A detainee imprisoned at the U.S. military's Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba has confessed to planning two major attacks on American targets in the past decade, according to a Pentagon transcript released Monday.

'I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation, buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation.'

—Walid Mohammed Bin Attash said of his involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000

Walid Mohammed Bin Attash, a Yemani, told a military hearing at the base that he played a key role in plotting both the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 213 and the attack on the battleship USS Cole in 2000.

Seventeen sailors were killed and 37 injured when suicide bombers steered an explosives-laden boat into USS Cole while it was refueling at the port of Aden, Yemen. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network was blamed for the attack.

"I participated in the buying or purchasing of the explosives," bin Attash said when asked what his role was in the attacks on the warship and the embassies.

"I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation, buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation."

Was link between bin Laden, deputy

The release of Bin Attash's transcript came five days after the Pentagon released the record of hearings held for three other top suspects at Guantanamo. According to the transcripts, one of them, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, confessed to nearly three dozen plots including al-Qaeda's attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Bin Attash said that just a few hours before the USS Cole was bombed, he met with Saudi-born Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is considered the mastermind behind the bombings and is now in U.S. custody.

"I was the link between Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Sheikh Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri," bin Attash said.

He also said he was with bin Laden when USS Cole was attacked.

Up to 14 detainees before military hearings

The U.S. military is holding an estimated 400 prisoners accused of terrorism at Guantanamo, including some who have been there since the prison opened in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Others were shipped there later after being arrested in broad sweeps of people suspected of ties to al-Qaeda or Afghanistan's Taliban.

The prison has repeatedly come under international and domestic criticism, because U.S. President George W. Bush and his administration have allowed the detainees neither the protections guaranteed to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, nor basic U.S. legal rights.

As a result, the detainees — including a Canadian who was arrested in Afghanistan at age 15 — were held in Guantanamo for years without being charged, without having access to the alleged evidence against them and without being able to legally challenge their detentions.

The Bush administration has argued that foreigners who are not within U.S. territory are not entitled to legal protections — the navy leases the Guantanamo Bay land from Cuba — and refused to let the detainees be tried in U.S. civilian courts, instead sending some to military tribunals, which don't have to meet the same legal standards.

The U.S. Supreme Court has already twice rejected the argument, ruling that the Guantanamo detainees should be tried before a judge in a U.S. civilian court, and is currently considering the matter a third time.

Meanwhile, military hearings for up to 14 leading detainees accused of terrorism are going on in private at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. Defence Department said journalists would not allowed to cover proceedings, alleging that much of the prosecution evidence had serious implications for national security.