Guantánamo guards must furnish confessed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators with enough battery power to use their prison camp laptops 12 hours a day -- but the 9/11 accused can't surf the Internet, a military judge ruled.

Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, the judge, issued the decision a week ago.

It turned up Sunday on a Defense Department website, which under the ruling the men will not be allowed to see live.

MASS MURDER

The five former CIA-held detainees are accused of the mass murder of 2,973 people on Sept. 11, 2001, in a complex conspiracy case that seeks military execution as the ultimate punishment.

They allegedly trained, financed and coordinated the 9/11 hijackers, and are in pretrial hearings at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba, where three of the five are now functioning as their own attorneys.

At issue of late has been what resources they get to prepare for the case inside a secret Guantánamo prison facility, called Camp 7, which is reserved for alleged terrorists who had earlier been interrogated somewhere overseas by the CIA.

`LAW OFFICE'

''Reasonable access does not equate to a right or an entitlement to be placed on the same footing as a technologically state of the art law office,'' Kohlmann wrote in his three-page ruling.

Mohammed, his nephew Ammar al Baluchi and Walid Bin Attash have sought through standby counsel filings at the Military Commission a long list of resources they say they need to mount their defense -- including Internet links to read news accounts and do live research on databases.

They argued, in part, that their Pentagon appointed counsel and U.S. civil liberties lawyers volunteering on their case are not always at the remote outpost as they prepare their defense.

POWERPOINT

Baluchi, 31, who at his arraignment identified himself as a Microsoft-certified software engineer, in particular sought a DVD writer, PowerPoint software, printers, a scanner and a hot line to the Pentagon's defense counsel's office.

A case prosecutor replied that he was providing the alleged terrorists with Toughbooks, laptops loaded with the government's evidence against them, which they could study up to eight hours a day in their cells.

Kohlmann refused much of the additional technology requests -- including the phone link. But he said, ''given the volume of discovering materials,'' the prison should make sure the defendants have enough battery power to use their laptops 12 hours a day to prepare for trial.

Kohlmann ruled out live access to the web.

But he said their U.S.-based, standby counsel can download and put on storage devices material they seek from ``a broad range of news and Internet research sources applicable to the defense in this case.''

Government censors would then review the material -- and blackout material they determine is off-limits for ''operational or privacy concerns'' before releasing it to the men.

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