Hello and welcome to Friday, Aug. 28, 2026 — bow ties, red wine, and cherry turnovers all sharing the calendar today, and somehow it's also the anniversary of one of the most consequential speeches in American history.
My calendar says it's Thoughtful Day, Rainbow Bridge Remembrance Day, Red Wine Day, Power Rangers Day, Bow Tie Day, and Cherry Turnover Day. Do something thoughtful for somebody, pour a glass of red wine ( and spare me the UB40, please), put on a bow tie just because you can, and remember a pet you've lost along the way — it's been that kind of week for a lot of people.
Today in History:
1565: Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés sights land near present-day St. Augustine, Fla., laying the groundwork for what becomes the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in the continental United States.
1609: English explorer Henry Hudson discovers Delaware Bay while searching for a northwest passage to Asia.
1789: Astronomer William Herschel discovers Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, during the first use of his newly built 40-foot telescope, the largest in the world at the time.
1830: The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Tom Thumb steam locomotive races a horse-drawn car to demonstrate steam power's future on American rails — and loses, running out of steam before the finish.
1833: The Slavery Abolition Act receives royal assent across the British Empire, outlawing the ownership or purchase of enslaved people.
1955: Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi after being accused of offending a white woman, a killing that helps galvanize the civil rights movement.
1963: Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have a Dream" speech to a crowd of some 250,000 during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
1968: Police and anti-Vietnam War protesters clash violently outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, images that shake the party for years afterward.
1996: The divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana is finalized. Forgive the observation, but we know how that worked out for everyone concerned.
Birthdays Today include: Leo Tolstoy, novelist (War and Peace, Anna Karenina); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writer, philosopher (Faust); Shania Twain, singer-songwriter ("Man! I Feel Like a Woman!"); Jack Black, actor, musician, comedian (School of Rock); LeAnn Rimes, singer ("Blue").
Your birthday, too, is it? Well, have a good one, then.
* * *
I find myself frustrated today.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is back in our headlines — and this time there's an actual reason, which somehow makes it worse. A military judge just set a trial date for the man the 9/11 Commission itself named "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks." That date: June 5, 2028. Not next year. Not the year after. Roughly 27 years after the attack, twenty-five after his capture, and a full twenty years after his 2008 arraignment.
Twenty years between arraignment and trial. If your own lawyer told you your trial wouldn't start for two decades, you'd assume you'd wandered into a dark comedy sketch. Instead, it's just Friday at Guantánamo.
For those under the age of 30, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, remains alive and held at Guantánamo Bay primarily because he has never been formally tried or sentenced, due to decades of legal, procedural, and evidentiary entanglements.
Why the bleep is this waste of air still alive, still uncharged in any final sense, still generating fresh headlines a full generation after the crime?
Look, gang, I understand the original rationale for keeping a high-value terrorist alive long enough to squeeze him for intelligence. After all, this wasn't some low-level courier. KSM was al-Qaeda's head of propaganda and, per Britannica, claimed to have personally beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 — a claim later independently verified. If the government believed he could hand over intelligence that would save American lives, keeping him breathing while extracting it made sense. For a while. Maybe a year. Three, tops. But certainly not 27 years.
A quarter century and counting, with two more years now bolted onto the end of it. Whatever intel this guy had must be worthless by now — al-Qaeda's surely changed the locks on the wall safes since then.
Twenty-five years is an almost incomprehensible stretch of bureaucratic limbo. Four full administrations, two parties trading the chair back and forth. An entire generation has grown up knowing September 11th only as a history-textbook chapter, the way earlier generations knew Pearl Harbor. The United States has fought wars, ended them, rebuilt its intelligence apparatus twice over, and hunted down most of al-Qaeda's original leadership, with bin Laden himself becoming fish food 15 years past. And yet, we’re still burning through billions keeping the Guantánamo machinery running.
And KSM is still there. Still waiting. Still consuming staggering amounts of legal, military, and administrative bandwidth, one of the last remaining detainees left at the facility. At some point, "what can we still learn from this guy" stops being a serious question and becomes institutional paralysis wearing a legal costume.
And this isn't merely bureaucratic molasses. It's self-inflicted. Plea agreements that would have spared Mohammed and two co-defendants the death penalty got negotiated, then blown up by a divided federal appeals court in July 2025, and the Supreme Court is still sitting on whether it'll even review that decision. So the government spent years hammering out a resolution, watched it collapse, and is back at square one — except square one now comes with a 2028 court date, because the case remains stalled by disputes over evidence obtained while these men sat in CIA black sites and were tortured, the same evidentiary fight that's dragged this circus along for two decades.
Speaking of torture: A 2014 Senate report confirmed the CIA waterboarded Mohammed 183 times, a series of interrogations one Senate document literally described as "near-drownings." That's not a footnote. That's the stated reason this evidence fight is still eating up courtrooms two decades later. Somewhere along the way, somebody decided that being gentle with a confessed mass murderer mattered more than closing this case and tied the courts up with that notion ever since.
So, why? Why did we spend years interrogating this man and decades failing to close his case? Why does a case that should have produced a conviction, a sentence — any definitive resolution — keep lumbering through the system a full generation later, with the judge himself pushing the date nearly seventeen months later than prosecutors even requested?
And most importantly: what did we actually get for those twenty-five years? If KSM's intelligence value justified all this, somebody needs to explain what that intelligence actually accomplished. I'm not asking for sources and methods splashed across the front page. But there ought to be some accounting, even in broad strokes, for a quarter century of this.
Because otherwise, what we're left with is genuinely extraordinary: We captured one of the men most responsible for nearly 3,000 American deaths, held him for decades, buried the case under endless proceedings, and 27 years later, we're still setting court dates two years out. That's not exactly a triumph of American efficiency by any definition.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for a shortcut to a firing squad. It would be emotionally satisfying, to say nothing of less expensive, but our Constitution, the courts, and due process don't evaporate just because the defendant is one of the most loathsome human beings alive. If we're going to punish someone, the process needs to survive scrutiny.
But due process and endless process are two vastly different things, whatever some in Washington want to pretend. There's a real difference between carefully administering justice and letting a case calcify into a permanent monument to governmental indecision — one now scheduled a full seven years past its original arraignment.
So here we are, 25 years after KSM entered American custody, freshly back in the news with a brand-new date on the calendar. Which brings me right back to my original question, the one nobody in Washington seems eager to actually answer: Why?
What, precisely, have we accomplished in a quarter century that couldn't have been accomplished in dramatically less time? If the honest answer is simply "that's how the system works," maybe it's time somebody in actual authority asked the harder follow-up questions: Has the system itself become the problem? Is this suicidal empathy, writ large, institutionalized, and running on autopilot?
And let's imagine the worst case — Democrats retake the White House in '28. Does this trial get postponed again, right on schedule, the same way it always has been?
The guy is 61 years old and has been in the slam for 25 years. You have to figure that eventually, health concerns are going to come up. And so, too, then, is the possibility of him meeting his 72 virgins before any of this nonsense gets settled.
It's time for us to acknowledge that there's a difference between reactions to security crimes such as this during wartime and during peacetime. 9/11 was a declaration of war. We do not defeat those who declare war on us by legalistic arguing about interrogation methods. In wartime, national security should always take the lead. Twenty-seven years of courtroom drama is exactly what happens when it doesn't.
While I'm on the subject of National Security and Islam, let's consider the Muslim Brotherhood. They've told us they'll impose Sharia in America through the ballot box or the bullet. Is it not time for us to react accordingly? Or will this get caught up in First Amendment fights? See how this works?
Thomas Jefferson himself wrote:
A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means.
Or as others have put it, the Constitution isn't a suicide pact. Priorities, ya know.
Thought of the day: Elon Musk created $1 trillion of value. Congress created $39 trillion of debt. Democrats claim Elon's the problem?
VIP members: The comment section is open for your thoughts, as always. Your voice matters. Go for it.
Take care today, gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.
Recommended: Why Abdul El-Sayed Wants to Talk About Your Body
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are once again respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
Help us continue to report on the administration’s peace through strength foreign policy and its successes. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member