The defendant, a 27-year-old British resident, is identified in the charge documents as Binyam Muhammad but he said his surname is Mohammad. He is accused of conspiring with al Qaeda to commit war crimes, including plotting to set off a radioactive bomb, and would face life in prison if convicted.

There is no uniform system of transliteration of Arabic names into English, and so either Muhammad or Mohammad could be correct.

Mohammad, as he said he prefers to be called, has proclaimed his innocence and has stated in court documents that he made false confessions after being extrajudicially transferred to a Moroccan prison where he was beaten, strung up by his arms and cut on the chest and penis with scalpels.

"This is four years of interrogation, highly intensive ... torture, and you still don't have the right name," he told the tribunal's presiding officer, Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann. "The man you are looking for is not here."

The defendant compared Kohlmann to Adolf Hitler and prosecutors to vampire slayers. He calmly criticized the tribunals as "crap" that set a bad example for the world and poked fun at their formal name, commissions.

"This is not a commission. It's a con mission. It's a mission to con the world," he said.

Kohlmann let him speak at first, then ordered him to stop using profanity, put down a handwritten sign reading "conn-mission" and conduct himself politely.

Mohammad refused to enter a plea and the presiding officer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

MOROCCAN RENDITION

The military charges say the defendant joined al Qaeda in 2001 and got weapons and explosives training at the group's camps and guest houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He was arrested trying to leave Pakistan in 2002 and his lawyer said he was sent to a Moroccan prison via extraordinary rendition, the practice of secretly transferring terrorist suspects between countries, outside normal legal channels.

Mohammad was held in Morocco for 18 months and gave false confessions including that he plotted with al Qaeda and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, according to his civilian lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.

Padilla was held at a U.S. military brig for three years but was never charged in a radioactive plot. He has since been charged in a civilian court with being part of a cell that supported terrorists overseas.

Mohammad was sent from Morocco to a secret facility known as the "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan and then brought to Guantanamo, his lawyer says. He is the first British resident to appear before the tribunals President George W. Bush created after the September 11 attacks to try foreigners for terrorism. British citizens held at Guantanamo were all sent home.

Defendants at the tribunals wear civilian clothes provided by their lawyers. Mohammad's lawyers brought him a bright orange shirt and trousers, reminiscent of the infamous orange jumpsuits Guantanamo detainees wore during the early days of the prison camp. He also asked to wear shackles to court but the request was denied, his lawyer said.

Human rights groups and legal scholars have harshly criticized the U.S. decision to indefinitely hold foreign prisoners at Guantanamo without the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the rights afforded in U.S. courts.

The Bush administration has defended the detention and interrogation of detainees as critical to national security in the war against terrorism.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legitimacy of the tribunals by the end of June.

Mohammad is one of 10 Guantanamo detainees facing war crimes charges and one of four appearing at pretrial hearings this week. The camp holds about 490 prisoners.

The boys initially were charged only with low-level crimes and were not eligible to be moved to adult court.

Authorities said the teens planned to target students, and teachers and others.

The terrorism charge and other charges added Thursday -- two counts each of conspiracy to attempt murder -- are serious enough that prosecutors could ask a judge to move the case from family court to adult criminal court, where the penalties could be much stiffer.

Prosecutors have 30 days to consider whether to request moving the case; no decision on that was made by Thursday afternoon.

The four boys -- including a 15-year-old from Hammonton whose arrest Wednesday night had not been announced -- appeared together in family court. Superior Court Judge Angelo DiCamillo ordered them held until the state Department of Human Services could complete thorough psychological and psychiatric evaluations.

DiCamillo said the court counselors who had interviewed the teens Wednesday recommended they not be released to their parents' care until a full picture of their mental conditions could be learned.

Public defenders for the teens argued that they should have been able to go home with their parents. "My client is rather frail and vulnerable," public defender Ruth Ann Mandell, who was representing a 14-year-old, told the judge. "No one was hurt in this case."

Authorities said the boys did not have any weapons to carry out the alleged plot. But one law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the teens attempted to buy a handgun.

DiCamillo on Thursday also disclosed that some of the teens charged have had brushes with the law in the past. Two of them were charged with fighting while they were still in elementary school; both cases were diverted out of the court system.



The 14-year-old was charged Wednesday with grabbing a girl by the neck and threatening to kill her.

The father of one of the 15-year-old boys said after the hearing Thursday that the charges were a mistake. "I think it's just kids hanging out together and having a little wild time, that's all," he said.

State judiciary spokeswoman Winnie Comfort said no one in New Jersey has been convicted of terrorism, a charge lawmakers created four years ago in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Under the statute, people convicted of the crime in adult court must be sentenced to at least 30 years in prison and are not eligible for parole for 30 years.

Prison sentences that long would be far steeper than those meted out to three teenagers in another Camden County town, Oaklyn, after they pleaded guilty in a case in which they were caught with guns, ammunition and swords in 2003. Each of them received a prison sentence between four and 10 years.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday the United States would not be a candidate in the May 9 election, though it will support and finance the new council and likely seek a seat next year.

"The United States will actively campaign on behalf of candidates genuinely committed to the promotion and protection of human rights and ... will also actively campaign against states that systematically abuse human rights," he said.

The United States was virtually alone in voting against establishing the council to replace the highly politicized and often criticized Human Rights Commission, arguing that the new body was only marginally better and wouldn't keep rights-abusing countries from winning seats.

The 53-member commission was discredited in recent years because some countries with terrible human rights records used their membership to protect one another from condemnation. Members in recent years have included Sudan, Libya, Zimbabwe and Cuba.

A key sticking point during the negotiations was U.S. insistence that members be elected by two-thirds of the 191-nation General Assembly - a step aimed at keeping out rights abusers. The U.S. effort failed, and members of the new council must be elected by an absolute majority - 96 member states.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the United States concluded that since the council has "fundamental flaws" Washington would skip this year's election and concentrate on other priorities, including the overhaul of U.N. management. But he indicated the United States was also concerned about whether it could win a contested election.

President Bush's administration has been strongly criticized in many countries for invading Iraq and for the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison.

During a U.S. National Security Council meeting earlier this week, U.S. officials raised the possibility of U.S. defeat, according to a person who was at the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the closed session.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Bolton recalled the U.S. defeat for a seat on the Human Rights Commission in 2001 and said the United States would face another contested election if it ran this year.

"I think that a decision by us to run had to be a decision that we were going to win, and that would mean either defeating other Western candidates or getting some of the rest of them to withdraw," Bolton said.

Some human rights groups and members of the U.S. Congress were dismayed at the U.S. decision.

Rep. Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, called it "a major retrenchment in America's long struggle to advance the cause of human rights around the world."

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said "it's unfortunate that the Bush administration's disturbing human rights record means that the United States would hardly have been a shoe-in for election to the council."

The new council was endorsed by key human rights groups, a dozen Nobel Peace Prize laureates including former president Jimmy Carter, and 170 countries that voted "yes" on the resolution - including a surprise approval by Cuba.

Under the rules for the new council, any U.N. member can announce its candidacy any time until the vote is completed. Countries can serve a maximum of two three-year terms and must leave the council before running again.

To ensure global representation, Africa and Asia would have 13 seats each; Latin America and the Caribbean eight; Western nations, seven; and Eastern Europe, six.

In a statement appealing for support for its candidacy, Cuba said it has "tremendous achievements" in human rights, most importantly in exercising the right of self-determination against "the unilateral policy of hostility, aggression and blockade imposed on it by the superpower."