A military judge on Wednesday threw out the last disputed confession in the 9/11 case at Guantanamo Bay, ruling that defendant Walid bin Attash’s statements were inadmissible at trial because federal agents failed to tell him that his earlier interrogations by the CIA could not be used against him.
Bin Attash is accused of conducting surveillance on U.S. carrier passenger planes in Asia before 9/11 to detect security vulnerabilities. He is also accused of training two of the 19 hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in the hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001.
The Pentagon did not immediately release the 63-page decision dated Oct. 7, 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 subject to redaction.
But, based on unclassified passages, the judge found that FBI agents had not done enough to distinguish bin Attash’s interrogations across 10 days in 2007 and 2008 from the previous four years when he was held incommunicado and interrogated, at times brutally, in secret CIA prisons.
The bin Attash decision was the fifth straight loss in the capital trials at Guantanamo to the prosecution’s plans to use confessions taken by federal agents (working in so-called “clean teams”) because whatever confessions the CIA got interrogating the men were inadmissible.
Combined, the five decisions by three military judges constitute a sweeping repudiation of the system developed by the George W. Bush administration to turn the page on a legacy of torture by obtaining fresh, lawful confessions from former CIA captives who had been held beyond the rule of law in black site prisons. Rather than finding the statements were clean, each of the judges found they were contaminated for different reasons by the prisoners’ questioning across their years of incommunicado detention.
In the instance of bin Attash, Judge Schrama wrote that federal agents didn’t do enough at Guantanamo to make clear that his participation was entirely voluntary in 2007 and 2008, and that what he had said before could not be used against him.
In other words, the judge described conditions at Guantanamo like those in the CIA black sites when, the defense lawyers argued, the CIA conditioned its captives to answer questions in exchange for rewards.
At Guantanamo, the judge wrote, the confessions could not be voluntary because “Mr. bin Attash faced a specialized guard force, a team of government interrogators, and questioning in a former C.I.A. black site on topics he had previously been forced to discuss under coercion.”
Agents testified that they went out of their way to make bin Attash comfortable and to emphasize that he was in charge of his interrogations and could speak about whatever he wanted, or not speak at all.
They brought him dates and tea and treats and lead questioner FBI Agent Stephen Gaudin dressed up in a typical Yemeni pantsuit to build rapport with bin Attash. But the judge found fault in the agents’ failure to provide a so-called “cleansing statement” that clearly explained to bin Attash that nothing he told the CIA previously could be used against him.
Testimony in pretrial hearings showed that the Bush administration lawyers forbade that kind of language, and also prohibited the reading of a classic Miranda-style warning to men who had been held by the United States since 2002 and 2003, and never had been allowed to consult a lawyer.
As for Agent Gaudin’s rapport-building techniques, the judge noted that the evidence showed the CIA also gave bin Attash “tea, soda, fresh kebab, bread, and figs to secure his cooperation during interrogations.” Rather than turn a page on the torture, the judge concluded that the circumstances at Guantanamo constituted “environmental continuity” that “effectively maintained the coercive psychological pressure established by the CIA.”
The other three defendants in the 9/11 case who had their statements excluded were:
- Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the 9/11 plot.
- Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who is accused of sending funds to the hijackers at the behest of Mohammed.
- Ammar al-Baluchi, who is also accused of helping the hijackers with finances.
Prosecutors are appealing the al-Baluchi decision. If overturned, 9/11 case prosecutors would have new law as a basis to ask Judge Schrama to reconsider his rulings in Mohammed, al-Hawsawi, and bin Attash.
Abd-al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of a key role in the Oct. 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen that killed 17 sailors, was the first former CIA prisoner to have his confession suppressed. Jury selection in his trial is scheduled to start this month.
His lawyers are also studying the bin Attash ruling. The judge in the al-Nashiri case, Col. Matthew Fitzgerald, has approved a prosecution request to admit the just-excluded bin Attash interrogations, and use them against al-Nashiri at the Cole trial. Al-Nashiri’s lawyers may ask Judge Fitzgerald to reconsider his decision.
Bin Attash is described in al-Nashiri’s charges as a key player in the Cole bombing, although he has never been charged for the attack. Guantanamo’s military commissions have a different, more liberal legal standard than the one used in regular federal courts for using third-party statements as evidence, even if it’s intermingled with otherwise inadmissible self-incrimination.
