GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Guards shackled 9/11 terror suspect Ramzi bin al Shibh to the courtroom floor and suspect Khalid Sheik Mohammed again said he welcomed death Monday as the U.S. government sought to press ahead with its showcase war crimes trial on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration.

Throughout it all Judge Stephen Henley, an Army colonel, handled procedural issues in the case for which the Pentagon seeks military execution.

''I really don't care whether I'm shackled or not,'' declared bin al Shibh, a Yemeni whose U.S. appointed lawyers argue he may be mentally unfit to stand trial in the mass murder of nearly 3,000 on Sept. 11, 2001.

Court records show that prison camp doctors have bin al Shibh on undisclosed psychotropic drugs. Monday, he and his four co-accused were wearing the white prison camp uniforms of compliant captives.

Obeying the judge's order, Navy guards then surrounded bin al Shibh and removed the chains that clamped his ankles to an eye-bolt inside the courtroom.

Monday's was the fifth hearing in the 9/11 capital case, which accuses the five men of financing, training and orchestrating the 19 men who hijacked the airliners for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror group.

All five men were held and interrogated for years by the CIA before their September 2006 transfer for trial here, and several of the accused asked the judge to exclude their American lawyers from the defense tables. ''The people who have tortured me received their salaries from the American government, and the lawyers do, too,'' Mohammed said.

Later he said: ``We don't care about the capital punishment; we are doing jihad for the cause of God.''

At one point, Shibh chimed in with, ``We are proud of 9/11.''

The session, held while the rest of the base observed the Martin Luther King Jr. Day federal holiday, was clouded with uncertainty and tension.

Judge Henley spurned an 11th hour request by the chief Pentagon prosecutor to postpone this week's session until after the new administration takes over. Obama's lawyers have signaled they might seek to tweak, if not scrap, the special system the White House set up in the months after the 9/11 attacks, which was approved by Congress in 2006.

Meantime, the military for the first time posted government contract censors inside a media center set up by the Pentagon to let invited journalists report on the proceedings. The so-called ''operational security officers,'' who typically decide what media images can leave the base, watched reporters while they watched the 9/11 hearing on closed-circuit broadcasts beamed from behind barbed wire inside adjacent Camp Justice.

Two pretrial hearings were held simultaneously Monday -- for the 9/11 accused and for alleged teen terrorist Omar Khadr of Canada.

And the first order of business at each was whether a Bush appointee directing military commissions unintentionally canceled the existing trials and initiated new proceedings by issuing new charge sheets in December.

Defense lawyers argued the new charge sheets, signed by Convening Authority Susan Crawford and processed by a retired Army judge who serves as the commissions' clerk, Donna Wilkins, mooted everything that happened before.

Case prosecutors say the Pentagon officials had simply sought to freshen up a jury pool of officers drawn from the different services. Some members of the original jury pool have since retired or been reassigned to new posts around the world, they argued.

Ret. Army Col. Robert Swann, now a civilian and the Pentagon's lead 9/11 case prosecutor, called the new charge sheets ``a proper purpose with flawed execution.''

In both cases, Henley and Judge Patrick Parrish ruled that the cases could move forward with pretrial hearings. Khadr is slated to go to trial Jan. 26. The 9/11 accused have no trial date, and the hearings so far have focused on discovery and procedural issues.

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