Washington
Exploits Guantánamo “Confession” To Justify Its Crimes
By Bill Van Auken
17 March, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The obvious question is:
why such haste to release the transcript—which 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Guantánamo—many
of whom are now on hunger strike—had 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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
The first and most obvious
is: why should anyone take either the Pentagon’s account at face
value, or for that matter, the account—if it is indeed genuine—given
by Mohammed himself?
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.”
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.
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.
Why are the military tribunals secret?
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.
The secrecy surrounding the
hearings is also designed to shield a number of countries—reportedly
including Jordan, Egypt, Poland, Thailand and Morocco—which provided
the US with sites for its clandestine prisons and, in some cases, assisted
in the torture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Those quickly identified
as the hijackers after 9/11—Mohammed Atta, Khalid al-Midhar and
Nawaf al-Hazmi and others—were 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.
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.
Particularly revealing was
the response of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barak Obama
of Illinois.
“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.”
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 confession—obviously
embraced by Obama—was that torture is both legitimate and necessary.
Obama went on to make the
case that the Democrats demand for a withdrawal of combat troops—though
by no means all troops—from Iraq was predicated on their redeployment...
to Afghanistan.
“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.”
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.