GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The chief judge for military commissions disclosed Tuesday at the war court that he will retire from the U.S. Marine Corps in seven months and may not preside over the full Sept. 11, 2001, mass murder terror trial.

Moreover, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann disclosed that he has lined up post-retirement work handling civil litigation such as sexual harassment and federal compensation act cases for U.S. forces and others at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Kohlmann revealed the retirement plans while defense lawyers for the 9/11 accused asked questions probing for potential bias at a pretrial hearing in the complex capital conspiracy case.

Kohlmann presided at the June arraignment of alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators, and has been deciding motions toward trial ever since. All five men could be executed if convicted of war crimes at trial before a jury of U.S. military officers.

The Marine colonel said he put in his paperwork for an April 1, 2009, retirement date in February. He turns 50 in December.

Unclear was whether Kohlmann will have served the maximum 30 years in uniform at the time of his retirement, which would make it mandatory.

Asked whether he thought the complex death penalty case would be completed by then, the judge replied: ``I won't speculate about whether that's likely or not. People can figure that out for themselves.''

Defense lawyers have argued that it will take a year or more to prepare for such a complex capital case, in which the CIA interrogated the suspected terrorists overseas for years in secret, without benefit of counsel.

Kohlmann, who as chief of the court assigns judges to specific cases, said he was prepared to assign the 9/11 case to a new military judge should that be necessary. He has already transferred the upcoming grenade-murder trial of Canadian Omar Khadr from one Army judge to another because the first judge was retiring.

Army Maj. Jon Jackson, Pentagon defense lawyer for alleged 9/11 financier Mustafa al Hawsawi of Saudi Arabia, asked the judge whether he might ``speed up the process because you don't believe it is advisable to start a case and not finish it.''

Kohlmann replied that he has long been aware of ''the long-term schedule of this case,'' in which pretrial motions are now slated to continue past the presidential elections.

He said seeing the case through trial and verdict was not part of ``the metrics in my mind regarding the measures of success . . . before I find it's appropriate to hand off to somebody else.''

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