Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - "KSM" to himself and his captors - is either the world's busiest terrorist or biggest blowhard, maybe much of both.

If it's true that al-Qaida operatives are taught how to game the American legal system, Mohammed must have been daydreaming about blowing something up - a skyscraper, an airliner, an embassy, the Panama Canal - the day the instructor taught about the right against self-incrimination.

Mohammed confessed to an astonishing range of murderous mayhem, everything, one wag said, from kidnapping the Lindbergh baby to killing Anna Nicole Smith. He planned, he said, 9/11 "from A to Z"; the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the abortive 2001 attack on an airline by shoe bomber Richard Reid; the 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali; bombing a hotel in Kenya popular with Israelis; and the 2002 murder of a Marine in Iraq. For good measure, he later added that he had beheaded American Daniel Pearl.

He also, he said, plotted assassination attempts against former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Pope John Paul II and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

And he dreamed of blowing up assorted world landmarks, too.

Even if some of what Mohammed confessed to is empty boasting, he is clearly one of the most barbarous terrorists to have walked the Earth in modern times. And for all the disillusionment with how the president has conducted the war on terror, Mohammed is also a reminder that no matter who is elected in 2008, that war will have to be conducted on some level for many years to come.