GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Four different civilian prosecutors' offices -- two in New York, two near the Pentagon -- are studying whether to charge and put on trial five alleged 9/11 conspirators.

Navy Capt. John F. Murphy, the Pentagon's chief war crimes prosecutor, revealed the behind-the-scenes rivalry in comments to reporters Sunday on the eve of a hearing in the proposed death penalty tribunal of al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four others.

He said the four jurisdictions include:

• The Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, headquartered respectively in Brooklyn and Manhattan;

• The Eastern District of Virginia, whose headquarters are in Alexandria but also have offices in Norfolk and Richmond;

• The U.S. attorney's office in the District of the Columbia, which prosecutes cases at the U.S. District Court midway between Congress and the White House.

White House lawyers have said they prefer federal prosecutions of alleged terrorists before civilian juries rather than military trials.

But they have not completely ruled out using tribunals, which would be held somewhere on U.S. soil if Defense and Justice Department officials successfully carry out President Barack Obama's order to empty the prison camps here by mid-January.

As of Monday, the Pentagon was holding 226 foreign men in the prison camps as long-held war on terror captives, 10 of whom have been charged with war crimes before military judges.

Justice Department attorneys have been studying the 9/11 case and five other alleged al Qaeda foot soldier prosecutions to decide if, how and where they should be tried.

Meantime, an Army judge, Col. Stephen Henley, scheduled a 1 p.m. hearing Monday on resources for Mohammed and his alleged four co-conspirators, whom President George W. Bush hadmoved here for trial in September 2006 from years of CIA custody.

The White House has sought a 60-day freeze in the process, it's third delay, and Monday's session may be the last time Mohammed and the four others are seen in a military setting unless the Obama administration changes its mind and goes with the tribunals.

Mohammed and the others, including Mohammed's nephew, allegedly helped, financed and trained the 19 hijackers who commandeered four commercial aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, and plunged them into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field -- killing nearly 3,000 people.

The Pentagon wants to try the five men jointly, even as Navy defense lawyers argue that one of them, alleged al Qaeda lieutenant Ramzi bin al Shibh, may be mentally incompetent because the prison camp medicates him with psychotropic drugs.

Murphy said the federal prosecutors in New York and near Washington are looking at each of the five men's prosecutions separately.

For the hearing, the Pentagon Sunday escorted nine family members of the 9/11 dead to this remote Navy base to watch from a glass-enclosed gallery.

They included grieving grandparents Lee and Eunice Hanson, whose son, daughter-in-law and 3-year-old grandchild Christine were killed aboard Flight 175, which crashed in New York. The child was 9/11's youngest victim, said Joe DellaVedova, a commissions spokesman.

Also taken to the base as an observer, and chosen under a lottery system, was Talat Hamdani, a Muslim-American woman whose rescue worker son, Mohammed Salman Hamdani, 23, was killed at the World Trade Center.

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