NATIONAL
October 17, 2012 | By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
FT. MEADE, Md. — Three of the five alleged Sept. 11 conspirators, including purported mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, refused to attend a pretrial hearing Tuesday where lawyers argued over one of the significant overlying issues in their case — whether potential evidence of torture and other classified material will be discussed publicly in their trial at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The government wants a protective order prohibiting the release of material from CIA "black sites," the secret prisons where the defendants were held before being moved to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
NATIONAL
October 15, 2012 | By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
- Pretrial hearings for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged top Al Qaeda terrorist operatives opened Monday with a ruling that the defendants cannot be forced to attend the legal proceedings at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The decision by Judge James L. Pohl came after Mohammed and his codefendants sat quietly and respectfully during the opening day of testimony at Guantanamo, sharply different from their courtroom protests during their arraignment last spring.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 7, 2012 | By Richard Rayner, Special to the Los Angeles Times
The tale told by former Los Angeles Times reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer in "The Hunt for KSM," the story of the pursuit, capture and interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of9/11, at times so resembles something straight out of "24" or the Bourne movies that the authors have to keep reminding the reader that this is for real. On the one hand, "The Hunt for KSM" is a flat-out thriller. On the other, it lays out aspects of our factual contemporary world that are far more ambiguous, internecine and dangerous than anything Hollywood dare contemplate.
NATIONAL
May 6, 2012 | By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
U.S. NAVAL BASE GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - The defense team for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, now formally charged with capital murder in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, on Sunday angrily called the military commission legal process a political "regime" set up to put him and his four accused collaborators to death. David Nevin, Mohammed's civilian attorney, said new rules imposed under the Obama administration barred the lawyers from discussing with their clients whether they were mistreated by U.S. authorities and, in the case of Mohammed, tortured after their arrests eight years ago. "We are operating under a regime here," Nevin said.
NATIONAL
May 5, 2012 | By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the boastful self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sat in a small blue chair for hours at the opening of his capital murder trial — holding his tongue. As Saturday wore on, it became clear that Mohammed and the four other defendants were staging a silent protest, aimed at both confounding the U.S. military court system here and demonstrating to the outside world that they do not acknowledge America's control over them.
TRAVEL
March 12, 2012 | By Terry McDermott
Among the many reasons Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man who planned the Sept. 11 attacks, should be tried in an American court of law, there is this: "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head. " The murder of Pearl, the Wall Street Journal's South Asia bureau chief, was but one of 31 attacks or planned attacks that Mohammed confessed to in front of an American military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on March 10, 2007.