Guilty Plea From 9/11 Mastermind: A Challenge To Put Them To Death?

As footnotes go, this is a pretty big one: 9/11 terror attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants now say they want to plead guilty.

However, Mohammed told a pre-trial hearing at Guantánamo Bay that he would postpone entering his plea until an investigation ordered by the presiding judge into the mental state of two of his co-defendants is complete.

The five men face death sentences if convicted for their roles in the 2001 attacks, but the trial would not begin until after President-elect Obama takes office and he is opposed to the military tribunal system, while also pledging to close Guantánamo.

In the end, the maneuver seems more of a challenge to the U.S. to put the men to death than anything else.

Or as Will Bunch puts it so well:

"These terrorists don't just want to die anytime. Although there's virtually no chance this could actually happen, they'd love to die in the next 43 days.

"While George W. Bush is still the president of the United States.

"Because if anything strikes fear in the hearts of Al Qaeda, it's the things that could happen to them after Barack Obama becomes the commander-in-chief.

"It's not torture. Just the opposite. They're afraid of a real, public trial, with regular rules of evidence, in the style of American justice that was once the envy of the world -- a trial that would reveal the slime of Al Qaeda and the sad details of its cowardly slaughter of innocent people on that day seven years ago. A trial that would be conducted on U.S. soil, and not at Gitmo, the symbol of what much of the world now considers to be an American gulag."

For the first time, nine relatives of 9/11 victims (sketch, above right) were flown to Cuba by the military to watch the hearing.

Pool sketches by Janet Hamlin