For Jackson, there is no question of what precipitated the reversal: He says that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of the other accused intimidated his client into rejecting counsel. “It was very clear to me what happened,” Jackson said, noting that al-Hawsawi was visibly shaking during the courtroom encounter. The prisoners had been escorted into the courtroom and briefly appeared to be laughing and joking, seemingly happy to see each other. But upon learning that al-Hawsawi and another of the detainees planned to cooperate with defense counsel, Mohammed glared at them and reportedly said: “What, are you in the American Army now?”

Last week, Judge Ralph H. Kohlmann, the Marine colonel presiding over the proceedings here, held individual hearings with each of the accused to ascertain whether any of the men had somehow been coerced into rejecting counsel and to implore them to change their minds.

The commission rules, in a nod to international fair trial standards, explicitly permit self-representation. Beyond the difficulties any accused criminal would face defending himself without a lawyer, U.S. officials doubtless remain worried that the 9/11 defendants will use their day in court to make grandstanding speeches impugning the U.S. and the Bush administration’s war on terror. If last week’s hearings are any indication of what is to come, the defendants are likely to direct attacks against the military commissions themselves, and not without reason. Given the enormous flaws in the procedures at Guantánamo — particularly the use of coerced and secret evidence — the defendants may not need professional lawyers to show legitimate shortcomings in the process.

Hearings for the five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks have been problematic from the start. Ramzi Binalshibh, the alleged 20th hijacker, refused to appear before the commission at all. According to his lawyers, he is mentally disturbed and taking a cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Unlike at past hearings in which military extraction teams were sent in to force the detainee to appear in court, Guantánamo officials allowed him to miss the hearing, probably because he is scheduled to have a hearing next month on his mental competency to stand trial.

The four others each appeared individually in the courtroom last week, their military and civilian counsel sitting beside them. Reading from a prepared script in a slow and deliberate voice, Judge Kohlmann asked each of the accused whether or not he had made the decision to represent himself of his own free will.

“Did any of the other accused do anything as a directive to you about the choices you should make about these proceedings?” he questioned.

“Without a doubt, no,” al-Hawsawi responded in his hearing. “Absolutely no.”

Judge Kohlmann asked the question several more times, in different ways. Was there anything that could be perceived as a threat? Are any of the other four men in a position to influence your actions concerning defense counsel?

Again, in each hearing, the detainees answered with a definitive “no.”

Judge Kohlmann spent the better part of each hearing warning the men about the dangers of self-representation. “I think it is unwise to represent yourself and I strongly advise you to accept representation of counsel as is your right under the Military Commissions Act,” he said.

He warned that the accused are facing very serious charges and could be sentenced to death. Legal defense counsel, he instructed, could file legal motions, make objections in the courtroom, cross-examine witnesses, call witnesses to the stand and present material as evidence much better than the defendants could. In addition, he noted that the accused, because they lacked security clearances, would not be given access to classified material before the trial, which could seriously hinder their abilities to represent themselves.

Indeed, from their cells in Guantánamo, it would be virtually impossible for the defendants to adequately defend themselves. (The accused don’t have access to telephones, computers or a law library, and obviously cannot travel to interview witnesses.) The military commission restrictions go well beyond what regular criminal defendants would face representing themselves.

This may be precisely one reason that the accused, perhaps at the behest of Mohammed, are insisting on representing themselves. None of the men seem particularly concerned about winning their case; they have already admitted guilt, and they say they are proud of their acts and would like to be sentenced to death. On their way to so-called martyrdom, they are eager to point out the injustices of Guantánamo. As various reports in Salon and elsewhere have shown, they have ample material to work with, thanks to the Bush administration’s policies at the prison.

At one point in the proceedings, Judge Kohlmann warned: “Self-representation is not a license to abuse the dignity of the courtroom, nor is it a license not to comply with relevant rules of procedure and substantive law.” He added that if any of the accused violated the rules, they would lose their right to self-representation and counsel would be appointed. He seemed to sense what was coming.

At each opportunity they had to speak, the detainees seemed intent on drawing attention to the flaws in the military commissions process. Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who prefers to go by the name Ammar al-Baluchi and is accused of transferring money to the 9/11 hijackers and helping them buy plane tickets, told the court that although he understood that his lack of experience in law put him at a disadvantage, he didn’t think it would make much of a difference because he rarely got to see his lawyers anyway. Defense counsel are not permitted to speak with their clients by phone and have to fly to Guantánamo and go through extraordinary security procedures to get a meeting with them.

“I do not know what they will do in my absence,” al-Baluchi said, explaining that it was impossible for him to oversee the work of his lawyers from Guantánamo. He added that he had written two letters and a motion to Judge Kohlmann, but that authorities had refused to deliver them to the court. It later emerged that part of the problem was that everything the so-called high-value detainees write is presumptively classified — and that because a “privilege team” responsible for declassifying such documents had not yet been appointed, there was no process in place to deliver material from the accused to the court.

Al-Hawsawi voiced similar complaints. When asked if he understood the disadvantages of representing himself, he answered through the court interpreter, “I understand that you appointed a lawyer for my defense. But they are deprived of some materials … If you do not trust the lawyers, with all respect to the lawyers present, how do you expect me to trust them?”

Walid bin ‘Attash, who is alleged to have helped train several of the hijackers for the 9/11 attacks, focused primarily during his hearing on the lack of access to classified information. “If I am representing myself and I cannot view classified information and there is no lawyer, then who is going to review these documents?” he asked the judge.

Kohlmann explained that he would appoint lawyers as standby counsel and that they would be allowed to review the documents, but that they wouldn’t be able to tell the accused what the documents said.

“I can’t review classified documents because I am not authorized, but the lawyer can?” Bin ‘Attash continued. “The charges are against me. My lawyer is not going to serve any death sentence. I feel I have the right to review these classified documents.”

Judge Kohlmann said that he understood the argument, but that under the rules of the military commissions, Bin ‘Attash did not have that right.

“As a judge appointed by the American government … do you think this is a just trial?” Bin ‘Attash pressed.

Judge Kohlmann said he would not discuss his personal opinions and asked if Bin ‘Attash still wished to represent himself. At one point, government prosecutors said they planned to make as much of the classified evidence as possible available to the accused to review in planning his defense, noting that they had already turned over more than 7,000 pages of documents. Bin ‘Attash said he welcomed that gesture, but that the documents were all in English and that he needed them to be translated into Arabic.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also complained about the lack of access to classified materials as well as his treatment by U.S. authorities since his capture. Addressing the judge in English, he made a point strikingly similar to the one made by Bin ‘Attash: “This is a capital case. I could receive the death penalty so it make [sic] no sense that I can’t see classified material.”

The prosecution told the court that it would make sure that the accused was able to look at any of the evidence it planned to introduce into the courtroom before the trial, but that he would not be able to see secret evidence that the prosecution did not plan to introduce into evidence. When asked how much evidence there was, the prosecutor described it as “a lot.”

“I know, it is five years torturing so for sure it will be a lot,” Mohammed said.

Before being transferred to Guantánamo in 2006, Mohammed and his co-defendants were held incommunicado in secret CIA detention for two to three years and government officials have acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, a form of torture in which the victim is made to believe that he is drowning. In a thinly veiled reference to his treatment, Mohammed asked the judge, “Will we be able to see evidence from early days? When we first been arrested? From March 2003? Or just later?”

Mohammed went on to say that his correspondence with his lawyers had been opened by Guantánamo authorities, that he had not received letters and other documents his lawyers had sent to him over a month ago and that he did not have any legal-size paper. In addition, he said that he had written a motion to the judge, but that apparently the court had not received it.

The judge explained that whether it was for small matters, such as a lack of paper, or big matters, such as the rules of the court, Mohammed would have to file a motion.

Courtroom observers were left to speculate as to how it was possible for the accused to file a motion to receive paper when he did not have any paper with which to file a motion, or when, should he get some paper, there was no procedure for delivering that paper to the court.

“You have from the mundane and the ridiculous to the serious and significant,” said attorney David Nevin, regarding Mohammed’s various assertions. (Nevin would be Mohammed’s civilian defense lawyer if the accused were to accept counsel.) But the circumstances of the commissions, he said, result in an inability for Mohammed to represent himself.

Nonetheless, with the possible exception of al-Hawsawi — who said he had not yet made up his mind about whether to accept counsel or not — all of the accused said that is exactly what they planned to do.

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.)