In a little over two months, our nation will mark the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001.
For the readers of this newspaper, that morning is not a distant abstraction. It is the field at Shanksville, a 30-minute drive from Johnstown.
It is the names carved into the white marble of the Wall of Names at the Flight 93 National Memorial. For my family, it is my brother, Edward P. Felt, who was murdered that day alongside the other passengers and crew members aboard United Flight 93.
Twenty-five years. And the man who planned their murders has never stood trial.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — known as KSM, and identified by the 9/11 Commission as the principal architect of the attacks — has been in American custody since 2003 and held at Guantanamo Bay since 2006.
Charges were brought in 2011. Pretrial hearings began in 2012. And there, astonishingly, the case has remained ever since — mired in pretrial motions, with no trial, no verdict, and no end in sight.
Most Americans do not know this. Many assume the matter was settled long ago. It was not.
Why? The reasons are difficult, and they deserve honesty.
First, the evidence is tainted. KSM and his co-defendants were held in secret CIA prisons and subjected to what our own government’s records describe as torture.
Statements taken under those conditions are constitutionally suspect, and the fights over what may be admitted have consumed years. A prosecution built on the foundation of torture struggles to reach a verdict that will stand. That is the price of having abandoned our own principles.
It is also what produced, two summers ago, a plea deal. Worn down by a case that may never reach a jury, military prosecutors negotiated an agreement: KSM and two co-defendants would plead guilty and accept life in prison without parole, and in exchange the death penalty would be taken off the table.
To many of us, it felt like a betrayal — the quiet shelving of the most consequential criminal case in our history, the mastermind’s crimes folded into a bargain and tucked away without the public trial we were promised for two decades.
The pushback was immediate and fierce. Within days, the secretary of defense moved to revoke the agreement, and that reversal has itself been fought through the courts ever since. We were left with the worst of all outcomes — no trial, no plea, and no assurance that either will ever come.
Second, there is the uncomfortable question of Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and for more than two decades, 9/11 families have pursued a civil suit alleging that Saudi government employees gave them material support.
Last August, a federal judge ruled the case may finally proceed toward trial. Yet the Kingdom remains a courted ally, and administration after administration has been reluctant to press the matter. Accountability and diplomacy have collided, and accountability has too often given way.
Third, there is a failure of political will. The subject is polarizing, implicating choices made by both parties across a quarter-century, and it is easier to let the case drift quietly on a Caribbean island than to make the hard decisions that finishing it would demand.
And fourth — perhaps most corrosive of all — there is the erosion of memory. A generation has grown up with no living recollection of that morning.
The unfinished business of Sept. 11 has slipped from public view, and when a nation forgets that justice has not been done, it stops demanding that it be.
I trust a functional process that leads to a just verdict. I want the defendants to have a vigorous defense and for the world to see the evidence leading to what I believe will be a conviction. What I cannot accept is the absence of any reckoning at all.
The 2,977 people murdered that morning were ordinary Americans and citizens of the world — office workers and visitors trapped in the towers, the firefighters and police officers who climbed the stairwells as others rushed down, service members and civilians at their desks in the Pentagon, and the passengers and crew members of four hijacked airliners.
They came from scores of nations and every walk of life, a complexly diverse people bound together in the worst hours our country has known in a generation.
They did not have the luxury of time. Our government has had 25 years.
I think often of the families who began this long wait and did not live to see its end. Each year, more of them pass – never having seen the men who planned the deaths of their loved ones answer for it in court.
That is the quiet tragedy unfolding alongside the headlines: Justice deferred until there is no one left to receive it.
There will be no closure here; there is no such thing. The families of Sept. 11 do not move on. We move forward, carrying our loved ones with us.
But moving forward does not mean loosening our hold on accountability. It means insisting upon it, year after year, until it is met.
As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, I ask the readers of this newspaper — and our elected leaders — to remember that this story is not finished.
Forty of our fellow citizens aboard United Flight 93 found the resolve to act in 35 minutes, changing our course of history.
Surely a great nation can find the will, before another quarter-century passes, to finish what their courage began.
Gordon Felt is the longtime spokesperson for the Families of Flight 93.