It was a failure of the justice system back then, too.

And those failures linger. Last month:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/28/us/politics/september11-c...

> In a major blow to the U.S. case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, a military judge ruled on Friday that the prisoner’s confessions to F.B.I. agents were not voluntary and cannot be used against him at trial.

> … his confessions have always been challenged because the government used torture to question him in secret C.I.A. prisons years before he was charged.

	▲	qlte 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's beyond embarrassing how the Bush admin took cases that in 2003 would have produced a slam dunk guilty verdict from any federal court in the country and decided to taint the evidence with torture (producing a bunch of spurious unactionable garbage) to be "tough", so instead they've been in legal limbo for 2 decades.