At 12:18 p.m. on Feb. 26, 1993, in a parking garage below the giant complex, Yousef personally detonated a 1,200-pound bomb that he himself had designed and built. His objective, he later told investigators, was to topple one 110-story building into the other. He hoped this might produce a staggering 250,000 fatalities. In fact, the blast killed just six people, including a pregnant woman, most of whom were eating lunch on the other side of a thick wall from the bomb-laden vehicle. Still, more than 1,000 were wounded, hundreds seriously.

The blast, the largest incident ever handled until then by the New York City fire department in its 128-year history, caused damage that spanned seven levels, six of them below ground, created a crater 200 feet long and sent nearly 2 million gallons of sewage water rushing into the car park. It damaged a commuter train station nearby, halting the train service and snarling traffic, knocked out television stations with transmitters on the roof and nearly caused the collapse of the Vista Hotel directly above. Yet once the structural foundations were restored, the buildings returned to life just one month after the blast, and the city went on much as before.

Today, in the wake of the exponentially more devastating Sept. 11 assault, the earlier bombing might seem a mere historical footnote. No direct links between the perpetrators of the two Trade Center attacks have been established. Yet Yousef’s act was the ultimate example of past as prologue: It established what would not bring down the towers. And it proved that a small group of determined individuals were within reach of inflicting terrible punishment on the United States.

As investigators struggle to understand the conspiracy behind September’s catastrophe, its forbear remains in many ways a mystery. Despite an intensive, globe-spanning investigation that would send six defendants to prison, an astonishingly large number of loose ends remain, including the question of whether Ramzi Yousef conceived the plot alone or with the help of others. A bullheaded man given to bursts of braggadocio, he remains silent about any sponsors. Not surprisingly, two of the names that have surfaced in speculation are Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Furthermore, according to Neil Herman, a former senior FBI supervisory special agent in charge of the Joint Terrorist Task Force that investigated the bombing, “Ramzi Yousef himself remains a very shadowy figure. We were not able to establish [his] identity definitively.” Nor were authorities able to clarify where Yousef had spent most of his life, the identities of his family members or how he had funded his extensive travels throughout the world prior to his apprehension — much of it in first class seats.

The man convicted in the case used more than a dozen aliases. He had entered the United States in 1992 on an Iraqi passport bearing the name of Ramzi Yousef. He had no visa, and immediately asked for political asylum, a formality that resulted in his being admitted on a temporary basis. On New Year’s Eve, when consular staff were presumably otherwise occupied, he went to the Pakistani consulate, and, with a photocopy of old passport records, secured a new one, in the name of Abdul Basit. Basit turns out to have been born in 1968 in Kuwait of a Pakistani father and Palestinian mother.

For a variety of reasons, investigators settled on Basit as the terrorist’s true identity, although they were never absolutely sure. As Basit, he had apparently traveled from Kuwait to Britain in the late ’80s for an education — specifically, English language courses at Oxford and a degree in electronic engineering at a modest institute in South Wales. He seems to have educated himself in basic bomb-making skills while in the U.K., and then to have traveled to bin Laden-sponsored Afghan rebel camps. (One prominent critic of the case — an Iraq expert — disputes this entire scenario, arguing that the paperwork establishing Yousef as Basit appears to have been appropriated from a different person altogether.)

Whoever he is, the man is certainly no typical Jihadist. During his years on the run, Yousef’s lifestyle bore little resemblance to that of a religious fanatic. He frequented bars, strip joints and karaoke clubs, flirted relentlessly with women, including married women, and bedded plenty along his trail. Instead of religion, Yousef’s motivation appears to be purely political.

This much is certain: The man known as Ramzi Yousef came to the United States for the express purpose of killing as many people as possible. On his arrival on Sept. 1, 1992, he went directly to meet Mahmud Abouhalima, an old friend who’d seen action in the Afghan war against the Soviets (and who had been implicated but acquitted in the assassination of Meir Kahane). Abouhalima was now working as a chauffeur for Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind radical cleric in Jersey City, N.J., directly across the Hudson River from New York. Jersey City was home to a large, multinational Islamic community that included many recent arrivals, including some radical fundamentalists. Yousef assembled a small crew of conspirators who in short order rented a storage facility, obtained the components for a bomb and began mixing and testing the deadly chemical brew. Yousef was no suicide bomber; he had prepared an elaborate exit strategy, calling abroad to places he would visit on the run, and obtaining the replacement Pakistani passport.

On Feb. 26, 1993, the conspirators assembled a convoy consisting of a rented yellow freight van and two cars. They drove from Jersey City to the underground garage of the World Trade Center, and parked next to a wall containing crucial building supports for the north tower. Inside the van, Yousef lit four 20-foot-long fuses, each timed to burn down in 12 minutes. Then he got into one of the accompanying cars and drove toward an exit. He had a moment of panic when he found his path blocked by another van, but the other driver soon returned, and Yousef was on his way well before the bomb (which he’d topped off with bottled hydrogen for maximum force) went off. The ferocious explosion came perilously close to puncturing the foundation walls that kept sea water from flooding into the basements, an act that might well have rendered the structures permanently uninhabitable.

In the aftermath, FBI officials working on the case (code-named TRADEBOM) began sifting theories of authorship, ranging from Colombian drug cartels to Serbian terrorists. Almost immediately, though, through a combination of skill and luck, investigators located a piece of the van’s chassis in the vast wreckage. A vehicle serial number quickly led them to a rental office in New Jersey. The conspirators, knowing that failure to return a rental van would draw attention, had reported the vehicle stolen the day before. When one of Yousef’s associates, Mohammad A. Salameh, a Jordanian of Palestinian parentage, went to the rental office to claim his $400 deposit, a platoon of agents were ready to grab him.

Salameh, who had helped assemble and build the bomb, was carrying identification that led investigators quickly to the apartment he’d shared with Yousef, and to a bank account. Relying in large part on records of telephone calls made from the apartment, they rapidly built a database of suspects. Another investigative front opened when the suspicious managers of the storage facility unlocked the rental unit, and found the makings of a bomb factory. Two other conspirators wee quickly rounded up. Mahmud Abouhalima, the huge, reddish-haired veteran of the Afghan wars whom Yousef had met in training camps on the Pakistani frontier, was captured in his native Egypt and extradited.

Yousef had disappeared, but within seven months of the bombing, the four co-conspirators went on trial. Prosecutors introduced a mind-numbing array of circumstantial evidence (the trial transcript was almost 10,000 pages). At their sentencing in May 1994, the judge gave 240-year sentences to the lot and dispatched them to a high-security penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

It was during this period that the FBI learned the danger of too quickly dismissing informants with crazy-sounding stories. For some time before the Trade Center bombing, an ex-Egyptian army officer named Emad Salem, who worked for the FBI, had been worried about loose talk he was hearing in a makeshift mosque upstairs from a toy store in Jersey City. The mosque was run by the blind cleric named Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had fled Egypt where he faced charges of plotting to overthrow that country’s president. Having entered the United States despite being on a terrorist watch list, he routinely inflamed his immigrant flock with incitements to “kill the enemies of God.” Salem reported to the FBI conversations he had heard about bombings and assassinations. But the Bureau, thinking that he was exaggerating to justify his weekly $500 salary, and suspicious that he was working for Egyptian intelligence, fired him.

After the bombing in the underground garage, though, investigators had a chance to examine the computer of one suspect, Nidal Ayyad, who along with several other co-conspirators frequented the same mosque. On the computer was a letter written on behalf of an unknown terrorist group, warning that it had 150 suicide bombers standing by to “execute our missions against military and civilian targets in and out of the United States.” Horrified bureau officials quickly reinstated Salem, who went on to set up a sting operation that resulted in the convictions of the Sheikh and 10 of his followers for preparing another vast terror operation, one that included bombing major tunnels and bridges and the United Nations building.

Ramzi Yousef missed all of that. Right after the bombing, he had briefly paused to admire his largely unsuccessful handiwork from the opposite bank of the Hudson River, then headed to JFK airport for a first class seat to Karachi, Pakistan. Despite his precautions, Yousef’s role as the mastermind of the operation emerged fairly quickly, aided by such clues as a pair of fingerprints on a chemical bottle in the storage unit and immigration documents left in the apartment.

While investigators worldwide searched for him, he began planning a new and spectacular reign of global terror. In 1994 he began spending a considerable amount of time in the Philippines, and some of his more ambitious schemes included assassinating President Clinton and Pope John Paul II during visits there. One plot that came perilously close to realization called for the simultaneous in-flight bombings of 11 U.S. jetliners en route home from Asia. The plot fell apart just two weeks short of fruition when Yousef, working with a friend and co-conspirator named Abdul Hakim Murad, inadvertently generated a fire while cooking up a batch of chemicals in a Manila apartment in January 1995. Murad was apprehended by the police when he went back to the apartment at Yousef’s request to collect his laptop; Yousef, as he would do on numerous other occasions, left his friend in the lurch and fled the country. From Yousef’s laptop, investigators discovered the extent of the plot, which — had it worked — might have resulted in 4,000 deaths and the paralysis of the airline industry. As it was, Yousef had already pulled off a couple of practice tests, one of which killed a Japanese man onboard a Philippine Airlines jet. (Murad, a commercial pilot who was convicted of his role in the bombing plot, had — in a terrifying precursor of the events of this Sept. 11 — also been planning to either crash a plane full of chemical weapons into the CIA headquarters or to fly overhead and douse the entire area with poison gas.)

While Yousef remained at large, U.S. investigators considered every trick in the book to apprehend him, including a so-called honeypot trap, taking advantage of his weakness for beautiful women. Meanwhile, the reward for information leading to his arrest was increased to $2 million; newspapers in Pakistan, the Philippines and other hot spots were blanketed with ads, and matchboxes were even printed up and dropped over parts of Pakistan and the Afghan border region.

When Yousef was finally caught, on Feb. 7, 1995, nearly two years after the blast, it came as a sort of anticlimax. He was betrayed by an associate, a South African Muslim living in Pakistan whom Yousef had worked hard to recruit. Pakistani soldiers and police and U.S. agents surrounded the Islamabad safe house where he had been staying, and Yousef, who had been lying on his bed, simply got up and answered a sharp knock at his door. He’d been apprehended on the brink of a new adventure: In his room was a suitcase containing toy cars packed with plastic explosives, and a letter threatening to kill the Philippine president and poison the water supply if his friend Murad was not released. The informant, who collected the $2 million reward, now lives in the United States with his wife and child, outside the confines of the government’s Witness Protection Program but nevertheless armed with a new identity.

On the plane back to the U.S., Yousef inexplicably talked to investigators about his role in the Trade Center bombing. He even drew a diagram showing the van’s positioning at the time of the explosion — before reconsidering his confession and eating a piece of the drawing. Back in New York, under incredibly tight security, he got a double dose of American justice. In October 1996, he was found guilty of charges related to the airplane plot, which prosecutors had dubbed “48 hours of terror in the sky.” In November of the following year, he was convicted for his role in the Trade Center bombing.

He insisted on representing himself at the first trial; he cut a sharp figure in a tailored, double-breasted suit, frequently turned on the charm and generally represented himself surprisingly well, even getting hostile witnesses to contradict themselves. During the second trial, over the Trade Center bombing, he let his lawyer do everything, and steadfastly maintained his innocence. First, he denied his earlier confessions, then, after being sentenced to 240 years in prison, declared: “I am a terrorist and am proud of it.” He said that his goal was to change American policy in the Middle East; he accused the United States of killing innocent people, of mistreating Native Americans and other minorities and of itself inventing terrorism.

While Yousef lives out his days in Florence, Colo., in circumstances close to solitary confinement, many questions remain. William Gavin, who ran the New York FBI office during most of the TRADEBOM investigation, instinctively feels some bin Laden presence, spiritual or more direct, in both incidents, 1993 and 2001. Gavin notes that even though the 1993 bombing itself cost only about $20,000, that still seems like a lot for Ramzi himself to have contributed, and his extensive years on the run would have been expensive, too.

Bin Laden has said that he didn’t have the pleasure of Yousef’s acquaintance until after the Trade Center bomb went off. Even assuming that he is telling the truth on that front, it seems clear that Yousef received pre-Trade Center training and taught courses in a bin Laden camp, and that the Saudi shared common cause with the bomber on subsequent projects, including having Yousef train Philippine separatists and trying to draw him into the plot to kill Clinton. It’s known that the bin Laden organization gave him shelter after he fled the U.S.; Yousef stayed at bin Laden’s House of Martyrs hostel in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar and was living in a bin Laden safehouse in Islamabad when he was finally apprehended. In addition, one of Yousef’s convicted co-defendants in the Manila airline plot, Wali Khan Amin Shah, had at one point been a top aide to bin Laden.

Laurie Mylroie, an academic expert on Iraq, has been beating her drum for a theory putting Saddam Hussein squarely behind the 1993 bombing. In her book “Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War With America,” she lays out an elaborate scenario suggesting that Ramzi Yousef is not really Abdul Basit at all, but an Iraqi agent posing as Basit, who she believes is dead. Mylroie presents what she claims are discrepancies surrounding the only two pieces of evidence used to establish the man’s identity: fingerprints and signature. Investigators maintain that Mylroie is misconstruing evidence, but she has her backers, including Adm. James Woolsey, who was the director of the CIA at the time of the bombing. Woolsey says that release of key documents from Basit’s stay in England could clear up the identity issue and help resolve the matter. (British authorities have, to date, made no effort to clarify publicly exactly what information is in their files regarding Yousef’s identity.)

Meanwhile, several former investigators who were intimately involved in the case point out that, unfortunately, no special skills or expertise were required in the 1993 bombing. Says one, “The sad thing is, nothing he did is that intricate. The explosives were relatively simply made, relatively inexpensive. It was a big bomb, but it didn’t take tons of expertise. Most of it was common sense stuff. If you’d read Tom Clancy books you probably could do the same.”

On May 26, 1995, a memorial fountain was dedicated to the six victims of the 1993 blast. At that ceremony, directly above the spot where the rental van exploded, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani uttered these words: “The memorial that we’re dedicating today is a small reminder of the city’s grief, and a tangible homage to those whose lives were cruelly snatched from them by a handful of cowards driven by the poison of hatred.”

Like the lost traces of a previous civilization, that memorial fountain now lies beneath the rubble of last month’s apocalypse. The suicidal perpetrators of Sept. 11, with a thousand times as many dead on their hands, cannot reveal what they know. But Ramzi Yousef sits in a jail cell, with all the time in the world to think about whether he has anything he wishes to say.

The newspaper account of the debate in The Hill just reinforced the Republican spin, highlighting the Democrats’ decision to make people spend more money on the hated TSA and downplaying the actual existing Republican alternative to the proposal, which was not “spend less on the hated TSA” but rather “raise money for the hated TSA by slashing needed aid to states.” The Democrats won, or “won,” and now they will earn the fruits of that victory: well-deserved scorn from everyone. And Ben Nelson (D-Troll Town) voted with the Republicans. (Though surely having users pay the fees for supposedly necessary security measures is perfectly conservative, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? I mean besides the fact that the two sides in this debate weren’t actually “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “people who want to come up with a way of paying for the oppressive and useless national security state” versus “people who want there to be an oppressive national security state but hate government spending on feeding and sheltering impoverished people.”)

I don’t know of anyone not employed by the TSA or some other arm of Homeland Security that believes the TSA does a good job and deserves its massive budget, but everyone in Washington apparently feels differently (and is terrified of being blamed for “voting to cut TSA funding” if there is another terrifying and deadly underwear bomber, of course). This is why everyone hates politics and Congress and Washington. This and Iraq. And the drug war.

The area was evacuated for two hours until a bomb squad determined that the device was not dangerous.

At about 2 a.m. Saturday, a police officer discovered Miyakawa on a ladder not far from where the first contraption was found. Police said he was tying a similar “I Love New York” bag to a public lamp post.

Miyakawa was charged with two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the first degree, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the second degree, two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of second-degree criminal nuisance.

A judge ordered him held pending a psychiatric evaluation. His lawyer, Deborah J. Blum, said Monday that she is filing for emergency relief to have Miyakawa released. A court date was set for June 21 to review the results of the evaluation.

“He’s still being held,” Blum said Monday. “I believe that it was a gross misunderstanding and other than that I don’t have any other comment.”

Miyakawa, who was born in Tokyo and is about 50 years old, has worked for a New York-based architect Rafael Vinoly for the last 20 years and also has an independent design practice.

Vinoly’s firm released a statement Monday praising Miyakawa for his “extraordinary brand of professionalism” and said he has been a mentor to generations of young architects.

“Takeshi is a fabulous human being and a person of extraordinary talent,” Vinoly said. “We hope this misunderstanding is cleared up as quickly as possible.”

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement that the charges sounded “like a wild overreaction.”

“It’s hard to understand why a light-up bag in a tree would be treated as an attempted terrorist act unless there’s more to the story than has been reported in the press thus far,” she said.

In 2007, an artist touched off a terror scare in Boston by placing electronic devices around the city as part of a marketing stunt for Cartoon Network. The city closed bridges, roads and public transit before authorities realized the signs were not bombs.

On an average day, the NYPD receives nearly 100 reports of a suspicious package. Last year, there were more than 4,000 such reports. The number generally rises following any word of terror threats in New York and around the world.

The concourse checkpoint needs to be there.  Just the same, chances are good that once an adversary has made it to the airport, he or she has engineered a way to outwit the system.  And spend as we might, there will always be a way to outwit the system.  ”Even if our technology is good enough to spot it,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, commenting on the news of the latest underwear plot, “technology is still in human hands and we are inherently fallible.”

That’s one of the smartest things I’ve heard a politician utter in some time.

Getting a handle on this takes us all the way back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day that everything, and yet really nothing, changed.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Conventional wisdom holds that the 19 hijackers exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling box cutters onto four Boeing jetliners. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mind-set — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. (In prior years, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.”) The presence of box cutters on 9/11 was merely incidental. The men could have used almost anything — a deadly sharp can be fashioned from a broken first-class dinner plate or a ballpoint pen — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The success of their plan relied not on hardware but on the element of surprise. It wasn’t a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was a failure of national security — a breakdown of communication and oversight at the FBI and CIA level.

To put it succinctly: The success of the 9/11 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security at all — a great and painful irony, of course, to any passenger forced to endure the checkpoint rigmarole in 2012.

Not that frontline guards don’t play a deterrent role.  And, in the opinions of some, the plot uncovered in Yemen underscores the value of full-body scanners — those controversial walk-through machines that allow guards to look beneath a passenger’s clothing. It’s a compelling argument, but the way in which these scanners have — and have not — been deployed is apt to make some of us cynical. For instance, the vast majority of body scanners are found at U.S. domestic airports. Overseas, where a bomb is far likelier to originate, they are rare. Is this really about safety, we wonder, or is it about billions of dollars going into the coffers of the companies contracted to build these machines?

And although the scanners are effective, where does the arms race end?  Not long ago, the idea that passengers would be marched through body scanners and photographed naked before being allowed to board an airplane, would have seemed outrageous. Yet here we are. What might be next?  The stubborn truth is, we can turn airports into fortresses if we want (in some respects we’re well along that path), yet we’ll never be entirely safe. Airport screening alone, no matter how thorough, how expensive, and how technologically advanced, will never defeat a relentless enough, resourceful enough adversary intent on downing a plane.

That isn’t capitulation, it’s reality.  And acknowledging this reality would go a long way toward warding off panic and overreaction when the next successful attack occurs.

Regrettably, too, we often forget that commercial air travel has long been a target of terrorist extremists.  The 1970s and 1980s in particular were, as I like to describe them, a Golden Age of Air Crimes, comparatively rife with bombings, hijackings and other deadly assaults against airplanes and airports. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks, including the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people; and the incredible saga of TWA Flight 847.  And let’s not forget what might have been, such as the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the 1994 scheme masterminded by Ramzi Yousef (nephew of Kalid Sheikh Mohammad), in which impossible-to-detect (at the time) liquid explosives were to be used to simultaneously destroy a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately the plot unraveled and Yousef was arrested.

While we can argue, quite persuasively, that many of the current-day security measures have done little if anything to make us safer, we’ve nevertheless introduced measures that have been useful and effective, from explosives screening of checked luggage to the sorts of trans-border partnerships that broke up the most recent plot from Yemen. Whether in spite of, or because of, the attention we’ve lavished on All Things Terrorism, the past decade has seen fewer attacks against commercial air travel than any since the 1950s.What we need to remember, though, is that our success has had more to do with the security measures we don’t see than those taking place in plain view. And if our luck is to hold, we need to better rationalize and streamline our entire approach to airport security. For instance, if we’re going to have those body scanners, let’s put them where they’re needed. If this requires negotiating with foreign authorities whose airports are beyond TSA’s jurisdiction, so be it. Meanwhile, here at home, TSA’s one-size-fits-all approach, in which every single person who flies is seen as a potential threat, is simply unsustainable in a country where close to 2 million people fly daily. Things like taking snow globes from children, haggling over tiny container sizes, or confiscating a dessert fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot (it happened to me) serve no useful purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, they divert valuable time and resources away from the things that could make us safer.  Let’s scale back that concourse Kabuki and retrain guards in the finer points of a more sensible, risk-based assessment of passengers and their belongings.

And lastly, if only as an aside, let’s behold for a moment the term “underwear bomb.”  That was the operative phrase in literally hundreds of articles and broadcasts over the past several days, and nowhere did it raise a snicker.  What does it say about our country, I wonder, that such a preposterous expression is instantly understood and effectively taken for granted?

Strange times indeed.

This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.

The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.

“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’

Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.

Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.

Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.

“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’

Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.

And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.

It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.

The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.

A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.

Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.

The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.

To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.

Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.

By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.

We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)