Defending 'the most hated man in the world'

Prince was appointed by the Defense Department, and in January moved into the defense team's unmarked working quarters in a nondescript commercial low-rise in Rosslyn, Va., a suburb of Washington near the Pentagon. He said he soon began to feel badly outgunned by the big team of government lawyers and investigators that had for years been building the case against Mohammed.

Difficulties abound

Prince has to share a paralegal with another detainee lawyer, and he still hasn't gotten top-secret security clearances for Scott McKay and David Nevin, the two Idaho-based civilian attorneys who, along with Army Lt. Col. Michael Acuff, make up his legal team.

He said he had trouble getting the Pentagon to take him to Guantanamo and, once there, to allow him to see his client. And, he said, all of his requests for discovery material have been denied.

He said he had also been hamstrung by institutional obstacles, including evidentiary rules favorable to the prosecution that will probably allow the use of hearsay and confessions and other evidence obtained through coercion.

Prince said a protective order he had to sign prohibited him from discussing publicly anything his client said to him, even to people who could potentially be corroborating witnesses. And, he said, he is prohibited from taking his notes with him after interviews with Mohammed, making it more difficult to follow up on the information.

Hartmann, the legal advisor at Guantanamo, said he could not discuss any specific pending case, including Mohammed's. He did say that the Pentagon was devoting extraordinary resources to the defense of the five defendants and that their combined legal team was larger than that of the prosecution.

Hartmann also said that although the protective order was in place to safeguard classified information, he was unaware of any restrictions on defense lawyers using the information to pursue leads that could help their clients. And he said the military commissions were working to improve lawyers' access to classified materials.

Meanwhile, Prince is trying to build rapport with a client with whom he has few, if any, mutual interests -- a client with an extreme distrust of anyone working for the U.S. government, especially someone wearing a military uniform. The CIA has admitted that Mohammed is one of three suspected Al Qaeda leaders that it subjected to waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.