The C.I.A. reported that even after Sept. 11, Baluchi was involved in plots against Western targets in Pakistan, including the United States Consulate in Karachi. And the agency says that when Mohammad was arrested in 2003, his plans for another spectacular operation fell from uncle to nephew. Baluchi is said to have pursued, among other things, a kind of British Sept. 11, in which Al Qaeda would hijack planes from Heathrow, turn them around and crash them into the airport and an office building in the Canary Wharf business district. Security was deemed too tight, however, and the plot evolved to taking planes from Eastern European airports and crashing them into Heathrow.

But the C.I.A. learned of these plots from Mohammad after its operatives began waterboarding him, which they did at least 183 times. Much of what he said during that period has since been proved false. Mohammad later retracted those statements, even as he continued to boast of his own involvement in Sept. 11.

The day after the meeting with Baluchi at Camp Echo was a hearing day. Security was tight. Baluchi was brought into the hearing room, a large space with one long table for each of the five defense teams, a chair at the end of each table for a defendant and a row of inward facing seats against a side wall for the guard force. Two uniformed men walked on either side of Baluchi, latex-gloved hands on his biceps, and deposited him in the chair next to his legal team. He wore sunglasses. The white light in the room is a trigger for him, worsened by a brain injury that a psychologist consulting for the defense says he received in C.I.A. custody. Pradhan says that although Baluchi didn’t see natural sunlight for three years when he was in the secret prisons, the C.I.A. used bright artificial light together with beatings, dousing, extreme cold, nudity and extreme noise so that for him all these things are connected.

Baluchi sat down and slipped off the basketball sneakers he was wearing; he would follow the proceedings in socks. There weren’t enough chairs at Baluchi’s table, so Pradhan knelt beside him as they waited for the judge. Even if Pradhan and Baluchi had been speaking above a whisper, the few people (including me) watching from the gallery and those watching via satellite feed probably wouldn’t have been able to hear what they were saying. All that observers — generally press, family members and nongovernment-organization workers — can hear is the sound loud enough to be picked up by microphones and piped out on a 45-second delay. It’s an arrangement set up as a fail-safe, in case someone in the room says something classified. The judge would then have the better part of a minute to cut the feed before observers hear something they’re not supposed to.

At least, that’s how everyone thought it worked, until the proceedings took one of their strangest turns a few years ago. One of Mohammad’s defense lawyers was explaining why evidence from the C.I.A. black sites had to be preserved, when, according to press reports, a red light in the courtroom lit up, and the feed died. The judge, Col. James Pohl, was confused. He hadn’t stopped it. But he thought he was the only one who could stop it. An unseen entity — most suspect the C.I.A. — had gained access to the feed without anyone knowing. (Asked for comment, the C.I.A. referred me to the Department of Defense, which said the feed was cut “due to a concern at the time that classified information was potentially being divulged.”)

Other cases of suspected monitoring by unseen entities followed. A few months after the courtroom audiovisual incident, one of Pradhan’s colleagues, Cheryl Bormann, a lawyer for Walid bin Attash, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard and a suspected Sept. 11 planner, was meeting with her client when she noticed a small electronic module on the ceiling. The guard said it was a smoke detector. Bormann was curious, so she did an online search for the brand name she’d seen on the side of the unit, and it turned out to be an audio-surveillance device. Somebody was listening in on privileged attorney-client meetings. Or at least, someone had the ability to. But in yet another pretrial hearing, the chief of the guard force testified under oath that he thought it was a smoke detector. Which meant whoever installed the listening device did so without even the guards knowing. Army officers argued at the time, and a Department of Defense spokesman later told me, that the devices were holdovers from the rooms’ previous use and furthermore that the “capability” to monitor rooms “does not establish the fact of abuse or misuse of that capability.”

The defense claims even more peculiar things have happened. There was the F.B.I.’s trying to turn a security contractor working for the defense into an informant. And there was one of Baluchi’s co-defendants claiming to have recognized his appointed interpreter as a man present during his torture at one of the C.I.A. black sites. Pradhan now operates under the assumption that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. are spying on the defense. She doesn’t think they do it to gather more intelligence but instead to give the prosecution a leg up and to control the dissemination of information about torture. She doesn’t have any evidence; it’s just the only explanation she finds plausible. “You don’t try and try and try and try again to interfere with the attorney-client relationship unless you’re going to get something out of it,” she says. “Our theory of the case has always been that the prosecution is working closely with the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.” The F.B.I. declined to comment, and the C.I.A. referred me to the prosecution. When asked, the prosecution acknowledged that it works closely with intelligence and law enforcement, but vehemently denied that its cooperation involves spying on the defense. Pradhan believes it anyway.