Free Republic

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge and wouldn't listen to Arabic translations as they confronted nearly 3,000 counts of murder. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants defiantly disrupted an arraignment that dragged into Saturday night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court. It wasn't until more than seven hours into the hearing that prosecutors at the U.S. military base in Cuba began reading the charges against the men, including 2,976 counts of murder and terrorism in the 2001 attacks...

The FBI investigation into a group of Seattle-based militant Muslims has a bigger target, federal sources say: Abu Hamza al-Masri, the firebrand Islamic cleric in London who supports Osama bin Laden and whose mosque is considered a recruiting ground for the al-Qaida terrorist network. The investigation accelerated late Monday when federal agents in Denver arrested James Ujaama, 36, a central figure in the Seattle group. He is being held on a material-witness warrant issued by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, the Justice Department's hub for international terrorist investigations. Ujaama and others connected with a now-defunct...