A military judge has thrown out the so-called “clean team” confessions of Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a capital defendant in the 9/11 case at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He is accused of helping the hijackers with finances and travel to the United States.
The Pentagon did not immediately release the 51-page decision dated Oct. 2, 2026 by Col. Michael Schrama. Portions of it were marked CUI for Controlled Unclassified Information, making some of it subject to review by a security officer and, potentially, redactions.
But, based on unclassified passages, a key basis of the judge’s suppression ruling was a decision by the George W. Bush administration to not let federal agents give a Miranda-style warning to the prisoner when they questioned him across four days in January 2007 at Guantanamo Bay.
At the time, al-Hawsawi, a Saudi citizen, had been held prisoner by the United States for nearly four years, mostly in solitary confinement by the CIA, which treated him brutally. Once he was transferred to U.S. military custody in Guantanamo, the Bush administration sent agents as “clean teams” to question him and other former CIA prisoners to try to obtain untainted confessions from them.
He is the third defendant in the long-running terrorism case to have his statements suppressed. Judge Schrama has yet to rule on a challenge by the fourth, Walid bin Attash, who allegedly helped train some of the hijackers.
“Crucially, the FBI agents deliberately chose not to give Miranda warnings or any equivalent rights advisement,” the judge wrote in his Oct. 2 decision. “Furthermore, they failed to provide a cleansing warning informing Mr. Hawsawi that the statements he had previously made under coercion to the CIA could not be used against him.”
“To a person who has experienced years of operant conditioning, a simple assertion of a ‘blank slate’ by agents of the same government is wholly insufficient to sever the psychological tether of prior coercion,” Judge Schrama wrote.
“Operant conditioning” was the term used by psychologists who were hired by the CIA to develop an interrogation program for suspected al-Qaeda terrorists: The CIA started off using violent “enhanced interrogation techniques” that instilled fear in the captives, and then impressed upon them that they could be punished if they did not continuously cooperate across years of questioning by representatives of the U.S. government.
The al-Hawsawi decision was also the fourth time a military judge rejected the Justice and Defense Departments’ effort to obtain fresh, lawful confessions from former CIA captives who had been held out of reach of U.S. courts in black site prisons between 2002 and 2006.
The first, most sweeping decision threw out the interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the summer of 2023. Al-Nashiri is accused of a key role in the Oct. 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen that killed 17 sailors. Col. Lanny Acosta Jr., an Army judge, concluded that al-Nashiri was so broken by the time he was questioned in 2007 that his ability to not incriminate himself was “intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before.” Prosecutors appealed that decision and lost.
Then in April 2025, an Air Force judge, Col. Matthew McCall, threw out the confessions of Ammar al-Baluchi. Like al-Hawsawi, al-Baluchi is accused of sending funds to the men who hijacked passenger planes on Sept. 11, 2001 and killed nearly 3,000 people. Prosecutors appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Military Review, a Pentagon panel, which has yet to rule.
Then last month, Judge Schrama suppressed the 2007 statements of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the 9/11 plot. Prosecutors chose not to appeal the judge’s ruling to try to preserve a June 2028 trial date.
For years, prosecutors have been defending the use of the 2007 “clean team” interrogations as their best evidence in the 9/11 case, which started with five defendants but now has four after one was ruled to be mentally unfit to stand trial.
The idea was that, at trial, federal agents could testify to what the defendants told them in what they described as consensual interviews. With these now unavailable, prosecutors will likely have to pursue their case with financial documents, transcripts of wiretapped conversations, and other statements attributed to some of the defendants.
In the instance of al-Hawsawi, two FBI agents, Abigail Perkins and James Fitzgerald, met with him in January 2007 at a lock-up called Echo II at Guantanamo. He had been brought to them blindfolded and in shackles similar to those used by the CIA in his previous years of detention and rendition. Then, with an ankle shackled to the floor, they showed him documents that appeared to link him to money transfers to some of the hijackers.
They testified in lengthy pretrial proceedings that al-Hawsawi voluntarily answered their questions and understood that he could have asked to be returned to his solitary cell at the military prison any time he wanted.
By then, he had been in custody for nearly four years and been held overseas in six different CIA prisons, starting with one known as Cobalt in Afghanistan. CIA employees described this location as a dungeon or resembling a Nazi concentration camp. There, he was brutally interrogated, sometimes naked and sometimes in a diaper, according to a narrative in Judge Schrama’s ruling.
In one instance, al-Hawsawi was kept awake for 24 hours and then interrogated for the next 14 hours, nonstop with “continuous rotational sessions consisting of water-dousing, walling, attention grasps, facial holds, facial slaps, cramped confinement, and psychological pressures.” A CIA interrogator offered the opinion that the “water dousing,” which was not approved, had the same near-drowning effect of waterboarding, the judge wrote.
The judge also found that al-Hawsawi was subjected to an “unduly rough body cavity search” in November 2003 that left him bleeding.
But Judge Schrama’s decision did not dwell on the question of whether there was torture. Rather, he found that those who designed and carried out the “clean team interviews” in 2007 failed to meet the legal principle of attenuation, essentially getting an untainted confession after a coerced one.
Prosecutors argued that the law enforcement agents’ conversational-style interviews with the future defendants met the attenuation standard of a change in time, change in place, and change in identity of the questioner.
None of the men had been charged at that point, and none had been allowed to consult an attorney.
For al-Hawsawi in particular, the government’s claim that his circumstances had changed was less credible because of the venue of his 2007 interviews: Camp Echo II. As a prisoner of the CIA, from November 2003 to April 2004, al-Hawsawi had been held and questioned in the same compound of small huts, each with a cell inside and space for interrogation. It was this decommissioned black site near the prison camps where the Defense Department held military detainees.
“A detainee who is shackled, transported to a former CIA black site, and intentionally kept ignorant of both his right to remain silent and the inadmissibility of his prior coerced confessions, cannot be said to be making an ‘essentially free and unconstrained choice,’” Schrama wrote.
Not only did Bush administration officials affirmatively decide to omit rights advisements, they also chose not to record the new interviews.
Instead, the agents who conducted them wrote narrative accounts of the men’s admissions on “Letter Head Memorandum” and then testified that they believed the defendants cooperated voluntarily, and in some instances even bragged about what they had done. The memos were never signed or reviewed by the defendants. They would only see them much later after prosecutors included them in pretrial discovery.
