"I'm looking to be martyr for long time," he said in serviceable English, improved, perhaps, by five years of custody, including three in secret CIA prisons. The arraignment on Thursday of Mohammed and four other detainees the US Government says were high-level co-ordinators of the September 11 attacks was the start of hearings in the case, which is the centrepiece of the Bush Administration's war crimes system.

But it was also the first public appearance by Mohammed, who has long cast himself in the role of super-terrorist, claiming credit in the past not only for the 2001 plot, but for about 30 others, including the murder of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Pakistan. Mohammed worked to get as much control as possible over the proceedings. Peering through big, black-rimmed glasses and sporting a bushy grey beard, he rejected US lawyers as agents of the Bush Administration's "crusade war against Islamic world," saying he would represent himself. He said the lawyers could stay to help him as advisers. By day's end, each of Mohammed's four co-defendants had said he wanted to represent himself. That could turn the trial into a jumble of rhetoric and a new opportunity for critics to attack the Guantanamo system as designed to get easy convictions.

The judge, Colonel Ralph Kohlmann, agreed to permit three of the men to represent themselves. But in the case of Ramzi Binalshibh, who was to have been one of the hijackers, he said he wanted to further investigate a report from a military lawyer that Binalshibh has been on psychotropic medication. When Colonel Kohlmann asked Binalshibh why he was taking the medication, security officials cut the sound fed to reporters in a glassed-in gallery and a media centre. It was one of several times when a national security consultant cut the sound when detainees appeared to be discussing what several of them said had been years of torture.

Mohammed managed to get the reference through the censor twice. "After torturing" he said, "they transfer us to Inquisition land in Guantanamo." CIA officials have said that Mohammed was one of three detainees subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. Mohammed looked lean compared with the photo taken of him after his 2003 capture. He chanted verses in Arabic and then translated them into English, and he vied with Colonel Kohlmann for control of the courtroom.

All five accused men were held in the secret CIA program and transferred to Guantanamo to face charges in the military commission system. The New York Times