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Guantanamo Bay: The accused Al Qaida mastermind of the September 11 attacks stood in a US military court on Thursdaysang a chant of praise to Allah and said he would welcome the death penalty.
"This is what I wish, to be martyred," Pakistani captive Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the highest-ranking Al Qaida operative in US custody, told the Guantanamo war crimes court.
He and four accused co-conspirators appeared in court for the first time on charges that could result in their execution.
As the judge tried to question him about whether he was satisfied with the US military lawyer appointed to defend him, Mohammad stood and began to sing in Arabic, cheerfully pausing to translate his own words into English.
Crusader war
"My shield is Allah most high," he said, adding that his religion forbade him from accepting a lawyer from the US and that he wanted to act as his own attorney .
He criticised the US for fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, waging what he called "a crusader war," and enacting illegal laws including those authorising same-sex marriages.
The judge, Ralph Kohlmann, tried to persuade Mohammad to accept an attorney, telling him, "It's a bad idea for you to represent yourself."
Mohammad looked old and portly and wore a long, bushy grey beard and big black military-issue glasses. He wore a neat white tunic and turban, in stark contrast to the saggy white undershirt he wore in photographs taken after his capture during a raid in Pakistan in March 2003. Mohammad and co-defendants Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mustafa Ahmed Al Hawsawi and Walid Bin Attash are charged with committing terrorism and conspiring with Al Qaida to murder civilians in the attacks that launched the Bush administration's global war on terrorism .
They also face 2,973 counts of murder, one for each person killed in 2001 when hijacked passenger planes slammed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. All five defendants came to court willingly and none were shackled inside the courtroom, a spokeswoman for the trials said.
Mohammad told a military review panel last year that he approached Osama Bin Laden with the proposal to hijack passenger planes and crash them into landmark US buildings, then oversaw execution of the plan "from A to Z," according to US military transcripts of the hearing.
But Mohammad cast doubt on that transcript in yesterday's hearing. "They mistranslated my words and put many words in my mouth," he said.
The other defendants are accused of helping choose, train and fund the 19 hijackers. Prosecutors want to start the trial on September 15, a date the defence says was chosen to influence the US presidential election in November.
The CIA has acknowledged interrogating Mohammad using a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and condemned as torture by human rights observers.
Exclusion
Visitors not allowed
As the Guantanamo war crimes court prepared to arraign five prisoners on death penalty charges of orchestrating the September 11 attacks, a Pentagon official apologised on Wednesday for excluding victims' families from the hearing. The US military quietly invited one woman whose brother was an American Airlines pilot killed in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon in the 2001 attacks.
But the invitation to attend yesterday's arraignment at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba was rescinded when the New York Daily News revealed that lone invitee Debra Burlingame was an ardent defender of President George W. Bush who spoke in support of his administration at the Republican Party convention during his 2004 re-election campaign. Relatives of other victims complained that the Guantanamo trials were being politicised.
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