Captain's Quarters -

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's declaration of involvement in dozens of al-Qaeda attacks, actual and planned, comes as no surprise to those who have followed his career. The London Telegraph paints a picture of a man who joined the jihad for fun rather than faith, and whose life is filled with examples of excess:

In contrast to most of al-Qa'eda's senior leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed liked to indulge in the sins of the Western civilisation that his movement is devoted to wiping out.

In the mid-1990s, while plotting the hijacking and bombing of a dozen US airliners and, to a lesser extent, the assassination of Pope John Paul II, he frequented nightclubs and pole-dancing bars in Manila with some regularity.

In Kuala Lumpur he reportedly buzzed a high-rise building in a helicopter where one of his numerous girlfriends was staying, ringing her from the cockpit and telling her to look out of the window.

He would introduce himself as a wealthy businessman from Qatar, which had some truth - he worked as an engineer for the government in the Gulf state for a time.

Peter Bergen, the author and leading expert on al-Qa'eda, said: "I think he really was in it for the fun. To use a horrible metaphor in this context, he was having a blast. He was obviously pathologically antisemitic but not very religious himself. He wasn't one to quote Saudi clerics."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not the only jihadi who indulged the sins of the flesh while on assignment as a terrorist. The 9/11 attackers also enjoyed so-called Western decadence during their short stay in the United States. As the 9/11 Commission report noted in its excellent recounting of the plot, a half-dozen of them made test flights to Las Vegas in the three months preceding the attack -- and while in Sin City, they indulged in alcohol, gambling, and strip clubs. KSM apparently lived the dissolute lifestyle as a rule, though, and not an exception.

US counterterrorist officials used to refer to KSM as Forrest Gump, having been involved in so many plots and places. He thrived as AQ's idea man, dreaming up large schemes and having to have them corralled into workable plans. Mohammed first conceived of 9/11 as an attack with ten planes at once hitting targets all over the US; Osama bin Laden scaled it back to four planes as a more practical attack to plan and execute.

Many have treated his claims with skepticism, especially his involvement with the death of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. However, other captured suspects linked Mohammed to Pearl's murder before this, the Telegraph reports. Intelligence officials have independent confirmation of most of the acknowledged #3 man's claims of participation in the other plots on his list.

Was KSM's braggadocio meant to puff himself up in front of the American tribunal? Certainly. He doesn't have much to lose by declaring himself a master terrorist at this point anyway, and it fits with his personality. It also seems that it may have been the truth, too.