AFP | US prosecutors compiled lots of evidence against the five men accused of having organized the September 11 attacks on the United States, but not until this week have details been fully revealed.

The indictment charging self-professed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others was unsealed when US Attorney General Eric Holder referred the case to the Defense Department for military trials instead of trials at a US federal court in New York.

Holder said Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustapha Ahmed al-Hawsawi could have been prosecuted in federal court and blamed Congress for imposing measures blocking civilian trials of Guantanamo Bay inmates.

They will be tried in military courts in the US naval base in southeastern Cuba.

The now-public details show that the United States, nearly 10 years after hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, reconstructed step by step the logistics of the five accused men.

Guardian | Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, will be tried by a military commission in Guantánamo. It is the latest retreat by the Obama administration from its much-vaunted plans to overhaul the legal processing of terror suspects.

Mohammed and four other terror suspects will be put on trial through a military system that President Obama had vowed to abolish when he began in office in January 2009. The White House had declared its intent in 2009 to push them through the civilian justice system with a landmark trial at the federal court in Manhattan, a stone's throw away from Ground Zero.

But the proposal invoked a groundswell of opposition, most powerfully from New York residents and the mayor of the city, Michael Bloomberg.

The US attorney general, Eric Holder, was expected to announce the administration's U-turn at a press conference in Guantánamo.

BBC.co.uk | New video has emerged of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York's World Trade Center, shot by a police helicopter crew hoping in vain to rescue trapped office workers. The video shows the aircraft hovering near the towers' roofs, only to retreat as the first tower fell. "The whole tower, it's gone," an officer is heard yelling. "They knocked the whole fricking thing down." It was released by a US government agency that investigated the collapse. The airspace over the towers was closed to news helicopters on the morning of the attacks, so little video of the attacks from the air has emerged.