Supposedly, in an omerta ceremony to which reporters were not allowed that the Bush Administration has euphemistically called a “Combatant Status Review Tribunal” (a/k/a “rubber stamp”) held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged September 11th mastermind Khlaid Sheikh Mohammed, who is always pictured in his perp shot after he was apprehended in Pakistan more than vaguely resembling adult movie star Ron Jeremy confessed to being the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, and indeed, expressed regret that there were so many victims of his supposed handiwork. (Who writes this crap?)
Well, well. The thing with the Bush Administration is that they only do things like this when they have some political motivation to cover for something else. You will recall the Bush Administration’s rather generous use of deliberate false alarms associated with the ridiculous color coded terror alert system (the one I appreciate the most being tied to a plot to attack the New York Stock Exchange, a building a few steps from where I go to work every day… a plot later revealed to be years old, even as it was blasted over every news outlet in the world.) So now, with Bush Administration approval ratings hovering in the toilet, controversy over “the SurgeTM”, Halliburton’s h.q., CEO and numerous bags of cash moving to Dubai and the coming war with Iran all looming (not to mention a bad week for A.G. Gonzales, who after the U.S. Attorney firing fiasco in which good old Harriet Miers is implicated, is called upon to resign by N.H. GOP Senator Sununu), we get this little “Gift from Gitmo”TM.
No one is denying that KSM, or perhaps all of the other 14 “high value terrorists”, are creeps and bastards, who should be brought to justice. The problem, of course, is that after five years of being tortured, and there is no doubt whatsoever that that is what we have done, that anything KSM, or anyone else who was a guest of our “CIA black prisons” says, is tainted by that torture thing. Indeed, part of KSM’s script was to note that he was subject to torture, “but is still making his confession freely and voluntarily.”
Er, no. In a real court, once you start poisoning the tree, you may as well pour the whole bottle in, because the tree and all its fruit are poisoned. Period. KSM’s confession would not hold up in a real court– which is why the Bush Administration, helped along by its friends Senators Graham and McCain (who will themselves also eventually have to answer to God, if not eventual war crimes tribunals for their role in turning our country back to the early Middle Ages), changed the rules for the kangaroo courts military tribunals at Gitmo to permit such evidence obtained by coercion… or less euphemistically, torture.
Which is neither here, nor there, because it is extraordinarily unlikely that KSM or the other 13 “high value terrorist suspects”TM will ever see even the inside of a kangaroo courtroom; the name of their game, like the Gitmo game in general, is to slowly trickle out the innocent rubes we are holding there (it’s down to 385 now; a few seem to be released each month) until January 2009, when this all becomes some other President’s problem.
We’ll ignore the legal implications of our blatantly disregarding our nation’s ratification of international bans on torture and the Geneva Conventions themselves, to simply ask what this says of us, as a nation supposedly governed by “the rule of law”, when we have to debase ourselves to the very level of the people we supposedly despise most.
Let’s just say that it doesn’t say anything good.
tdog
Very strange “confession” PDF: it is “image-only” – so you cannot scrape the text out of it without transcribing it. This is a rare case for the Gov to release a document like this.
Image Only was the original intent of PDF, so I’m not surprised. I was with a firm then and had to prepare an IT guy report for the partners on the potential ramifications of the public release of PDF writers, more accurately editors, specifically Adobe Acrobat, to our clientel. This could indicate there’s a new PDF writer out there we don’t know about, or more likely a locked down version of Acrobat unavailable to the general public.
KSM also confessed to the Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murders, the Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, sinking the Maine, and the Zodiac killings. 82 police departments are sending their open murder cases to Guantanamo and asking that KSM clear their books.
Actually, KSM professed his true identity – John Belushi – but it was redacted. It seems Belushi didn’t die, it was a cover for him to be reborn as an Islamic fighter in Afghanistan. However, things became too real for John, leading him to adopt the Mohammed moniker. If you read the transcript, you must wonder about the reference to “was it over when the germans bombed pearl harbor?” And now he’s doing Samurai Jihadi.