“The neocons are now taking the next step in the campaign for legalized torture.”
by Ian Mosley
The latest bit of neocon propaganda which we are being fed in the run-up to Bush’s unprovoked attack on Iran is that an Arab named Khalid Sheik Mohammed has confessed to “masterminding” the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and personally beheading a Jew named Daniel Pearl back in 2002 as well. Why it took so long for Mohammed’s “confession” to be trotted out, no one is saying. His arrest was trumpetted as a great victory, but it hasn’t led to the arrest of Osama bin Laden. This raises the question: Can we believe anything from our government on the war on terror? Maybe this guy was running a falafel stand and just got swept in off the street.
According to the Sydney Herald, “‘I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,’ Mohammed said in a statement, read by a US military officer at the hearing held at the US camp for war on terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” Mohammed supposedly said as well, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan.” No media or other impartial observers have been allowed near this man, so we have no way of knowing if Mohammed even said any such thing at all, under torture or not.According to the Herald, “A suspected senior deputy to Osama bin Laden, Mohammed claimed responsibility for an array of other terrorist attacks, including the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing and the 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, according to the transcript. He also claimed to have devised attacks in Britain, Singapore and the Panama Canal, and had planned to kill the Pope and former US presidents.” Sounds a little like overkill to me–on his American and Israeli interrogators’ parts, not his. When a guy has a pair of electrodes wired to a battery terminal attached to his genitals, he’ll confess to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
In the transcript, the part where Mohammed was asked whether he had been tortured was answered “CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning when they transferred me …” Then the rest of the transcript was censored and withheld from the media.
The neocons are now taking the next step in the campaign for legalized torture. Having authorized its actual use, they are now starting to base media propaganda and political PR campaigns, needed now to psych up the American people for the coming attack on Iran, on tortured statements and “confessions.” The next and final step will be to make confessions and statements extorted under torture legally admissible in court–if the case ever gets to court, which isn’t necessary under the Patriot Act in any case.