Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants tell the judge they want to confess and plead guilty.

"We all five have reached an agreement to request from the commission an immediate hearing session in order to announce our confessions ... with our earnest desire in this regard without being under any kind of pressure, threat, intimidations or promise from any party."

That's the note sent to the military judge during the pretrial hearings at Guantanamo.

MORE: William Glaberson sheds some light on the possible strategy of pleading guilty now:

Many people inside and outside the government expect President-elect Obama to close down the military commissions that have been used by the Bush administration, and to direct that many detainees now held in Guantánamo Bay be prosecuted instead in the civilian American legal system.

If that indeed happens in the first days of the Obama administration, then Monday’s proceedings will have been the detainees’ last opportunity to challenge the widely criticized system here with guilty pleas that could yield them the opportunity for what they see as martyrdom.