Khalid Shaikh Mohammed

They make an unlikely pair, the world's most notorious captured terrorist and the Navy captain assigned to defend him against war-crimes charges that could lead to his execution. But together, the two men are quietly embarking on a legal odyssey that could last years, and may ultimately help define the constitutional parameters of the United States' role in the global war on terrorism. On three occasions over the last few weeks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described orchestrator of the Sept.

WASHINGTON - The military judge overseeing the trial for alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others has ruled that lawyers cannot make public even unclassified materials. The ruling by the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl, follows an order on Dec. 6 in which he directed that any evidence or discussion about harsh interrogation techniques used against the five men also be kept secret. He issued the ruling despite accusations by human rights groups that the government was trying to hide the fact the men were tortured.

Military attorneys for confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators called Friday for the dismissal of the charges against the men, saying an Air Force general advising the tribunals applied "unlawful influence" to bring them to trial. The defense motion followed Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred's ruling last week that disqualified Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann from the case against Salid Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver.

WASHINGTON - The judge in the military commission case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other suspected Sept. 11 plotters ruled that details of harsh interrogation techniques used on them would be kept secret during their trial, a decision that human rights advocates called an attempt to hide the fact that the men were tortured. The order, signed by Army Col. James L. Pohl on Dec. 6 and made public Wednesday, represents a clear victory for U.S. military and Justice Department prosecutors in the opening round of pretrial disputes.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has told American interrogators that he first discussed the plot with Osama bin Laden in 1996 and that the original plan called for hijacking five commercial jets on each U.S. coast before it was modified several times, according to interrogation reports reviewed by Associated Press.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was on the run in Pakistan, but the Al Qaeda operations chief never lost sight of his target: a historic synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba. French and Spanish investigators say that as he changed hide-outs and phones to avoid capture last year, he also managed to put into motion the intricate machinery that he had built to kill by remote control: A Tunisian named Nizar Nawar cased the target using the cover of a job in Djerba's bustling tourist industry, they say.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda agent believed to have been a key organizer of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, spent a year here in the mid-1990s. From the way he behaved, it's little wonder no one suspected him of being dangerous to anything but his bank account. Evidence collected by Philippine investigators describes a man far different from the usually abstemious Al Qaeda agent. In Manila, where police say he used the name Abdul Majid, he met associates in karaoke bars and giant go-go clubs filled with mirrors, flashing lights and bikini-clad dancers.

A joint team of Pakistani and U.S. agents arrested Al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed near Pakistan's capital on Saturday and began interrogating the terrorist who claims to have masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. Pakistani intelligence agents led the early morning raid on a safe house in Rawalpindi, southwest of Islamabad, arresting Mohammed and an unidentified Middle Eastern man.

Federal authorities did little last week to dispel reports that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who allegedly helped plan the 9/11 terror attacks, will soon be indicted in federal court in New York. If this occurs, we will finally -- after many false starts -- have a courtroom showdown deserving of the otherwise overused label "trial of the century." A public trial of Mohammed in downtown Manhattan would challenge virtually every component of the U.S. legal and political system.

Two senators who watched Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confess to planning the Sept. 11 attacks and other plots said that his allegations of mistreatment by U.S. captors should be taken seriously. "To do otherwise would reflect poorly on our nation," Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a joint statement. Mohammed gave military officials a written statement alleging mistreatment before arriving at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

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.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The lawyer for a man convicted of killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl said in Pakistan that he would appeal his client's death sentence after reports that an Al Qaeda lieutenant recently confessed to the slaying. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed claimed at a U.S. military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he personally beheaded Pearl in 2002. An anti-terrorism court sentenced Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born militant, to death for involvement in Pearl's killing.

1. Which city was attacked 911 days after 9/11? A) London B) Bali C) Madrid D) Cairo E) Los Angeles 2. Where did Richard Reid hide his explosives? A) His suitcase B) His beard C) His jacket D) His shoes 3. Which of the following terrorists is saving investigators some time by writing an autobiography?

A senior Al Qaeda military commander strongly warned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed not to kill Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, cautioning him "it would not be wise to murder Pearl" and that he should "be returned back to one of the previous groups who held him, or freed. " But Mohammed told his U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that he cut off Pearl's head anyway, according to U.S. military documents posted on the Internet on Monday by WikiLeaks. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept.

His words leave little doubt about his role. It is his punishment that remains uncertain. Four years ago, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed not only brazenly portrayed himself as mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The senior Al Qaeda operative also bragged to a U.S. military tribunal that he had directed other major terrorist attacks around the globe. Mohammed claimed responsibility for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, for the "shoe bomber" attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner in 2001, for the deadly bombing of a nightclub in Indonesia, for planned assassination attempts against Pope John Paul II and President Clinton, and for aborted attacks in London, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere.