Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?
It could all have been so different. Between September 2002 and April 2003, the five defendants in the forthcoming 9/11 trial at Guantánamo — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi) and Walid bin Attash — were seized and transferred to secret CIA prisons, where they were subjected to an array of “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. And yet they could, instead, have been questioned by skilled US interrogators for whom torture remains abhorrent, illegal and counter-productive.
These experts would, no doubt, have spent years building up cases against Mohammed and his alleged accomplices and encouraging them to talk through tried and tested methods. After 9/11, however, the White House and the Pentagon decided that skilled interrogation was somehow soft, and that al-Qaeda operatives were so tough that they had been trained to resist all types of traditional interrogation. But as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer explained in an article last summer, a former CIA officer with knowledge of the techniques used on the al-Qaeda suspects explained, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable.”
If the same techniques used before 9/11 had been applied after the attacks, it’s probable that by now Mohammed and his co-defendants would have been tried in a US federal court, and the reputation of the United States — as a country that does not torture, rather than one with a lying administration that claims it does not torture because it has cynically redefined what torture means — would still be intact. A case in point, completely overlooked in the administration’s defense of its “robust” new approach, is Ramzi Yousef — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew, and the terrorist behind the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 — who, as Mayer has explained, “gave a voluminous confession after being read his Miranda rights,” following his capture and rendition to the US court system in 1995.
These experts would, no doubt, have spent years building up cases against Mohammed and his alleged accomplices and encouraging them to talk through tried and tested methods. After 9/11, however, the White House and the Pentagon decided that skilled interrogation was somehow soft, and that al-Qaeda operatives were so tough that they had been trained to resist all types of traditional interrogation. But as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer explained in an article last summer, a former CIA officer with knowledge of the techniques used on the al-Qaeda suspects explained, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable.”
If the same techniques used before 9/11 had been applied after the attacks, it’s probable that by now Mohammed and his co-defendants would have been tried in a US federal court, and the reputation of the United States — as a country that does not torture, rather than one with a lying administration that claims it does not torture because it has cynically redefined what torture means — would still be intact. A case in point, completely overlooked in the administration’s defense of its “robust” new approach, is Ramzi Yousef — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew, and the terrorist behind the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 — who, as Mayer has explained, “gave a voluminous confession after being read his Miranda rights,” following his capture and rendition to the US court system in 1995.
posted by temporal at 9/30/2008
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