9/11 defendants ignore judge at Guantanamo hearing

They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge and wouldn't listen to Arabic translations as they confronted nearly 3,000 counts of murder. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants defiantly disrupted an arraignment that ended late Saturday night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court.

In this photo of a sketch by courtroom artist Janet Hamlin and reviewed by the U.S. Department of Defense, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reads a document during his military hearing at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, Saturday, May 5, 2012. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed repeatedly declined to respond to a judge's questions Saturday and his co-defendant Walid bin Attash was briefly restrained at a military hearing as five men charged with the worst terror attack in U.S. history appeared in public for the first time in more than three years.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted architect of the attacks that sent hijacked jetliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the four men accused of aiding the 9/11 conspiracy put off entering pleas until a later date. Another hearing was set for June 12.

It wasn't until more than seven hours into the disrupted and prolonged hearing that prosecutors at the U.S. military base in Cuba even began reading the charges against the men, including 2,976 counts of murder and terrorism that carry the death penalty.

Earlier Saturday, Mohammed cast off his earphones providing Arabic translations of the proceeding and refused to answer Army Col. James Pohl's questions or acknowledge he understood them. All five men refused to participate in the hearing; two passed around a copy of The Economist magazine and leafed through the articles.

Walid bin Attash was confined to a restraint chair when he came into court, released only after he promised to behave.  CONTINUE .. . . .

Families of 9/11 victims mourn across the globe

Families of 9/11 victims mourn across the globe

Most foreigners who lost loved ones that day had little urge to wave a flag. And many questioned the politics and wars that followed. Where, then, did they fit?

Yvonne Kennedy had handed the itinerary for her North American vacation to her son with trademark black humor. "This is just in case the terrorists get me," the 62-year-old said — as she always did — before she set out on her adventure, a retirement gift she'd given herself after a nearly 30-year career with the Red Cross.

One year after the attacks, Kennedy traveled from his home in Sydney to Washington, D.C., to attend a memorial service in honor of those killed on American Airlines Flight 77. At the ceremony.

A world away from ground zero, In a Lithuanian cemetery, the twin towers still stand. Vladimir Gavriushin lays white roses near the 6-foot granite replicas of the World Trade Center's skyscrapers,

A memorial he built to honor his daughter Yelena, one of the nearly 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11.

Gavriushin has buried rocks from ground zero under these tombstone towers, far from the place Yelena died — a place he can no longer afford to visit. And so, as the 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks approaches, he mourns for Yelena here, at his own ground zero.

He remembers frantically calling his daughter that day amid the terrified crowds in Brooklyn, where he was at the time: "She never answered."

As people from London to New Zealand learned their loved ones were among the dead. But though the pain transcended borders, foreign families have battled to cope with their loss from afar.

For some, it was impossible to make healing pilgrimages to the site of the tragedy, or to grieve alongside a community that understood their pain. Sept. 11 itself — a day that, for Americans, is inextricably tied to national identity, politics and patriotism.