A camouflage-cloaked Khalid Sheik Mohammed was back in court yesterday, and up to his old tricks.
A day after disrupting a pretrial hearing with a rambling, anti-American rant, the 9/11 plotter frustrated a military judge with a bizarre request to attend private scheduling sidebars.
“My client would like to attend this conference,” Mohammed’s lead attorney, David Nevin, said. “I don’t want to keep anything secret.”
But the judge, Col. James Pohl — who had earlier OK’d Mohammed’s request to wear military clothing and admitted he erred in letting the terrorist make a speech — denied the motion.
Prosecutors in the Guantanamo Bay hearing countered with a motion to empanel an anonymous military jury. If the names of the panelists were to come out, prosecutor Edward Ryan said, they would “have targets on their backs.”
Ryan said some serve in hot spots where al Qaeda has a known presence.
The tribunal is scheduled to meet again today and then for another week of hearings in December before a trial is held some time next year.