Top al Qaeda official Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to planning the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States, plus a string of others.
"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," Mohammed reportedly said in a statement read during the session.
He made the confession during a military hearing held Saturday at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prison, according to a 26-page transcript released Wednesday by the Pentagon.
The transcript refers to a claim by Mohammed that the CIA tortured him, but he said he wasn't under duress when he confessed.
The colonel heading the three-member panel said the torture claim would be investigated.
Mohammed took responsibility for planning 28 different attacks, including some which were never carried out.
Those attacks include:
- The 1993 truck bombing attack on the World Trade Center in New York, killing six and injuring more than 1,000,
- The 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, killing 202, and
- The effort of shoe bomber Richard Reid to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight.
Mohammed also claimed to have worked on plans to attack the Panama Canal, London's Big Ben and to assassinate former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
Some of Mohammed's remarks in the transcript were blacked out.
"(Mohammed) was one of al Qaeda's master bomb-makers. He's a really innovative bomb designer, with a number of very frightening and very impressive designs behind him," security expert John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute told Â鶹´«Ã½net.
Mohammed had also trained other bomb-makers for al Qaeda, and some of those people are likely still at large, he said.
Other suspects
The Pentagon also released transcripts from the hearings of Abu Faraj al-Libi and Ramzi Binalshibh, two other top al Qaeda operatives.
Binalshibh, a Yemeni, is suspected of involvement in 9/11 and has been linked with a foiled plot to crash aircraft into London's Heathrow Airport.
Al-Libi, a Libyan, reportedly helped plan two bombings carried out in Pakistan in December 2003. Those attacks were designed to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for his support of the U.S.-led war on terror.
All three men had been arrested in Pakistan.
The hearings began last Friday and are being conducted in secret. The military has limited the information being provided to the news media, saying it wants to prevent sensitive information from being disclosed.
The U.S. military is trying to determine whether 14 alleged terrorist leaders should be declared "enemy combatants," a designation that would allow them to be held indefinitely and prosecuted by military tribunals.
Hearings for six of the 14 have been held to date.
The 14 had been in the U.S.'s secret CIA prison network before being moved to Guantanamo in September.
About 385 men suspected of ties to either al Qaeda or the Taliban are being held in Guantanamo Bay, including Canadian Omar Khadr.
The 20-year-old is accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.
With files from the Associated Press
