CIA interrogations report

KSN: WASHINGTON (AP) — "We're going to kill your children."

With those words, a CIA interrogator tried to squeeze intelligence information from accused terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

On Monday, the threat was revealed in a newly declassified report on alleged detainee abuse as President Barack Obama's Justice Department launched a criminal probe of "unauthorized ... inhumane" tactics during George W. Bush's war on terrorism.

The five-year-old report by the CIA's inspector general, released under a federal court's orders, described harsh tactics used by interrogators on terror suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Seeking information about possible further attacks, interrogators threatened one detainee with a gun and a power drill, told another he would have to watch his mother sexually assaulted and tried to frighten a third with a mock execution of still another prisoner"

Paul Craig Roberts: The Confession Backfired

Via 9/11 Blogger:

Paul Craig Roberts, Lew Rockwell.com

"The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals – that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.

That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.

That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.

Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes.

Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the entire show. No other terrorists needed.

Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB.

Humorists are having a field day with the confession: "’I’m a very dangerous mastermind,’ said Mohammed, who confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Brink’s robbery, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the Lincoln and McKinley assassinations. Mohammed also accepted responsibility for spreading hay fever and cold sores around the world and for rained out picnics."

If there was anything remaining of the Bush regime not already discredited, Mohammed’s confession removed any reputation left.

The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don’t know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 "high value detainees."

In other words, the government has nothing on 99 percent of the detainees who allegedly are so dangerous and wicked that they must be kept in detention without charges, access to attorneys and contact with families.

And little wonder. The vast majority of detainees, alleged "enemy combatants," are not terrorists captured by the CIA and brave US troops. They are hapless persons who happened to be outside their tribal or home territories and were kidnapped by criminal gangs or war lords who profited greatly at the expense of the naive Americans who offered bounties for "terrorists."

The US government does not care that innocent people have been ensnared, because the US government desperately needs both to prove that there are vast numbers of terrorists and to demonstrate its proficiency in protecting Americans by capturing terrorists. Moreover, the US government needs "dangerous suspects" that it can use to keep Americans in a state of supine fearfulness and as a front behind which to undermine constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights.

The Bush-Cheney Regime succeeded in its evil plot, only to throw it all away by releasing the ridiculous confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Will Bush’s totalitarian Military Tribunal now execute Mohammed on the basis of his confession extracted by torture, or would this be seen everywhere on earth as nothing but an act of murder?

If Bush can’t have Mohammed murdered, the US government will have to shut Mohammed away where he cannot talk and tell his tale. The US government will have to replicate Orwell’s memory hole by destroying Mohammed’s mind with mind-altering drugs and abuse.

It is to such depths that George Bush and Dick Cheney have lowered America."


9/11 Khalid Sheikh MohammedPaul Craig Roberts

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 'confession' met with suspicion

So yesterday we have:

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States, has claimed responsibility for those and other major al Qaeda attacks, according to the transcript of a hearing at Guantanamo Bay released on Wednesday.

"I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z," said Mohammed, speaking through a personal representative, according to the transcript of the hearing at the U.S. military prison camp released by the Pentagon"

"I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z,". You have to wonder who writes this stuff.

So for anyone who doesn't know KSM has been tauted as the practical 'mastermind' of 9/11. He was arrested some time back, even some mainstream journalists were very skeptical at the time whether he actually had been arrested or not. Nonetheless, the NYT and Human Rights Watch believed he had been the subject of torture while in US custody and so on.

Anyway, significantly both CNN and Time Magazine have displayed real suspicion towards this so called confession, and I think anyone who has looked at 9/11 would correctly be enormously skeptical indeed about the veracity of this and indeed the reliability of KSM himself.

9/11 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed KSM

David Ray Griffin: A reply to George Monbiot

Via 9/11 Blogger: "In “Bayoneting a Scarecrow The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a coward’s cult.” (Guardian, February 20), George Monbiot accuses members of the 9/11 truth movement of being “morons” and “idiots” who believe in “magic.” Having in his previous attack---“A 9/11 conspiracy virus is sweeping the world,” Guardian, February 6---called me this movement’s “high priest,” he now describes my 9/11 writing as a “concatenation of ill-attested nonsense.”

If my books are moronic nonsense, then people who have endorsed them must be morons. Would Monbiot really wish to apply this label to Michel Chossudovsky, Richard Falk, Ray McGovern, Michael Meacher, John McMurtry, Marcus Raskin, Rosemary Ruether, Howard Zinn, and the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who, after a stint in the CIA, became one of America’s leading civil rights, anti-war, and anti-nuclear activists?" Read more...

People like Webster Tarpley, and indeed David Ray Griffin in the past have argued that the best way to stop the wars and the police state may to be run with 9/11 itself. I can certainly see the logic there. The only criticism I've said is that you have to be careful not to say that well '9/11 was inside job, therefore everything that has come after it is bad'. No that is false, everything that has come since 9/11 is entirely wrong irrespective of whether or not 9/11 is an inside job.

I think if anything DRG has been extremely conservative in his list of people here, remember you've got people. who while don't necessarily fully endorse the inside job position, are not satisfied with the current fable either and feel that MIHOP can't be ruled it out, from what I've seen would seem to include the likes of Daniel Elsberg, Rabbi Michael Lerner and possibly Gore Vidal from when I heard him on Alex Jones' show along with many many others.

The problem I have with George Monbiot is that he is the distraction here, and part of an insidious, albeit perhaps well-meaning, Axis-of-Drivel aimed squarely at the coffee-sipping left (chattering) middle classes, to which Monbiot has tried to elect himself a hero of.

Despite all the things he claims to have done in his life, Monbiot gives the firm impression that the hardest decision he has ever faced is what nut cutlet dish to choose from the local healthfood store. Now, a caricature of humanity, Monbiot is like the Modern Parents cartoon you may remember from Viz, nothing but a walking list of failed left clichés and a stupid poster boy for the international establishment's global taxations and so on.

Monbiot, is the exemplification of why the establishment left has failed, not just failed itself which is neither here nor there, but failed its constituency and everyone else at large. This idea that governments are benign creatures and that only another crippling tax to appease the white guilt of Monbiot will save the world really has been perhaps one of the most dangerously failed pseudo-zeitgeists of our time.

When I see this sort of drivel, its sadly no surprise that the US and the UK are embarking on horrific and brutal wars of aggression across the Middle East, slaying and maiming thousands upon thousands, accompanied by the construction of a dizzying, terrifying, humiliating and dehumanizing police state at home, as despite whatever Monbiot's anti-war direct political affiliations have been, he and his autistic friends have effectively given the green light for this with their stream of self-indulgent and valueless trinket distractions that have willfully distorted, misrepresented and masked the gravity of what is going on in the world today.

I think we can say that George Monbiot and the kind of thinking he represents can be safely disregarded.

George Monbiot David Ray Griffin 9/11

Guy Smith (producer BBC 9/11) on Alex Jones

Via 911 Blogger:

Well worth a listen indeed. This person Guy Smith is an apparently a pretty sad piece of work, it saddens me that licence payer's' money goes into the wages of people like this. Intersesting, he is very very nervous in the interview and what you note is the very real institutional, cultural embedded difficulty for many in opening one's mind to this and that the BBC's position is very much an approach to containment on the topic.

Interview Here

9/11 Alex Jones BBC hit piece The Conspiracy Files Guy Smith

Top Bin Laden Expert: Confession Fake

This looks like it is a couple of days old from Kevin Barrett's radio show, but it is something we have talked about on this blog before and it is a good one via 911blogger:

"By Kevin Barrett, http://mujca.com 2/17/06

Is the famous “confession video” genuine? Despite Bush’s insistence that the tape is authentic, America’s top academic Bin Laden expert has finally gone on the record, joining numerous other experts.

“It’s bogus,” says Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University’s Religious Studies program.

Lawrence, author of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, offered his historic debunking of the administration’s lie in an interview with Kevin Barrett (“Dynamic Duo,” gcnlive.com, 2/16/2007, first hour). The interview marked Lawrence’s first major public statement since he made headlines last year by suggesting that recent Osama tapes are hoaxes and that the real Osama Bin Laden may be dead.

Why has the Bush Administration been lying for more than five years by telling us that this preposterously bad hoax is a genuine “confession video”? Lawrence, citing informants in the US intelligence apparatus’s Bin Laden units, said that everyone knows the tape is fake, adding that the hoax has been kept alive because it is politically useful to those who wish to deflect attention from
“conspiracy theories” about 9/11"

9/11 Bin Laden Kevin Barrett