20 years later, victim’s families still waiting for accused 9/11 masterminds to go on trial 

TAMPA, Fla. - On the morning of September 11, 2001, Sylvia and John Resta were supposed to be at a doctor’s appointment. She was seven months pregnant with their first child. For some reason, it got rescheduled, his brother Tom told Fox 13.

The Restas were traders on the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. They died that Tuesday morning, 19 years ago.

“They were just classically, the kind of people that you would say, to know them was to love them,” Tom Resta said.

In the nearly two decades since their death, Tom has been telling their story, even traveling to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba with other 9/11 family members for the pre-trial hearings for the five accused to masterminding the attacks. 

“It’s very frustrating for us because it just drags on and on,” he said. “It’s also just surreal, sitting behind the defendants in the courtroom, separated by the triple-pane glass.”

Though Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the four others arrived at Guantanamo Bay in 2006, the case has yet to be brought to trial. 

Last year, a judge gave a start date of January 2021. But then COVID-19 happened.

No lawyers have been down to the Navy base since the pandemic was declared. No court session has been held since February. Resta says he was one of the family members chosen in a lottery to attend the hearings again this year. That was all canceled.

The New York Times’ Carol Rosenberg has covered the case since it began and says for years, it’s been plagued with delays—even before the pandemic.

“There’s still an open question about what evidence applies,” Rosenberg said. “There’s still an open question about literally how they’d mount this trial. We are in the midst of pre-trial hearings that have been ongoing, and bringing down FBI agents and CIA contractors to discuss whether confessions taken from those men will be admissible in trial. It’s a huge mini-trial within the trial, and it’s ongoing.” 

At the center of the debate: whether evidence the CIA got through “enhanced interrogation,” or torture, can be legally used in court.

Mohammed, known as “KSM,” was captured in 2003. As Rosenberg explains, America was reeling from the attacks, and the government was focused on stopping any future attacks.

“As they captured them, they didn’t give them lawyers, they didn’t charge them,” she said. “They saw them as assets to interrogate through what became this very violent program of enhanced interrogation. They started down a course that derailed what would have been the New York City trial that the people could have gotten in those early days.”

Nineteen years later, she says, the five remain behind bars an undisclosed location on the island. Called “Camp 7” the prison is so clandestine, the defense teams don’t even know its location.

The prosecution, Rosenberg says, has told families they have to go slowly to give an appeal-proof conviction. Right now, she believes jury selection could start by next June.

So families like the Restas can find justice for their loved ones, nearly 20 years later.

“The whole process has been frustrating right from the beginning, and I just hope we can see it through to the end,” he said. 

This story was reported from Tama, Fla.