GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Sept. 11 terror suspect Ramzi bin al Shibh told a military commission here Monday that "We are proud of 9/11'' and suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed again said he welcomed death as the U.S. government pressed ahead with a showcase terror trial on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration.
Navy guards initially shackled Bin al Shibh to the floor, but removed the chains after Judge Stephen Henley, an Army colonel, ordered them to.
''I really don't care whether I'm shackled or not,'' declared bin al Shibh, a Yemeni whose U.S. appointed lawyers argue he may be mentally unfit to stand trial in the mass murder of nearly 3,000 on Sept. 11, 2001.
Court records show that prison camp doctors have bin al Shibh on undisclosed psychotropic drugs. Monday, he and his four co-accused were wearing the white prison camp uniforms that guards give to compliant captives.
Monday's was the fifth hearing in the 9/11 capital case, which accuses the five men of financing, training and orchestrating the 19 men who hijacked the airliners for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror group.
All five men were held and interrogated for years by the CIA before their September 2006 transfer for trial here, and several of the accused asked the judge to exclude their American lawyers from the defense tables. ''The people who have tortured me received their salaries from the American government, and the lawyers do, too,'' Mohammed said.
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