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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=5>Washington Exploits Guantánamo
“Confession” To Justify Its Crimes<br><br>
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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>By Bill Van Auken<br>
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<a href="http://www.countercurrents.org/auken170307.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://www.countercurrents.org/auken170307.htm<br><br>
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<dd>17 March, 2007<br>
<dd><a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/ksmo-m16.shtml">
World Socialist Web</a><br><br>
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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=5>T</b></font>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>he American public was inundated
Thursday with non-stop coverage of the confession allegedly given by the
man accused by the Bush administration of orchestrating the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington.<br><br>
<dd>The 26-page transcript supplied by the Pentagon has Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed taking responsibility for literally dozens of attacks, plots and
threats carried out on at least five continents over the course of 15
years.<br><br>
<dd>This transcript was purportedly the record of a closed-door military
hearing conducted at the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It is
replete with multiple redactions, including the blacking out of sections
of the detainee’s testimony dealing with torture as well as of the names
of every US officer and enlisted men taking part in these
proceedings.<br><br>
<dd>Media coverage of these events has exhibited a definite breathless
quality, with a focus on the most sensationalist aspects of Mohammed’s
alleged testimony, taking responsibility for everything from “A to Z” in
the 9/11 attacks, to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 2002 Bali
nightclub bombing, the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel
Pearl as well as alleged plots to blow up other skyscrapers and landmark
buildings, including New York’s Stock Exchange and Empire State Building,
Chicago’s Sears Tower and London’s Big Ben, and to assassinate world
figures ranging from ex-US President Jimmy Carter to Pope John Paul
II.<br><br>
<dd>Curiously, the confession to the savage murder of Pearl was redacted
from the original version of the transcript released by the Pentagon. It
was added only later, with the Defense Department explaining that it had
blacked it out until authorities were able to inform the journalist’s
family of what Mohammed had said.<br><br>
<dd>The obvious question is: why such haste to release the
transcriptwhich was from a hearing conducted last Saturday. The most
likely answer is that the release was timed for the political benefit of
the Bush White House.<br><br>
<dd>After barring the press from the secret hearing, the Pentagon
released the Mohammed transcript as part of a deliberate effort by the
Bush administration to divert public attention away from the crimes of
the administration and the deepening debacle confronting the US
occupation in Iraq. The confession had the added advantage of removing
the deepening political crisis surrounding Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales and the politically motivated firing of eight federal
prosecutors from the top of the news.<br><br>
<dd>The reality is that there is little new in terms of these
revelations. Much of what was included in the transcript had already
appeared in reports leaked to the media as well as in an account of
Mohammed’s interrogation that was included in the September 11 commission
report. What is largely obscured by the media’s approach is that
Mohammed’s confession was extracted over the course of four years of
detention and torture in secret CIA prisons, and that thousands of others
subjected to similar treatment have yet to be accused of, much less tried
for, a single crime.<br><br>
<dd>The unstated purpose of the confession being waved in front of the
public is to justify more than five years of international lawlessness on
the part of US imperialism: unprovoked wars, targeted assassinations,
extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, torture and illegal
spying.<br><br>
<dd>Mohammed is one of 14 so-called high value detainees whom Bush
ordered moved from secret CIA prisons to Guantánamo in September after
the existence of the CIA “black sites” became widely publicized. The
military court that he and others are being called before is known as a
combatant status review tribunal, whose sole purpose is to rubber stamp
the Bush administration’s definition of these detainees as “enemy
combatants,” who, by definition, are denied rights under both the US
Constitution and the Geneva Convention.<br><br>
<dd>Once their status is confirmed, they can be held indefinitely before
being brought before another military tribunal with the power to condemn
them to death.<br><br>
<dd>The nature of the proceeding emerges clearly from the Mohammed
transcript. He was not provided with a lawyer, but rather a “personal
representative,” i.e., another military officer. He was not allowed to
call two witnesses that he requested, both fellow detainees at
Guantánamo. Nor was he allowed to see classified evidence that was
assembled against him.<br><br>
<dd>According to the transcript presented by the Pentagon, Mohammed
accepted his designation as an enemy combatant, while rejecting the
legitimacy of the US tribunal. He insisted, however, that most of the 385
other men being held in Guantánamomany of whom are now on hunger
strikehad nothing to do with terrorism or attacks on the US and were
innocent people swept up by US forces in the wake of the invasion of
Afghanistan.<br><br>
<dd>This assessment was supported by Mark Denbeaux, a Seton Hall law
professor acting as an attorney for two Tunisians held at the Guantánamo
prison camp. “The government has finally brought someone into Gitmo who
apparently admits to being someone who could be called an enemy
combatant,” he said. “None of the others rise to this level. The
government has now got one.”<br><br>
<dd>Mohammed was the only one of the 14 thus far who agreed to
participate in the hearing. Another detainee called before a tribunal
last week, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, issued a statement saying he would refuse
to appear before any body except a court of law in the US. He pointed out
that he had been denied a lawyer and could not call witnesses in his
defense.<br><br>
<dd>“If I am classified as an enemy combatant,” he said in the statement,
“it is possible that the United States will deem my witnesses are enemy
combatants and judicial or administration action may be taken against
them. It is my opinion the detainee is in a lose-lose
situation.”<br><br>
<dd>With its focus on the details of the myriad attacks and plots to
which Mohammed supposedly confessed, the mass media failed to raise any
number of questions posed by the highly peculiar transcript made public
by the Pentagon.<br><br>
<dd>The first and most obvious is: why should anyone take either the
Pentagon’s account at face value, or for that matter, the accountif it
is indeed genuinegiven by Mohammed himself?<br><br>
<dd>No independent observers were allowed into the secret hearing held in
Guantánamo last weekend. All anyone has are the 26 pages issued by
Defense Department. The cable and network news filled in the blanks with
images of buildings and individuals supposedly targeted in the listed
plots and by interviewing “terrorism experts.”<br><br>
<dd>As for Mohammed, his confession would be ruled inadmissible in any
genuine court. There is no question that he was subjected to forms of
extreme torture. He was further intimidated by the CIA’s seizure of his
wife and two young children, who were threatened with similar treatment
unless he told his interrogators what they wanted to hear.<br><br>
<dd>The 9/11 Commission, meanwhile, basing itself on evidence given by
the CIA, described him as someone prone to “inflating his own role,” who
saw himself as a “self-cast star, the superterrorist.” According to some
media accounts, cynical US intelligence officials referred to Mohammed as
the “Forrest Gump of Islamic terrorism,” for his tendency to place
himself at the center of every single event over the course of
decades.<br><br>
<br>
<dd>Why are the military tribunals secret?<br><br>
<dd>Another question largely glossed over by the media is why the
hearings to determine the status of Mohammed and 13 other former
prisoners of the CIA are being held in secret. Clearly, the main purpose
of this secrecy is not to protect “national security,” but to prevent the
American public and indeed the world at large from hearing any detailed
testimony as to the torture the detainees have undergone at the hands of
US intelligence.<br><br>
<dd>The secrecy surrounding the hearings is also designed to shield a
number of countriesreportedly including Jordan, Egypt, Poland, Thailand
and Moroccowhich provided the US with sites for its clandestine prisons
and, in some cases, assisted in the torture.<br><br>
<dd>Finally, and most importantly, the secrecy is meant to protect
high-ranking US officials, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others,
who undoubtedly issued orders to torture prisoners, acts that are crimes
of war that could bring them before an international tribunal for
prosecution.<br><br>
<dd>There is another question left unanswered in the media frenzy
surrounding the Guantánamo “confession”. Who is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
really, and what were his relations with the intelligence services of the
United States and its allies? Supposedly he is the hardest and most
ruthless of terrorists, yet he is the only detainee who agreed to
participate in the kangaroo courts in Guantánamo, offering a detailed
confession.<br><br>
<dd>His capture, it should be recalled, took place four years ago in
March 2003. It was the result not of some covert US operation, but rather
of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Pakistan’s secret
service, going and picking him up at the house where he had been living
in Rawalpindi, the city where both the ISI and the Pakistani military are
headquartered.<br><br>
<dd>It has been widely reported that Mohammed, who was born in Kuwait and
educated as an engineer at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical
State University in the US, had functioned as either an agent or asset of
the ISI in the 1980s and 1990s, and freely traveled on a Pakistani
passport.<br><br>
<dd>As noted in the transcript released by the Pentagon, Mohammed
participated in the US-financed mujahideen guerrilla war against the
Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, when he and
others, including Osama bin Laden, received funding, support and training
from the CIA.<br><br>
<dd>In 1992, he went to Bosnia, working to mobilize Muslim fighters in
support of the US-backed government that had seceded from Yugoslavia that
year. Later, he took a special interest in the war between Russia and
Muslim forces in Chechnya. Throughout his career, Mohammed is said to
have lived a lavish and decidedly secular life-style.<br><br>
<dd>In short, this is an individual who was not an Islamist and whose
activities over the course of more than a decade appear to have
dovetailed neatly with those of the CIA, directly serving the interests
of American foreign policy.<br><br>
<dd>That such an individual is identified as the “mastermind of September
11” only raises once again the essential question surrounding the still
unexplained and tragic events of that day: was the US government informed
in advance of the 9/11 plot and did it deliberately allow it to take
place in order to provide the Bush administration with the pretext that
it required to launch its already planned campaign of military aggression
and conquest in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf?<br><br>
<dd>It is not only Mohammed’s history as an apparent “asset” of both the
CIA and Pakistani intelligence that raises this question. Any serious
examination of the information that has emerged about how these attacks
were prepared strongly suggests that intelligence officials in the US
actively intervened to prevent the plot from being exposed and to protect
those who ultimately carried it out.<br><br>
<dd>Those quickly identified as the hijackers after 9/11Mohammed Atta,
Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi and otherswere well known to US
intelligence and had been under surveillance, in some cases for years, by
the CIA. Nonetheless, they were allowed to enter and reenter the US,
living openly and flying on transcontinental airplanes under their own
names. The latter two individuals were even given housing by the FBI’s
chief informant on Islamic radicalism in southern California.<br><br>
<dd>Such questions, however, are raised neither by the media nor by the
Bush administration’s ostensible political opposition, the Democratic
Party. On the contrary, both rallied in support of the essential aim of
the administration in releasing the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed transcript:
terrorizing the American people and diverting public opinion.<br><br>
<dd>Particularly revealing was the response of Democratic presidential
candidate Senator Barak Obama of Illinois.<br><br>
<dd>“Obviously, just from the confession, we see the scope of the
planning that was done by al-Qaeda,” he declared on the morning
television news program “Today” Thursday. “I think it just redoubles our
need to make sure that we are securing the homeland...and that we are
aggressive in terms of human intelligence, and really snuffing out these
terrorist networks.”<br><br>
<dd>To talk of the need to be “aggressive in terms of human intelligence”
in relation to a case in which US intelligence officials acknowledge the
use of the most extreme forms of torture, to the extent that the suspect
cannot even be presented publicly, has unmistakable significance. Indeed,
the entire subtext of the public discussion of Mohammed’s
confessionobviously embraced by Obamawas that torture is both
legitimate and necessary.<br><br>
<dd>Obama went on to make the case that the Democrats demand for a
withdrawal of combat troopsthough by no means all troopsfrom Iraq was
predicated on their redeployment... to Afghanistan.<br><br>
<dd>“We have not followed through on the good starts we made in
Afghanistan, partly because we took so many resources out and put them in
Iraq,” he said. “I think it is very important for us to begin a planned
redeployment from Iraq, including targeting Afghanistan.”<br><br>
<dd>What emerges from this reaction to the Mohammed transcript is the
bipartisan support for militarism abroad and sweeping attacks on
democratic rights at home. Both major big business parties are agreed
that the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan must continue and
that the open-ended “war on terror” should be used to justify military
aggression internationally. They also both support the use of police
state powers and stepped-up spying at home to defend the interests of
America’s ruling financial aristocracy. To the extent that there are
differences, they are only over how well these methods have been employed
and over what constitute the best tactics for accomplishing their shared
goals.<br><br>
<br>
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