In the recent military tribunal hearing on his combatant status, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad owned up to 29 separate acts of terror in which he served, at the very least, as “responsible participant.” Some such acts, September 11 for instance, he claimed to have successfully masterminded and executed.

Others he helped plan but, happily, did not manage to pull off. These include schemes to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago, the New York Stock Exchange and the Panama Canal as well as plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and presidents Clinton and Carter.

It is likely that KSM has inflated his role in many of these events, but just as likely that he was at least involved.

The Department of Defense does not edit a word out of 28 of the 29 acts that KSM listed. But one act, number 3 in KSM’s line-up, the DOD originally redacted entirely.

The numerical placement seems critical here. In number 1, KSM assumes responsibility for the “1993 World Trade Center Operation,” and there is no reason to doubt him.

In number 2, he takes credit for “the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.” Although KSM overstates his control of the operation, there is little reason to question his involvement.

In number 4, KSM admits his participation in the “Shoe Bomber operation to down two American airplanes.” Again, this seems like a credible claim.

Number 3, however, was originally posted as “REDACTED.” This was before the Internet started humming about its likely contents.

Given the placement of number 3 high among the provable acts of terror committed against Americans on American soil, I and others speculated that KSM may very well have been staking claim to one of two events.

One is the Oklahoma City bombing. As has been well enough documented, convicted conspirator Terry Nichols made multiple trips to the Philippines when KSM’s “nephew,” Ramzi Yousef, was living there. Yousef was constructing the bombs for the impending aviation attack that KSM refers to as “the Bojinka operation.”

According to a recent House report, Nichols traveled with the book, ''The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives,” and just happened to show up in Cebu City at the exact same time as master bomber Yousef.

This was November 1994, six months before the Oklahoma City bombing. Nichols changed his itinerary immediately after Yousef’s lab was busted by the Manila police in January 1995 and left the county in haste.

In "Against All Enemies," Clinton anti-terror czar Richard Clarke has this to say about the visits of these two terrorists to the same city in the same country at the same time: "We do know that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay," writes Clarke, "and were deadly when he returned."

The second likely suspect for the redacted terror act was TWA Flight 800, the 747 blown out of the sky off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996, Saddam’s national liberation day.

According to two separate sources within the NSA, on the night the plane went down Yousef phoned KSM from his New York City prison and said—in their native Baluchi-- "What had to be done has been done, TWA 800" (last two words unintelligible).”

The next day Yousef asked for a mistrial, arguing in high chutzpah that the environment had turned prejudicial in regard to accused airplane bombers like himself.

KSM had few qualms about shooting down airplanes. “I was responsible for launching a Russian-made SA-7 surface-to-air missile on El-Al or other Jewish airliner departing from Mombasa,” he writes in his declaration. This was number 22 of 29.

In addition to his role in 9/11 and Bojinka, KSM also admitted to planning the destruction of an El-Al plane departing Bangkok, an attack on the Israeli city of Elat by planes from Saudi Arabia, and an aerial assault on the CIA headquarters, using an explosives-packed private aircraft.

Whatever KSM said at the tribunal, he was likely not speaking out of school. “When I wrote this thing,” KSM said of his declared 29 acts, “I mean, the PR he told me that President may stop you at anytime and he don’t like big mouth nor you talk too much.”

Late in the day on March 15, however, the DOD offered a new version of the KSM transcript. In this one, number 3 is not redacted. Instead, KSM claims, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl.”

The painfully incurious mainstream media were spared the indignity of being trumped by the pajama brigades. The DOD provided an alternative for the missing claim that works and that sounds legitimate.

If true, KSM lethal anti-Semitism might make the lamentable Rosie O’Donnell rethink her affections for this poor man, whom she belies was robbed of his “humanity” by daily torture at Gitmo.

Also in the new version, KSM no longer takes credit for financing the assassination of Pakistan's President Musharaf or an attempt on a company owned by the “the Jewish former Secretary of State, Henry Kissiner (sic).”

There are a few other intriguing tidbits in tribunal report. KSM, for instance, talks casually about his participation in the “Shoe Bomber operation to down two American airplanes.” Italics mine.

As is well enough known, on December 22, 2001, British citizen Richard Reid attempted to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 en route from Paris to Miami by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes. Fortunately, he was stopped in his tracks.

It is possible, however, that Reid was not the first shoe bomber. As noted in WND and elsewhere more than five years ago, there was “a spreading conviction among aviation and counter-terror experts” that Reid was, in fact, the second such bomber and that the first took out American Airlines Flight 587 40 days earlier over Queens, N.Y.

Nothing has happened in the interim to dispel that possibility. KSM’s off-hand remark should reinvigorate the discussion as to why the Dominican-bound aircraft crashed after take-off, two months to the day after September 11.

Of interest, too, is that KSM takes responsibility for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Left unsaid is who sponsored and financed a bombing that took place on the second anniversary of Iraq’s humiliating withdrawal from Kuwait.

By treating it as a case for the local constabulary, the Clinton administration ignored a dramatic signal that war was afoot.

Osama bin Laden declared war more or less officially in May 1998. KSM talked about this declaration at some length. As he points out in the transcript, ABC reporter John Miller met with bin Laden that same month.

“The consensus among the detectives was that Ramzi Yousef was an intelligence operative working for some hostile foreign power,” writes Miller of the first World Trade Center bombing.

Then, as Miller notes, investigators began turning their attention to Osama. “But bin Laden denied to me that he was behind the bombing,” writes Miller, “and claimed he didn't know Ramzi Yousef.”

In his official transcript, KSM backs up that claim. He acknowledges that in 1993 he and Yousef had yet to hook up with bin Laden. Unsolved—unsought for that matter—is the identity of the “hostile foreign power” behind the first WTC bombing.

One other minor bombshell that KSM dropped in his transcript was his avowed responsibility for managing “the production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American soil.”

Left unsaid, of course, was where those weapons were coming from and to what end they were used.