Sifton said the depth and breadth of Mohammed's statement was ''weird . . . He's linked to everything,'' he said.

''The confession sounds like something that was taken off WhiteHouse.gov,'' Sifton said. ``This is precisely why people are supposed to have lawyers.''

Before Mohammed's hearing, the Pentagon said it would issue transcripts scrubbed to protect national security after a military intelligence review.

It is unclear from the context whether operation No. 3 was completed or never carried out -- like the vast majority of operations he claimed to have plotted on the list.

Later, in broken English, Mohammed himself spoke in the transcript, seemingly supporting the statement that was read on his behalf.

He had already admitted at that point to swearing an Islamic oath of allegiance to the al Qaeda chief, bin Laden, ``to conduct jihad of self and money.''

Then he appeared to be appealing to the military panel -- as though one soldier to another.

'What I wrote here is not, `I'm making myself hero,' when I said I was responsible for this and that,'' he is quoted as telling the officers in the room.

``But you are military man. You know very well these are language for any war.''

HIGH-VALUE DETAINEES

Mohammed was the most notorious of 14 so-called high-value detainees who arrived at Guantánamo in September by order of President Bush; until then, they had been held by the CIA and had not been given contact with the International Committee of the Red Cross, which maintains international prisoner rolls the world over.

Since their arrival, they have been transferred to Pentagon custody, though kept out of sight of other prisoners on the base, and allowed to meet Red Cross delegates, who gave them the opportunity to write family. It is not known whether the Pakistani-born man who was raised in Kuwait wrote home, but another captive yet to appear before a review board wrote his mother in Indonesia.

The Pentagon released the transcript along with those of two other alleged al Qaeda masterminds -- Ramzi Binalshibh, who has been cast as a deputy planner in the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Faraj al Libi, a Libyan who allegedly plotted the unsuccessful assassination of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.