Would you want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed living in your backyard?

How about the accused mastermind of 9/11 and his four alleged cohorts spending their time just yards from your back door?

That, essentially, is what the residents of the New York City apartment building Chatham Towers face. Their 240 apartments are just yards from the Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan where the Obama administration plans to try the terror suspects in civilian court. In fact, by my measurement, the corner of the courthouse at one point is a mere 30 feet from the corner of the apartment complex. The buildings are so close, you can look right into the windows of the courthouse “and see them eating lunch,” as one resident put it.

The people who live here are outraged at the White House decision and are urging the administration to move the trials.

“People’s lives are going to be altered, this is going to be a federal armed camp,” resident Jeanie Chin told Fox News. “I hope that President Obama will reconsider when he understands that densely packed residential buildings surround the court.”

Fox News visited a couple of apartments and we could clearly see the goings on inside the courthouse with the naked eye. The windows are so close, that we could view whom we presumed to be Assistant United States Attorneys going about their work on federal criminal cases, administrative assistants using the copying machine, and people working on their desktop computers and drinking coffee. We could also view lawyers and others in what appears to be a federal courtroom. At one point, people inside a courthouse office even waved back.

The residents are not only afraid of being a terrorist target, but they also worry about the overwhelming security measures police have promised for the trial, even if the precautions are for their own protection.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly acknowledged “We can’t guarantee everything,” but promises intense security, including: 2,000 metal barriers, multiple checkpoints, sniper teams on roofs, bomb sniffing dogs, and nearly 24 hour protection from the NYPD’s aviation unit. He says the department is working with the residents to have a security plan that “minimizes the disruption that will be caused by the trial.”

But the precautions only inflame, not assuage some residents.

“On 9/11 we heard it, we saw it, we smelled it and we lived it,” said one at a hearing of the local Community Board’s Executive Committee. “240 families will be imprisoned.”

“It’s bad for the neighborhood, it’s not going to be safe, it’s going to increase the terrorist threat,” said Board Member Marc Amersuo. “I just hope that common sense and compassion for our neighbors trumps the ideology of still wanting to get George Bush.”

The Executive Committee of Community Board One, the group of local residents, who usually deal with issues like zoning, noisy bars, and garbage pick up, unanimously passed a resolution calling on the Obama administration to change its mind and offered an alternative. They suggest moving the trials to Governors Island, a 172 acre formerly Federally owned island just off the tip of lower Manhattan, in New York bay. The island was used as a military installation for two centuries, was last run by the Coast Guard, and has been used for sensitive security events in the past. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan held a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, there.

“The advantage of Governors Island is, jurisdictionally, it falls in the Southern District of New York,” said the Board Chairwoman Julie Menin. The Board will send their resolution to Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama himself.

Some residents, however, do not object to the terror trials being held among them.

One member of the Community Board, Bill Love, said at another recent hearing that “this is the logical place to hold them. This is where the crime was committed, where the murders were committed. It’s going to be difficult but it’s also probably the best place in the country as far as being able to provide security.”

Terror defendants have been tried and convicted in the courthouse complex before, including several Al Qaeda operatives who were found guilty of bombing the U.S. embassies in Africa. They were tried in the older courthouse around the corner from Chatham Towers. The convicted mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef, was also tried and convicted here.

But those successes do not ease the fear of many. As for those who support the decision to hold the trials across the street from Manhattan’s densely populated Chinatown, Ms. Chin had some blunt words:

“They are being ideological idiots,” she says. “It just doesn’t make sense to put ourselves in the line of fire when other locations would be more suitable and require less resources to protect… All taxpayers will wind up paying for this foolishness.”

But unless the Obama administration changes its mind, the people who live here will have a front row, ring-side seat to the terror trials, whether they want one or not.