During a secret hearing at Guantánamo, the military judge in the 9/11 death-penalty case ruled against a secret government request to withhold information from defense lawyers for accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his four alleged co-conspirators, according to a partially redacted transcript released Tuesday.

The hearing, held Aug. 19 at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba, was the first closed pre-trial hearing of the Sept. 11 capital case. The subject matter was so secret that the judge cleared the court of the public and the five men who, if convicted, could be executed for conspiring in the worst attack on U.S. soil, including 2,976 counts of murder.

The “C” word has been every World Trade Center responder’s nightmare — and for good reason.

Cancer has become a reality for more than 1,000 men and women who sacrificed their health at Ground Zero — and the number is expected to grow.

“You get a lump in your throat when you first have to tell your wife,” said NYPD Detective Amadeo Pulley, 47, who was diagnosed with kidney cancer in May. “But I told my family and two kids I’m gonna be fine. We will get through this.”

Mystery solved, if there was any doubt: It was the CIA that hit the mute button in the war court earlier this year when a defense lawyer for the accused 9/11 mastermind began talking about the CIA’s secret overseas prisons, the lawyer said Monday.

The Jan. 28 episode so embarrassed Army Col. James Pohl, the judge in the Sept. 11 terror case, that he ordered the kill switch unplugged, an order the agency apparently honored because no outside entity has censored the court since.

The accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks has a right to justify the worst terror attack on U.S. soil at his death-penalty trial, and that requires exchanging material about jihad with his defense team, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's lawyer told an Army judge Wednesday.

Veteran criminal defense attorney David Nevin invoked "recent history, ancient history" and "impressions throughout many areas of the world of Western oppression" in an argument to bring Guantanamo prison's legal-mail handling policy in line with what he cast as American Bar Association standards.