Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man the United States says masterminded the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, confessed to the attack and to plotting a reign of anti-American terror across the planet, according to a military transcript of a weekend hearing at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, released Wednesday.

''I was responsible for the 9/11 operation -- from A to Z,'' he is quoted as saying in the 26-page transcript, posted on the Defense Department website at the close of business Wednesday.

The confession likely clears the way for the Pentagon to try the man that the United States says was Osama bin Laden's operations chief before a military war-crimes court empowered to sentence alleged terrorists to death.

No attorney was present at the status hearing in front of a panel chaired by a Navy captain and meant to determine whether he could be classified as an ''enemy combatant.'' The Pentagon also barred the news media.

According to the transcript, an Air Force lieutenant colonel read a 31-point list of operations -- some completed, some planned -- while Mohammed sat in a hearing room on Saturday.

In them, Mohammed, 43, allegedly confessed to the Sept. 11 attacks and its 1993 World Trade Center predecessor attack, and to plotting assassination attempts on Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II.

He said he dispatched so-called shoe-bomber Richard Reid to down American airplanes; plotted the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing that killed 162 people, most of them Australians, and plotted unrealized attacks on far-flung landmarks.

The unrealized attacks included the Big Ben tower in London, the Panama Canal, Chicago's Sears Tower, New York's Empire State Building, the port city of Eilat in Israel, NATO headquarters in Europe and the New York Stock Exchange.

He said he also plotted attacks on the American embassies in Indonesia, Australia and Japan, and the Israeli embassies in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Australia.

LIST CLARIFIED

According to the transcript, Mohammed was listening to the U.S. officer's recitation and interrupted at item 29 to clarify he was not uniquely responsible for an unsuccessful Pope John Paul assassination attempt in the Philippines, date unknown.

''I was not responsible, but share,'' said Mohammed, prompting the officer to go back and reread the claim of shared responsibility, not sole responsibility.

Missing from the list were the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which the United States has broadly blamed on al Qaeda.

Only one of his list of 31 was censored: No. 3.

No. 2 was the 9/11 attack. No. 4 was the ill-fated shoe-bombing, aboard a Paris-to-Miami flight.

The Defense Department had earlier ordered a news media blackout at the proceedings -- an about-face from an earlier policy. Previously, reporters watched a Guantánamo detainee address a three-officer panel in a trailer at Camp Delta at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

Mohammed arrived at Guantánamo last year -- three years after Pakistani security forces captured him in Rawalpindi and turned him over to U.S. intelligence agents for secret interrogation at a so-called CIA ``black site.''

CRITICS OF DETENTION

Human rights and international law attorneys have protested the secret detention.

''Why are we here in 2007 having this happen? Why wasn't Khalid Sheik Mohammed arraigned in March of 2003 in America? He wasn't captured on the battlefield. He was captured in Rawalpindi [Pakistan],'' said Human Rights Watch attorney John Sifton in New York, less than a mile from Ground Zero.