“'The prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammad’s statements to the F.B.I. were voluntarily given,” Schrama wrote, according to the ruling’s conclusion."
"The military judge overseeing the long-delayed prosecution of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed recently threw out the terrorist’s confession to FBI agents, dealing a major blow to the government’s case. Now, the judge’s writings have come under scrutiny for his criticism of conservatives in the military.
"Lt. Colonel Michael Schrama, an Air Force judge presiding over the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, ruled Friday that statements Mohammed made to FBI agents in 2007 were not given voluntarily and could not be used against him at trial. The ruling came just days after Schrama set June 5, 2028, as the start date for Mohammed’s trial, nearly 27 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
"Mohammed had previously been subjected to CIA interrogations, including 183 instances of waterboarding, after his capture in 2003. Prosecutors had already excluded statements from those interrogations. Schrama went further, finding that the effects of the earlier interrogation continued to influence Mohammed when he was questioned by FBI agents at Guantanamo in 2007.
"But scrutiny of the judge has also revived a 2023 essay in which Schrama argued that the military needed new legal tools to combat what he described as a growing domestic extremism which he attributed to the military’s “conservative tendencies.” . . . More.
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