9/11 trial. So to explain it to you, I'm going to stick with her. Colleen's brother, Bill Kelly, died on September 11. He was 30 years old. He worked in finance, something e-trade. Colleen never fully understood. But she used to visit his fancy Bloomberg office. He'd visit Colleen in the Bronx, play with his niece and nephews. On September 11, Bill happened to be at the World Trade Center for a conference. So it took a few hours before the family figured out he was in the building. Around midnight, Colleen headed into Manhattan with a friend to look for Bill. And they performed the same impotent itinerary of hundreds of other family members in the shell-shocked city -- walking, walking, emergency room to emergency room, Beth Israel, Bellevue, NYU. Finally, she said, all these families ended up in a big auditorium downtown, where people's names would get called. COLLEEN This is at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and just to file -- I don't know -- a missing persons report? We had to report. Yeah, and -- SARAH KOENIG And you did that? You met with somebody? COLLEEN Yes, a female detective. I remember that. SARAH KOENIG Colleen and her parents and her siblings populated a sudden demographic, which eventually would squeeze into a military acronym, VFMs, Victim Family Members. They'd eventually get their own section of the airplane that flies down to Guantánamo, their own escorts and drivers on the base, their own curtained-off seating area inside the gallery of the military court, their own press conferences. All that was years away. In the moment, right after the attack, Colleen tried to find out what happened to her brother, not the general outlines. She had to know exactly what happened. COLLEEN I became obsessed with understanding his last day. I want to know what my brother was thinking when he was trapped on the 106th floor. I want to understand, was he panicked? Was he OK? Was he hopeful? What was he thinking? It became very, very important to me. Give me everything. Give me everything right now. I want to know every -- I don't know if Bill jumped. I believe he did. I became obsessed with that question in the fall of 2001. SARAH KOENIG She went about answering that question methodically, like a detective. Several weeks after 9/11, Colleen's family found out that Bill had sent BlackBerry messages to his boss at Bloomberg after the plane hit the North Tower. The last message Colleen saw was from 9:23 AM. There was a whole hour to go. The North Tower didn't collapse until 10:28. Colleen fixated on that last hour, on Bill's last minutes. Bloomberg also gave Colleen's family photos of Bill from that morning at Windows on the World. It turned out they'd hired a photographer for the event, who'd left just before the building was hit. Colleen spoke with the photographer, studied her pictures. In one of them, Bill is talking with a man Colleen didn't recognize -- receding hairline, glasses. That spring, "The New York Times" published a big story, a tick tock of the final 102 minutes of the towers. Colleen examined the grainy, zoomed-in shot of people teeming at the blown-out windows. In one of them, she thought she recognized Bill. So Colleen contacted that photographer, went to his studio in Lower Manhattan. He gave her an enlarged print to take home. She stared at it. Yes, it looks like Bill, she thought. He's at an open window. She sees the back of his head. His arm is reaching across the vertical window frame, reaching out to another man -- receding hairline, like the guy from the Bloomberg photo. Maybe Bill knew him. They're holding on to each other's arms. This photo is partly why Colleen thinks Bill jumped. Also, they never found any remains of her brother, while other bodies were recovered from the 106th floor. Eventually, Colleen was able, as she says, "to let it let go." She realized excavating Bill's last minutes was her way of trying to take away some of the pain and fear her brother must have felt, a way to absorb it into herself, which was impossible. The energy Colleen put into tracking Bill's last hour, that ferocity for uncovering information and that fealty to facts, no matter how distressing, now multiply that 1,000 fold, and that's what Colleen has dedicated to the 9/11 trial. She's been to Guantánamo well over a dozen times. If she can't watch the trial in person, she'll sometimes go to a remote viewing station at Fort Hamilton, an army base near the Verrazano Bridge in Brooklyn. When hearings aren't in session, which is most of the time, she calls up experts and attorneys to ask questions and talk strategy. Before I knew better, I'd thought the actual trial of the 9/11 accused might not matter all that much to Colleen -- five men languishing at Guantánamo, imprisoned for 20 years already, unlikely to ever be free. Why would a trial affect Colleen's life? Her busy life, by the way. She set me straight. She did care. COLLEEN Oh, my god, yes. Yeah, yeah. Hugely. Because if Bill was killed on a street corner in Manhattan, where he lived, of course, I would be at that trial every day when it came to a trial. It's like, you want to know all the facts. You want to know how this happened, who this person was, what went on, and have people be held accountable. So, yes, I was always really, really interested, both in the trial as a form of accountability, but also, what the hell happened that day? This sounds ridiculous that I'm saying this to you right now, 22 years later. No one knows how did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed do what he did. How did the hijackers get their money? How did they get on planes? Who knew what, when, how? How are these other guys, the other four men, how are they involved? I literally -- I don't know what they did. He was the money guy. What does that mean? I don't know what that means. Like, money to do what? Did you know what they were doing with the money? To me, that's the hardest piece of this, is, it comes back to the evidence. What is the evidence against these other four men? I really don't know. So I'm intensely, obsessively, wanting to know how this all happened. And why? SARAH KOENIG Don't you feel like you know why they did it? COLLEEN No. I've been told by people who are not the five accused why they did it. No, I don't know why they did it. SARAH KOENIG I see. You need to hear it from them. COLLEEN Yeah. It's just, it's what I need. It's what I need. [MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH KOENIG Keep in mind, Colleen has looked at everything she can get her hands on about how and why 9/11 happened. Government reports, statements by the 9/11 accused, books by prominent journalists. Most extraordinary to me, she spent years visiting a former member of the militant group Weather Underground in prison. She wanted to know what it felt like when your belief system carried you past natural boundaries to extreme violence. But none of it satisfied her. In this case, Colleen needs primary sources. She needs specific answers that are still locked inside these specific defendants. The trial would unlock them. That's what trials are for. [MUSIC PLAYING] The military commissions at Guantanamo were supposed to be our Nuremberg trials, when the Allied powers prosecuted Nazis and German leaders immediately following the Second World War. The Nuremberg trials were huge, efficient, and by many measures, successful. They didn't fix the world, but they at least held racists and murderers to account, helped repair a broken continent, and reset a common morality that said war crimes, no matter how chaotic or horrific, would be adjudicated in a civilized court of law for all the world to see. It's no wonder, then, that photos of the Nuremberg trial hung on the wall at the prosecution offices of the military commissions. SARAH KOENIG Oh, whoa. What is that? SARAH KOENIG On Colleen Kelly's wall hung a handmade primer explaining the military commissions -- the opposite of the Nuremberg trials in terms of efficiency and success. COLLEEN This is the weirdness. [CHUCKLING] SARAH KOENIG Wait. Just explain what I'm looking at. SARAH KOENIG Behind her bedroom door was a waterfall of paper, giant, presentation-sized sheets, describing the special court created to try a handful of Guantánamo prisoners we charged with terrorism or war crimes. The 9/11 case was meant to be the main event. COLLEEN This is really helpful because we all forget about the charges against the 9/11 accused. SARAH KOENIG This document was for an explainer she did years ago, but Colleen was keeping it here because so much time had passed since the 9/11 criminal case started, she sometimes forgets the basics. Also, I suspect, because the case has emulsified into her waking life, so that she hardly noticed that an enormous, handwritten record of judicial disappointment occupied physical and mental real estate in her bedroom, spitting distance from her pillow, while she slept. COLLEEN It's not good. SARAH KOENIG You can age this document by the judge Colleen listed on one of the sheets, Judge Pohl. He lasted the first six years, until 2018. Then came Judge Parella, who left after nine months. Then Judge Cohen came in, pledging continuity -- so important in a case of this magnitude. Less than a year later, Cohen retired. Then Judge Watkins stepped in temporarily until Judge Keane came aboard. Judge Keane lasted two weeks. He had conflicts. Then Judge McCall, but McCall had been a judge for less than two years, which was against the rules, so Judge Watkins stepped in temporarily again. Then Judge Acosta babysat the case for a minute until Judge McCall came back once he had two years' experience under his belt. Judge McCall is the current judge on the 9/11 case. He's announced he might or might not be retiring at the end of this year. I know you're not following this. That's the problem. No one can follow this. COLLEEN Like, no joke. On January 1st, I saw some friends that I haven't seen in a long time, and they know that I'm very active in this work. And they asked, what's going on? And I started to explain, and I see -- this is a guy who's a lawyer. And he's really smart, and he's really engaged on issues of great importance around the globe. And I just see, like, after a while, just glazes over. Yeah, I was kind of bummed out. SARAH KOENIG Do you get the sense they don't believe you? Like, they think you must not understand what's happening because it can't be that bad, or literally, it's just too complicated? COLLEEN Too complicated. It's too complicated. Because if you start to say something, you say a sentence, and you realize you have to say another sentence to explain it. Because there's no way -- there is no elevator pitch for this. SARAH KOENIG No elevator pitch, OK. But how about we take the stairs, you and me, all the way to the top, and you lend me those -- I don't know -- seven minutes, and I'll spin you through this farkakte case and this farkakte court, so you can understand the bind the 9/11 case is in right now. After we captured the five defendants, the men we believed plotted and carried out the 9/11 attacks, we held them in CIA custody, in black sites around the world, and we tortured them. After three, four years, we sent them to Guantánamo in September of 2006. A couple of false starts later, including a politically disastrous effort to bring the case to federal court in Manhattan, the men eventually were arraigned in May of 2012 at a military commission in Guantánamo Bay. The five defendants were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al Shibh, Aamar al Baluchi, and Mustafa al Hawsawi. In the courtroom, they would each sit in a different row, one behind the other, in the order they appear on the charge sheet, KSM to al-Hawsawi. So how is this court different from all other courts, and why doesn't it work? Any normal lawyer hearing what I'm about to lay out here is probably going to be horrified or else think I must be mistaken. I am not mistaken. Here we go. In normal criminal court, a defendant has a constitutional right to confront his accuser. So if I accuse you of assault, say, I have to come to court, take an oath, and testify in front of a judge or jury. In the military commissions, they'll entertain a jacked-up form of hearsay evidence, which means an FBI agent can take the stand and say, years ago, I went to a police station in Yemen, and a Yemeni cop brought me some witnesses he had already interrogated. And I talked to all of them, and I wrote down what they told me. But those original Yemeni witnesses don't have to be called in, or take an oath, or answer any questions, because the agents who spoke with them don't even know how to find them anymore. The Yemenis' secondhand statements -- made through an interpreter, mind you -- can be allowed as evidence in the war court at Guantánamo. And these aren't any old criminal cases. These are capital cases, death penalty cases. As one former military defense attorney said to me, allowing that kind of hearsay, quote, "that would happen nowhere else. That's absolutely insane," unquote. Also, torture. Statements derived from torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment cannot be used in federal court, period. But in the military commissions, it's mushier. Something I said while I was being tortured -- you can't use that in an actual trial. But it's still in dispute whether the government could use my torture-derived statements in pretrial hearings, or use something my neighbor said about me while he was being tortured. And -- and this is the central issue now -- they might be able to use at trial statements I made after I was tortured. Also, all the classified stuff. It is mind boggling, the profusion and confusion over what is classified. In the military commissions, the accused isn't allowed to see all the evidence against him because classified, a ton of it. Even the classification guidelines for the military commissions are themselves classified. The defense can't see them all. And it's not just documents the defense can't see. A large number of potential witnesses, people who worked in black sites, say, their identities are classified. The defense can't call them because they can't identify them. And if they do happen to know the name of a CIA employee, current or former, they aren't allowed to contact them directly. So those are some of the baked-in problems. Now to the weirder stuff. The cases, from the outset, have continuously fended off, let's call it interference, intrusion, infiltration -- spying, basically. The first big incident that made the news was in 2013, just as the case was getting underway -- the kill button incident. One Monday afternoon in court, a lawyer for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was talking about evidence from CIA black sites. And when he said the word "secret," the CCTV feed from the courtroom cut off, meaning anyone watching from the spectators' gallery or remotely suddenly heard nothing. White noise filled the speakers. The judge and the security officer sitting to his right, they do have the ability to cut the feed to avoid classified spills. But in this instance, the judge hadn't pressed the button, and neither had the security officer. Someone else, some external body, had cut the feed, and the judge didn't know who and he was pissed. All kinds of questions erupted then. Who was listening in? What else could they hear? Was this the CIA? Did the CIA just drown out information it didn't want anyone talking about? Who was in charge of this thing? Who was really in charge? The kill button was only the beginning. In attorney-client meeting rooms, spaces that are supposed to be sacrosanct, they'd find hidden mikes in the shape of phony smoke detectors, or else, hidden in the walls. The FBI would pry inside a defense team, in one instance, turning a defense staffer into an informant. An interpreter assigned to the defense seemed to have had a previous job at a CIA black site. So who was he really working for? All this bugging and snooping, it was hard not to conclude, was an effort to undermine the cases, to keep evidence and documentation of what happened to the men in black sites from becoming public. This is what the CIA feared, and still fears -- secrets of the torture program becoming public. The CIA didn't offer any comment about this when I contacted them. Torture has infected almost every aspect of the military commissions cases. It's why so much of the discovery is classified or not available at all. It's why the men's physical and mental health is a constant topic. It's why fighting over admissibility of evidence in the 9/11 case is epic. It's why delays and breakdowns in the proceedings are legion. Every one of these problems -- the kill button, the hidden mics, the classification arguments, the medical issues, and countless, frequently ridiculous others that I do not have time in our journey here to name -- all of it, has involved litigation that causes months or half a year or several years of delays. And that is how a case which could have been -- I don't know about a slam dunk, but vastly easier, surely -- remember, KSM has admitted planning 9/11 -- that this case is now entering its 13 year of pretrial hearings. Finally, last thing -- I promise -- appeals. Many, many legal experts who's looked at the 9/11 case agree that a verdict in this case cannot survive appeal, which, likely, eventually, would end up in the Supreme Court. In a statement to lawmakers, a Marine Brigadier General who served as chief defense counsel for the commissions wrote that the myriad defects mean that, quote, "There are literally so many significant grounds for potential reversible error that it is impossible to list them all," unquote. And appeals, of course, take their own sweet time. The appeals could add another decade to this case, easily. Another attorney told me, in a moment of relaxed crankiness, that at the rate his case was going, it was actually possible his client's appellate attorney hadn't been born yet. So for family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks, watching the military commissions has been like trailing a mirage. You can hear their mounting disillusion in the VFM press conferences from Guantánamo over the years. At first, a lot of them, they thought it could work. ARCHIVED RECORDING 5 I'm very honored to be here and see how our justice system works and the transparency. Because the world needs to see that. SARAH KOENIG That's from a press conference in 2012, when the 9/11 defendants were arraigned. Two years later, you hear people start losing their patience. ARCHIVED RECORDING 6 If we could feel we were moving somehow forward towards a resolution -- SARAH KOENIG This woman talked about how she'd been down in Guantánamo once before in 2009 and watched a mental competency hearing for one of the 9/11 defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Now, it was 2014, and she was back, watching a mental competency hearing for one of the 9/11 defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. ARCHIVED RECORDING 6 But here we are, standing in place, since 2009 to 2014, five years standing in place. And it's painful. But I see there's -- SARAH KOENIG By 2017, you hear desperation. ARCHIVED RECORDING 7 And I don't think this is going to be resolved in my lifetime. And that's really what I have to say. And it may sound negative, but I'm not negative with anybody here or any of the people here. It's just that I want justice done, and I can't see light at the end of the tunnel yet. OK? I know -- SARAH KOENIG After 2017, prosecutors stopped meeting with the media. For Peaceful Tomorrows members, Colleen told me 2017 was also the year they realized, oh, this is never going to work. COLLEEN We've had it. Like, now we've had it. It's endless. There's always something, and there's always going to be something. That's when it's like, plea deals. SARAH KOENIG Plea deals. The prosecution was still insisting they could get this trial done, get guilty verdicts against the 9/11 defendants. But Colleen and Terry and the group members had lost faith. They could see clearly now the military commission system was a failure. Forget about a trial. The only logical solution to ending this thing, to getting a conviction that would stick, to getting the answers they wanted -- plea deals. Anyone could see that plea deals were the way to go, right? That's after the break. The idea of a plea agreement was that if the government took the death penalty off the table, maybe the 9/11 defendants would plead guilty and give up their right to appeal. The case would be over. The plea would include an extensive, likely months-long sentencing hearing, almost like its own trial. And such a hearing would include a stipulation of fact. This was key to Colleen, a stipulation of fact, a narrative, in which each defendant would explain with precision exactly what they had done to make 9/11 happen and exactly why they had done it. And that's how, through a plea deal, Colleen could get the answers she needed. But a plea deal in the 9/11 case, for a lot of people, that's a tough sell because it's the 9/11 case. It's emotional, and a plea deal sounds wrong, like the government's giving up or just doesn't care anymore. And no death penalty for the people responsible for 9/11? Why would anyone ever make a deal with these guys? That is an understandable response, especially if you have no idea how dysfunctional the court is. And let's face it, very few people have clocked the ins and outs of the 9/11 case, including most politicians. While President Trump was in office, a plea deal in the 9/11 case was a nonstarter. Come 2021, though, a few remarkable things happened to shake up the military commissions. First, the long-serving and forceful chief prosecutor, a general who'd been committed to a death penalty trial, announced he was retiring. His replacement, Colleen thought, might be more amenable to a plea. Then came the sentencing hearing of Majid Khan. The military jurors' response to hearing Majid Khan talk about being tortured, their recommendation for clemency, offered a clue as to how the jurors might react to the torture of the 9/11 defendants, one of whom, as a result of being sodomized in CIA custody, has to sit on a cushioned chair in court and eventually underwent rectal repair surgery. In other words, even if prosecutors got a conviction at trial, they might not get a death sentence. ARCHIVED RECORDING (COLLEEN) -- watched in frustration as one judge after another has been replaced. SARAH KOENIG Soon after Majid Khan's sentencing, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled "Closing Guantánamo." The only victim, family member who testified was Colleen. Her message was strong and sad. Family members who wanted and needed this trial to happen, she said, had already waited too long. ARCHIVED RECORDING (COLLEEN) In May of 2012, I sat with my dear friend Rita Lazar, watching the arraignment of the 9/11 accused. Rita's brother, Abe, died when he stayed behind to assist a disabled co-worker on the 27th floor of the North Tower. Rita is now deceased. In 2017, I was on the plane to Guantánamo with Lee Hansen, the only 9/11 family member to be deposed in the pretrial hearings. Lee Hansen lost his son, his daughter-in-law, and his granddaughter on flight 175. Mr. Hansen is now deceased. In 2019, I was on a boat crossing Guantánamo Bay with Alice Hoagland, mother of flight 93 hero Mark Bingham. Alice Hoagland is now deceased. SARAH KOENIG Colleen and her cohort had always been the hippie 9/11 group -- anti-war, anti-violence, anti-Guantánamo. In the world of victims' family members, their views were squarely in the minority. But now, two decades later, it seemed the national mood had shifted. Vengefulness had dimmed, and Colleen was invited to the table. Five other people testified as well, non-hippies, conservatives, a couple people who'd been Guantánamo boosters back in the day, who'd helped design detainee policy and the military commissions under President Bush. And now, nobody was arguing. Plea deals -- it's the only way. ARCHIVED RECORDING 8 -- Guantánamo Bay. I thank you again for your invitation and for your time and attention. ARCHIVED RECORDING 9 Thank you, general. [MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH KOENIG A few months after the Senate hearing, in March of 2022, the newspaper announced prosecutors and defense attorneys were in talks. They were negotiating a plea deal in the 9/11 case. Finally. That same spring is when I started listening in on the Peaceful Tomorrows' Zoom meetings. Colleen and the rest of the group knew a plea agreement and sentencing would take some time. One attorney on the case estimated 18 months. Their strategy was to stay cool, which the lawyers negotiating the deal had also recommended. Yes, the plea talks had been in the papers. The news was out there. But still, they decided, let's not make a lot of noise. No big public push. The risk of riling up opposition was too great. This thing was so fragile politically, even minor blowback could snuff it out. So, they'd lie low. The meetings, though, were animated. The group worked on a list of questions they wanted the defendants to answer in the event of a sentencing, questions some of them have harbored since 2001. SPEAKER 9 Who knew that there were 20 hijackers and how they were getting their tickets? SARAH KOENIG They want to know, who was the financial mastermind? Was it KSM's nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi? SPEAKER 10 Did he communicate to so-and-so that he was making this transaction? Is that maybe what you're more after? SPEAKER 9 And what were they told about why the transaction was made? SARAH KOENIG The finances are a big topic with this group, not only because they want to understand the inner workings of the plot, but because they want to understand the relative guilt of the five defendants. Is Ammar al-Baluchi less culpable than his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but more culpable than Mustafa al-Hawsawi? They passed their questions along to a defense attorney working on the 9/11 case -- a defense attorney. At first, this surprised me, but they were talking to defense attorneys as much, if not more than they were talking to prosecutors. And then they waited. Six months passed. Eight months. By December, nine months since the plea negotiations started. Everyone was getting antsy. SPEAKER 9 So I just -- boy, this is beyond any kind of advocacy I've ever done before. SARAH KOENIG Hearings in the 9/11 case were on hold while the prosecution and defense tried to work it out. They were supposed to agree on so-called policy principles by now, which is a dry term, but it was the meat of the deal. If the men pleaded guilty, what would they get in return? The policy principles mostly had to do with the conditions of the men's imprisonment. They wanted assurances that as long as they were in prison, they'd have a communal situation like they have now -- the ability to eat together and pray together, no solitary confinement. Also, they wanted proper, sustained treatment for their physical and psychological trauma caused by the torture, and the ability to communicate better with their families. For the plea to progress, the prosecution needed an answer from the Biden administration, whether they supported the policy principles. But Biden wasn't saying anything at all. In the Peaceful Tomorrows' Zoom calls, people started asking, what should we do? Should we stomp our feet? Terry reminded everyone, the lead attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, Jay Connell, he was still advising no. TERRY Because he thinks it's going to take the time it takes, and we could mess it up. So I'm just really keenly aware of how little negative press plea deals have gotten and how much I don't want to generate negative press. [MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH KOENIG The one-year mark came and went. Now it was March of 2023. Still nothing. Valerie's cat was dying. VALERIE When you pet him, you have to be so careful because he's all bones, you know? SARAH KOENIG Liz's wedding was off. She was now running for mayor. Phyllis suggested maybe they take a breather, get some distance from all the discouragement. J. Connell came to a meeting to give an update, which was no update on the deal, really. But he did have something to tell them. J. CONNELL So I have now seen a draft of the proposed stipulation of facts, and it is extensive. It is 200 pages long. SARAH KOENIG That's the document Colleen and the others are waiting for, the main thing they want from this plea. In the 200-page statement, J's client, Ammar al-Baluchi, had laid out his background, how he ended up in this situation at such a young age. Then he talks about 9/11. J. CONNELL It's really a deep examination of who exactly did what in the plot around 9/11. I mean, and it's very detailed on that point. SARAH KOENIG Finally, there's a section about what happened to him in prison. J. CONNELL So, this 200-page document really dives deep into, I think, basically any question that anyone would have. SARAH KOENIG Liz has a "holy shit" look on her face. Later, she told me that's what she was feeling. LIZ Holy shit. This information is out there. And why do we not have it? SARAH KOENIG One of the five defendants had answered their questions in a document they couldn't see -- not yet. Not unless there was a plea. But it was something. [MUSIC PLAYING] And then, August of last year, the public suddenly woke up. It was the government who woke them, not Peaceful Tomorrows. The prosecution sent a letter to 9/11 victim family members to a much wider group than usual, some of whom hadn't been contacted about this case in forever, letting them know the plea negotiations were happening and seeking their opinions or concerns. And, oh, man, did they need an editor for this letter -- robotically matter-of-fact, lousy with acronyms. Sure enough, nearly a year and a half after the plea negotiations had first been reported, a whole new crop of people did have opinions and concerns. They called the prosecution office. They called the press. They called Capitol Hill. The AP ran a story. Plea negotiations could mean no 9/11 defendants face the death penalty, the US tells families. Conservatives made immediate hay. Ted Cruz took to his podcast. ARCHIVED RECORDING (TED CRUZ) This story is absolutely outrageous. And I think everyone hearing it should be shocked and should be furious. SARAH KOENIG Family members expressed outrage on TV. ARCHIVED RECORDING 10 I feel like the Biden administration should order them not to accept this plea deal. SARAH KOENIG More than 2,000 victim family members wrote an open letter to the president, protesting the plea deal. Peaceful Tomorrows members were feeling like, ugh, if they could just gather all the family members in the same room and explain everything they knew about how broken the military commissions were, maybe the others would see. They were never going to get a trial or the death penalty. If they wanted answers or any shred of accountability, a plea deal was the best they could hope for. [MUSIC PLAYING] Within a couple of weeks, President Biden broke his silence regarding the plea deals. Well, he never said anything publicly, but a line in a prosecution court filing said the Biden administration declined the so-called policy principles. Biden was not on board. He would not support an assurance of no solitary confinement or an assurance of torture rehabilitation. For the past year and a half, no one had seemed clear on what role the White House was playing in these unprecedented plea negotiations in this unprecedented criminal case, in this unprecedented court. Maybe the president really disagreed with the terms of the deal, or maybe, in September of 2023, it just came down to realpolitik. He's coming up on an election. And perhaps the mother of all bad Guantánamo headlines is the one that says you're negotiating sleeping arrangements and therapy with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who claimed to have beheaded Daniel Pearl and orchestrated the most devastating terror attack in modern history. So. I kept thinking about Colleen. How on Earth did she have the stamina for this? I would have given up years ago, probably a decade ago. Found some way to talk myself out of caring anymore. I'd asked her, was that the hardest part, just staying with it? COLLEEN No. SARAH KOENIG No? COLLEEN Because I'm so stubborn. Seriously. Stubborn. Being stubborn. Like, I am not going to let their failure be mine as well. I'm sticking with this. I'm not giving up until this ends some way, somehow. I'm not. I'm not giving up. SARAH KOENIG And so, Colleen headed down to Guantánamo. That's after the break. Because of the plea negotiations, and before that, COVID, the 9/11 case, hadn't seen much court action since 2019. Now, September of 2023, the whole enterprise cranked back up again. For the 9/11 case, that's five teams of roughly 20 people per team, lawyers and interpreters and analysts. Then the judge and his staff, plus observers and reporters and their minders and escorts. Maybe 150 people heaving themselves to Cuba, including Colleen. I traveled alongside Colleen. She hadn't been to Guantánamo for 3 and 1/2 years. She was in a brighter mood than I expected. At the hotel, she joked that the complimentary laundry pods in her room might be listening devices. COLLEEN Maybe that's a secret listening device. SARAH KOENIG [LAUGHS]: That would be really funny. COLLEEN It would be. All thrown in the washer, and that's what activates it to send the -- SARAH KOENIG I didn't see Colleen all that much during the week. At Guantánamo, the VFMs are closely guarded and protected, mostly in an effort to keep media away from them. So it felt almost illegal to seek her out. In the courtroom gallery, we'd nod to each other self-consciously as I walked by the VFM section to get to my seat. It was a strange split-screen experience to watch this pretrial hearing, knowing, or at least strongly believing, none of this is leading to an actual verdict. But also, it's court. So it's interesting -- people arguing passionately about secrecy and the Constitution, witnesses testifying nervously or testily. Within the larger narrative of inaction, there's a lot of action. This week's hearing, they were dealing with the crux of the case, whether statements the defendants made in 2007, after they got to Guantánamo and were no longer in CIA custody, whether those statements could be used as evidence at trial. The statements, which are critical to the prosecution, are known as the "clean team statements," since they were taken by teams of government investigators who were not CIA and were not, the government argues, using any form of coercion. The defense wants the clean team statements thrown out, arguing, among other reasons, that they are tainted, a backdoor way for torture-derived evidence to enter the trial, and that the interviews were not truly voluntary. Not to mention that the men were never sufficiently informed of their rights in these interviews or allowed a lawyer. The fight over whether to suppress these statements has been going on -- you will be shocked to learn -- for many years in many different forms. The week we were there, the excitement was that former FBI agent Frank Pellegrino was going to be testifying, the agent who took a clean statement from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at Guantánamo. He'd been after KSM for years prior to September 11, probably knew more about him than anyone in law enforcement. Pellegrino's testimony seemed great for the prosecution. He came across as credible, said KSM answered his questions voluntarily, that he even cracked a joke or two. But Pellegrino also seemed restive with anger at the position the CIA had put him and other FBI agents in because of the black sites and the torture. Under questioning, Pellegrino said, quote, "I think that the whole thing from the beginning was a flaming bag of crap that we got stuck with," unquote. One defense attorney told me it was the first time a witness had said something so plainly critical of the torture program since the proceedings began a dozen years ago. A couple other significant things had happened, too, hugely significant. The week before, the judge had severed Ramzi bin al-Shibh from the 9/11 case, deciding, after about a decade of litigation, that he was mentally incompetent to aid in his own defense. Ramzi bin al-Shibh is generally considered the second most culpable of the five defendants, sort of like KSM's deputy. The other major news was that a month earlier, a judge in the other death penalty case before the military commissions against the Saudi man accused of orchestrating the deadly bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, that judge threw out the clean teams statements in the Cole case, saying they were tainted by torture. These developments seemed to me to point in the direction of plea deals. The 9/11 case seemed like it was disintegrating. I'd come down to Guantánamo thinking the plea deals were dead, but everyone was saying, they're not. Really, they're not. We just have to find a different way to get them done. J. Connell told reporters, the plea deals are sleeping. Not in a coma -- sleeping. SPEAKER 11 Right now, the feels like temperature, which I think is accurate, is 98 degrees. SARAH KOENIG Most evenings, a bunch of us reporters hang out on outdoor couches in the hotel's courtyard. Contract workers often sit at the tables nearby, everybody drinking, while the leggy stray cats of Guantánamo dart around the edges of the patio. Carol Rosenberg sometimes feeds them her leftovers. Colleen came to join us a couple times to talk about the case and also to reminisce. COLLEEN It was the really bad flight. SARAH KOENIG She's known most of these reporters for years. She was with a few of them on a flight so notoriously terrifying that people still talk about it. John Ryan was on that flight. So was Carol. COLLEEN Well, I don't know what you were doing, but you were doing something. You were scared shitless. SPEAKER 12 Yeah. SARAH KOENIG Also, Terry McDermott, a former investigative reporter for the LA Times, who now writes books, including "The Hunt for KSM," which Colleen has read. He was on that flight, and he's back here now. COLLEEN I had taken a lot of Ativan, and I went and sat next to you and said I -- SPEAKER 13 You came up and embarassed yourself. COLLEEN I did. I was like, tell me everything you know about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. [LAUGHS] And I took, like, three sentences of notes, and then I trailed off, I guess. I don't know. [LAUGHS] [MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH KOENIG I'm not a war reporter, but I imagine this is sort of what it's like after hours, minus the danger. People thrown together, trying to make sense of a protracted battle. The so-called war on terror has been enormous, global. And yet sitting here, it can feel like the whole thing is funneled down to this small klatch of people -- reporters, victims, attorneys, soldiers -- drinking in the courtyard of the Navy Gateway Inn and Suites. We start talking about how this case ends. Plea deals, John Ryan says, 100 percent. Terry agrees there's never going to be a trial. Carol thinks maybe an abatement could happen, but at some point, the judge might say, OK, government, if you won't produce CIA witnesses, then I'm going to pull the plug. Everybody go home until you're ready to make this a fair trial. Which could mean no resolution at all. One night, J. Connell, the defense attorney, turns up. He's wearing shorts and sandals, a brace on his ankle from an injury sustained in spin class. He grabs a club soda. I ask him all these things that are happening -- the decision to sever Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the USS Cole judge's ruling on the clean team statements, the flaming pile of crap -- does it feel like this case might be crumbling in the defense's favor? He says, look, I know you've been down here before. J. CONNELL And there's this temptation to feel like I've come at a pivotal moment, and something important is happening. But this is our 47th hearing. And they've all felt like that. Like, I always feel like if it were a boxing match, we'd have won every round on points. But what does that matter? There's no tallying up of points. There's no points. And so, we'll come back in November, and then we'll come back again in February, and we'll come back and back and back and back. SARAH KOENIG J.'s been on this case full-time since 2011. He's the one who used to make predictions. It'll take four years to get to trial, he said at the beginning. OK, five years. In 2018, he stopped timestamping. The most he'll say now is that we're in the middle of the case. The middle. How long the middle lasts, anyone's guess. At least a couple more years, maybe longer. Jay believes in the rightness of his mission, that the US government's power cannot go unchecked or trample human rights. He tries not to get caught up in what should happen or could happen. He says he's going to stick with this case as long as it takes. But for a minute there, he really thought this thing might end, that the plea deals would materialize, maybe by the end of 2022. He started planning his next move, entertainment law. He wants to work in the music industry. He even ordered slick new business cards, the kind that feel like a credit card. SARAH KOENIG Do you ever get the sense that the prosecution feels exactly the same way you guys do on the defense side? That everyone is just like, we're locked in this falling apart train that just keeps going? J. CONNELL In dark moments, I feel like I'm a puppet in a revenge fantasy where somebody, 15 years ago, decided that they were going to put on this show about getting the death penalty against these men, knowing that the military doesn't really execute people. Military hasn't executed anyone since 1961. And that they needed actors for their [INAUDIBLE]. They needed to put people in place. They needed to put defense attorneys in place, prosecutors in place, judge in place. I don't always feel that way, but sometimes it feels like that. And I could entirely imagine that the prosecution would feel like that, that they are put up there to represent the forces of revenge, and that we're put up there to represent the forces of the rule of law, and that there's just kind of a play that happens. [MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH KOENIG The prosecutors weren't permitted to discuss the case with me on the record, so I can't say whether they share J.'s revenge fantasy feeling. But the prosecution were the ones who initiated the plea negotiations two years ago, as the road to trial is getting only longer and darker. They want this show over, too. [MUSIC PLAYING] Toward the end of the week, I checked in with Colleen one last time. She'd been up since 3:00 AM, she said. Her mind had been churning, so she said she wrote it all down to get her thoughts outside her body. She'd underestimated how sad this trip was for her. COLLEEN I never cry down here. I mean, like, yeah, this is the third time I cried down here. I don't usually cry down here. And I'm not saying that's good or bad. It just is what it is. There was just -- this trip was really emotional. SARAH KOENIG I'd seen some of that earlier in the week. Within 24 hours of our arrival, I'd gone to find her in her hotel room a couple of floors below mine. She was falling apart a little, missing her brother, worried she couldn't remember his voice anymore. And also just being down here again, watching this case rattle back to life. COLLEEN I think I've pinned a lot of my hope for accountability and getting to the bottom of this on some kind of a legal process because it just feels like, Jesus, he was murdered. Somebody be responsible for that. [SNIFFS] SARAH KOENIG This side of Colleen, I wasn't familiar with. I'd seen only confident, rigorous, determined Colleen, but never Colleen in despair. COLLEEN I feel like I've said this 20,000 times, but I'm really feeling this now. I don't know that there's ever -- that this is ever going to happen. I don't know that there will ever be a trial. I've never felt -- I've never questioned it as strongly as I am now. [EXHALES] SARAH KOENIG Waiting 20 years for a trial doesn't just deny Colleen answers. Year after year after year, it prolongs her grief, makes dealing with her brother's death harder, if such a thing is possible. By the end of the week, Colleen was more collected. She told me the VFMs had met with the defense the night before. She'd cried a lot at that meeting, too, she said. Like J. Connell, she knows better than to get her hopes up, but she realized she'd gotten her hopes up about a plea deal. The lawyers had talked about how close they'd come, really kind of close to a deal. In the meeting, Colleen had aired her most cynical, and, she worries, possibly her most realistic, analysis of how this all ends, which is nothing. No trial, no plea deal, no ending. And that that nothingness, that is the plan. A plan that would serve the interests of some powerful stakeholders, namely the CIA, which would never have to reveal the identities of the people who conducted and enabled torture, or the countries where it all happened. Also, the detainees, who could quietly stay here at Guantánamo in the communal confinement they want, presumed innocent until they die, forgotten. The politicians, who could keep kicking this toxic can farther and farther into the distance, keep pretending it's out of their hands. Who this plan doesn't serve, of course, is Colleen. A postscript and perhaps an antidote to this dolorous trip. While we were at Guantánamo, another Peaceful Tomorrows member was there, too -- Leila Murphy. Her week was so different from Colleen's. She was so different from Colleen. In the past few years, as founding members of Peaceful Tomorrows have grown infirm or died, a bunch of young people have joined. They're children of 9/11 victims -- Leila and her sister Jessica, Liz, Aiden. A young woman named Chanel started coming to the Zoom meetings in November. Obviously, they're self-selecting, but a remarkable number of these 9/11 kids have studied Arabic in the Middle East or spent time there. Leila's becoming a lawyer. She wants to do criminal defense. Her sister's in med school. She's interested in the effects of torture on human health. The Murphy sisters have joked darkly that this was KSM's plan all along -- to radicalize the children of 9/11 victims against their own government. During the day at Guantánamo, Leila met with attorneys, took copious notes during court. She was with two other young people, one a fellow law student, another recently minted lawyer. In the evenings, they did what young people do -- played cornhole at the Tiki Bar, played tennis or pickleball. LEILA MURPHY Also, I just love the sign -- "First dedicated pickleball courts in the Navy." JESSICA MUPRHY Wait, actually? LEILA MURPHY That's what it says on the sign with pickle clipart. [LAUGHS] SARAH KOENIG It's not that Leila was living it up -- it's that she seemed to have no expectations from this trip. She was an observer in the literal sense, taking it in, noting it down. She admires Colleen and Terry and the other members of this group, but she doesn't need what they need. She's not waiting for answers from the 9/11 accused. She doesn't need a trial. And sure, a plea deal would be good -- she'll lobby for that. But whatever happens to these five aging defendants, she doubts it'll have meaning for her. What Leila wants, what would be most meaningful to her is an admission of guilt from the US government. LEILA MURPHY Their horrible behavior is the reason we're in this situation, and the reason it's dragging on for so long, and the reason that they're even pleased. There will never be any real justice, you know? Because it's just all so fucked up. [LAUGHS] The US's behavior is the reason this has dragged on. SARAH KOENIG Leila's voice dropped. A guy in military uniform was walking past, close enough to hear us. SARAH KOENIG Did you just get nervous because you saw someone who looked like military? LEILA MURPHY Yes, I did. It's classic Guantánamo. [LAUGHS] SARAH KOENIG I understood her trepidation. It feels somehow heretical, or at least ungrateful, with all these soldiers and sailors around, for Leila to say, all the government's post-9/11 effort -- the endless war and the prison and the court -- I know you did it for me. You did it in my name. But none of it worked. So it's time to stop now. Just say you made a huge mistake and that you're sorry. Leila knows it's a long shot. She was three years old when her father died in 2001. And in all the time since, the government has never held itself accountable, has never worked to reset our common morality as a country. But this young person who's about to become a lawyer, it would be so great if she could have this little bit of hope in the forces of the rule of law. [MUSIC PLAYING] "Serial" is produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivvis, and me. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional reporting by Cora Currier. Fact-checking by Ben Phelan and Kelsey Kudak. Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Original score by Sofia Degli Alessandri. Editing help from Ira Glass, Jen Guerra, and Diane Wu. Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg, John Ryan, and Rozina Ali. Additional production from Emma Grillo, Alvin Melathe, and Daniel Guillemette. Our standards editor is Susan Wessling. Legal review from Al-Amyn Sumar and Maya Gandhi. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guther. Supervising producer for "Serial" Productions is Ndeye Thioubou. Our executive assistant is Mack Miller. Sam Dolnick is deputy managing editor of "The New York Times." Special thanks to Scott Ream, David Kestenbaum, Peter Blair, Harvey Rishikof, Gary Brown, Brian Mizer, and all the incredibly patient attorneys who've worked at Guantánamo Bay and took the time to explain it to us, and to everyone at Peaceful Tomorrows who allowed us to sit-in on their meetings. Thanks also to Jeff Melman, Ben Schreier, and Ben Thorp Brown. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Lloyd J. Austin III Secretary of Defense 1000 Defense Pentagon Washington, DC 20301-1000 10 August 2024 Dear Mr. Austin, On September 11, 2001, my younger sister and only sibling, Laura Rockefeller, died in the North Tower of the WTC. Our father died in 2003, while the men who were later charged with planning and supporting the 9/11 terrorist attacks were being tortured by agents of the CIA in overseas “black sites.” Our mother died in 2013, a year after the current defendants in the 9/11 pre-trial hearings at the Expeditionary Legal Complex on the Guantanamo Naval Base were arraigned for the second time in a military commission. More than 12 years after that arraignment, the prosecution in the case, the government lawyers who were to deliver justice on behalf of families like mine, recognized with great honesty and integrity that plea agreements (pre-trial agreements in the military system) offered an end to the legal purgatory I and so many other 9/11 family members have been living through. The Convening Authority, Brigadier General Susan Escallier, your appointee, who is a lawyer with extensive experience on behalf of military justice, agreed and approved those agreements. She fully understood that it is unlikely that a military commission trial would ever end with death penalty convictions that could withstand appeal, and the equally unthinkable likelihood that no trial would ever take place. In communication from the prosecution, 9/11 families were assured that the defendants’ pleas would assure a guilty verdict that would never be appealed. Most importantly, the agreements were no simple assertion of a willingness to profess guilt, rather they included individual stipulations of fact that detailed each defendant’s actions. These stipulations were agreed to by the prosecution, the defense, and the Convening Authority; this was an enormous achievement. The facts in those stipulations are information that family members have never been privy to but are eager finally to learn nearly 23 years after our family members were killed. At the same time, family members were told by the prosecution how we could submit questions that the defendants would answer in open court. Many of us have already submitted questions through the portal that the Department of Defense established. Then you, Mr. Austin, chose to undo years of effort to craft these agreements and nullified the best possible path to judicial finality and judicial certainty. You claim that you acted out of concern for 9/11 family members, but, respectfully sir, you do not know who we are. 9/11 family members are not a monolithic community. While there is a vocal faction who do want the death penalty. Many, like my parents, died without any resolution and cannot speak up. Perhaps the largest number of 9/11 family members have grown totally disaffected with the failure of the military commission system and simply no longer engage. What do you say to those who now expect nothing from the legal system you oversee? It is time that you confer with the government prosecutors in the 9/11 case and truly understand exactly why, after more than 12 years of pre-trial hearings, they came to believe that plea agreements were their best legal strategy. I urge you to reconsider your actions. Retract your revocation of the defendants’ pleas and avoid lengthy litigation over your misguided decision, litigation which will only prolong family members' suffering and frustration. The very real alternative is to see the planners and supporters of the 9/11 attacks die legally innocent, as the likelihood that they will be found guilty after a trial and appeals in Article III courts is vanishingly small. Most sincerely, Terry Kay Rockefeller Sister of Laura Rockefeller—North Tower WTC terrykayrockefeller@gmail.com

August 3rd, 2024 Contact: Peaceful Tomorrows (845) 754-1762 September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows was created partly from a fear that the legacy of 9/11 would include the erosion of the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law. Today we saw that happen. Again. This past Wednesday, word of signed plea agreements with three of the September 11th defendants reached 9/11 families. This was not the justice originally hoped for. But plea agreements offered a path to finality, and a modicum of justice and accountability for the crimes of 9/11. Yesterday, those agreements were invalidated by Defense Secretary Austin in a move that not only ultimately betrays 9/11 family members, but undermines the very government attorneys charged with prosecuting this case. The 2019 Manual for Military Commissions Rule 705 regarding pretrial agreements clearly states “The decision whether to accept or reject an offer is within the sole discretion of the convening authority.” It was Secretary Austin who named Brig. General Susan Escallier to the job of Convening Authority in September 2023. That the Secretary has now overreached and undertaken direct oversight of the 9/11 commission is cause for enormous concern. While we understand there are family members who are opposed to plea agreements, the reality stands that the 9/11 accused were tortured and several were sodomized. If any entity is at fault for the inability to prosecute this case with a slam dunk, it’s the torturers. Because of the torture, the 9/11 accused will not be put to death. And any Administration official or member of Congress who says otherwise is either uninformed, or politically pandering. The men who perpetrated the death of thousands on September 11th; men who have never uttered a word of remorse, should be justly punished. But what happened this week to 9/11 families is emotional whiplash. We will recover. We have been working for justice for the death of our loved ones for 23 years. Our larger concerns today are for this country, for the future of our children and grandchildren when legal principles are compromised. We ask that Secretary Austin meet with the 9/11 prosecution team, learn the deep complexities and flaws in the case, and come to his own conclusion that pretrial agreements will provide the finality and accountability we all deserve.

May 2024 Updated June 25, 2024 Peaceful Tomorrows was founded by family members of those killed on 9/11 who committed to seeking nonviolent responses to the deaths of our loved ones. Among our original goals was to “bring those responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks to justice in accordance with the principles of international law.” Below are some answers to frequently asked questions about the 9/11 case in the military commission currently taking place on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo. Is the U.S. military commission conducting a trial concerning 9/11? No, the legal proceedings at Guantanamo are only PRE-TRIAL hearings. How long have the pre-trial hearings taken place? When will a trial start? The pre-trial hearings are now in their 13th year. The arraignment took place on May 5, 2012. A trial date still has yet to be set. Who are the 5 defendants? Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Walid Muhammed Salih Mubarak Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi are accused of directing, financing, or training the hijackers on 9/11 As of September 2023, Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh has severed from the case, declared mentally incompetent to stand trial What work has Peaceful Tomorrows done as it relates to the 9/11 case? Peaceful Tomorrows is a 22 year old organization that encourages a multilateral, collaborative effort to bring those responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks to justice in accordance with the principles of international law Members have observed pre-trial hearings, drafted several Amicus briefs, and partnered with human rights organizations in the pursuit of justice, finality, and accountability How long has Peaceful Tomorrows been sending members to observe the trials? Peaceful Tomorrows is the only 9/11 family organization to have been granted non-government organization observer status to attend the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay PT representatives have attended pre-trial hearings at Guantanamo Naval Base since 2016. PT members also watch hearings from the CCTV sites stateside. What is a military commission? A military commission is a military court of law traditionally used to try the law of war and other offenses Who is the current judge? On August 20, 2021, Colonel Matthew N. McCall, US Air Force, was detailed as the 8th military judge in the 9/11 case Judge McCall announced his retirement on September 15, 2023, and anticipates he will remain on the case until December 2024; a new successor has yet to be named Who works for the military commissions? The military judge and his staff, the prosecution team, and the five defense teams – including a death penalty learned counsel – are all paid by the Dept of Defense to perform their respective functions What is a possible resolution to the case? Plea agreements would provide a stipulation of facts from each of the accused, answering the who, what, when, where, and why questions of the September 11th attacks. Plea agreements would result in guilty verdicts that would prevent the possibility of ever appealing those verdicts or sentences. A plea agreement could also allow a process for 9/11 family members to pose questions to the defendants; requesting information from the accused themselves. How can I observe the legal proceedings against the 9/11 accused? Family members and first responders can attend the proceedings in person on the Guantanamo military base through the Victim Family Witness Assistance Program or as an NGO observer representing Peaceful Tomorrows Additionally, the DoD has 4 Closed Circuit TV sites for 9/11 family members and first responders to view the proceedings in Fort Hamilton, Fort Meade, Fort Devens, and Fort Dix Where can I learn more about PT members’ experiences? Many PT members have written about their experience. Below is a list of non-exhaustive pieces: Opinion: Guantanamo Bay is Delaying Justice for 9/11 Families”, The New York Times Testimony of Ms. Colleen Kelly, founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Senate Testimony 9/11 Families like Mine want Plea Agreements, Teen Vogue Among The Iguanas - On life and the pursuit of death in Guantánamo Bay, The Indy I Lost My Father on 9/11, but I Never Wanted to Be a “Victim”, Nation For 9/11 families, it’s 22 years without answers, justice or accountability, The New York Post I Lost My Father on 9/11. I Am Still Ashamed of the Injustice Done in the Name of Families Like Mine, Time Letter to the Editor, The New York Times Where can I learn more information? A more detailed primer on the case can be found here Articles: The New York Times’ Carol Rosenberg and Law Dragon cover the trials Several former prisoners have written about their experience, including The Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Don’t Forget Us by Mansoor Adayfi An article about a friendship between a former guard and former prisoner can be found here. Information on the military commission, legal documents, and court transcripts can be found at www.mc.mil How can I get involved? Please reach out to the Rule of Law Committee at ruleoflaw.pt@gmail.com Membership: If you lost a family member in the 9/11/2001 attacks and would like to join September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows Supporters: Individuals who did not lose a family member on 9/11, but are interested in supporting the work of Peaceful Tomorrows members For additional information our to contact us directly, please email info@peacefultomorrows.org