Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of plotting the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon returned to a military courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, today for pre-trial hearings that immediately became mired in a debate over how to handle secret evidence.

As a week of hearings began, defense lawyers said they weren’t willing to sign a memorandum of understanding on the handling of classified material because they said a judge’s order would prohibit them from sharing relevant evidence with their clients.

They dreamed of following in the firefighter footsteps of their fathers who died of 9/11-related illnesses. But then government bureaucrats declared their dads’ deaths weren’t heroic enough to be fully considered “in the line of duty.”

At least 13 men who banked on a longstanding FDNY policy granting children of firefighters who died on the job preferential status are devastated because their dreams have gone up in smoke.

The owners of the World Trade Center were blocked Thursday from filing a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the two airlines whose hijacked planes brought down the twin towers.

The ruling from Manhattan Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein came after a four-day trial where the doomed skyscrapers’ owners sought to sue for at least $3.5 billion in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

A group representing 6,600 survivors and relatives of those killed and injured in the 9/11 attacks has called on the FBI to “come clean” about its investigation of Saudis in Florida who may have aided the terrorist hijackers.

The reaction by 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism on Thursday followed news that former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham had accused the FBI in court papers of concealing the existence of its Sarasota investigation and impeding Congress’s Joint Inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.