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In a rambling statement delivered Saturday to a closed-door military tribunal, Mohammed declared himself an enemy of the United States and claimed some responsibility for many of the major terrorist attacks on U.S. and allied targets over more than a decade. He said that he is at war with the United States and that the deaths of innocent people are an unfortunate consequence of that conflict.

"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z," Mohammed told a panel of military officers through a personal representative, who read off a list of 31 terrorist acts that were either carried out or planned but not executed. According to transcripts released by Defense Department officials last night, Mohammed later spoke in broken English and Arabic, saying, "For sure, I'm American enemies."

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[ 15 March 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Or is it possible that Osama was not actually the mastermind behind the attacks, as we have been told ever since?

He also said (but the Wash Post neglected to mention) that he had been tortured by the CIA into confessing. Was he lying about that but telling the truth about his involvement in all those terrorist attacks?

By the way, some media have mentioned that he was maybe, like, possibly a wee bit coerced into spewing nonsense:

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But Amnesty International urged caution in assessing Mr Mohammed's statements, which it said were made without any of the normal legal safeguards.

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 'confession' was not made in a court of law but in a secret screening process that bars lawyers," said Amnesty UK spokesman Mike Blakemore.

"Before his six months at Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was apparently held in a totally secret CIA-run prison for three-and-a-half years where he alleges torture."

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Adjusting his eye patch with a fingerless hand Mohammed revealed the location of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, apologized for his role in causing the tsunami of 2005 and hurricane Katrina, and revealed the fates of both Judge Crater and Amelia Earhart as well as well as confessing to a number of unsolved murders in various states.

At least that is what his interpreter, Omar Faruq thinks he said as he noted that without a tongue or fingers the ability to communicate in either the spoken word or sign language is somewhat of a problem.

US Army representative Major Bubba Joe Jackson remarked that Mohammed had become pretty proficient at writing with a pen stuck in his nostril, at least when he still had nostrils.

This blogger sums it up nicely:

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...Here’s what the Orwellian Pigs in the White House are telling Americans that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has “confessed to”, er, I mean, said after he was beaten into the shape of a pretzel, darn it, I mean, here’s what the Bush White House has decided what crimes Mohammed has done to make the White House feel better about their own incompetency:

From Reuters:

- The September 11, 2001 attacks that destroyed New York’s World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. Mohammed said he was the operational director for Osama bin Laden and carried out the attacks “from A to Z”.

- The 1993 truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center that killed six people and wounded more than 1,000.

- The October 12, 2002 bombings of two nightclubs in Bali, Indonesia, which killed 202 people.

- The 2002 bomb attack on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel on the Kenyan coast, which killed at least 14. A simultaneous, failed missile attack on an Israeli airliner leaving nearby Mombasa airport.

- The attempt to down two American passenger airplanes using shoe bombs. British-born Richard Reid was sentenced to life in prison for trying to blow up a transatlantic American Airlines flight on December 22, 2001 with explosives stuffed in his shoes.

- A plan to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.

- Surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American presidents, including Jimmy Carter.

- A plot to destroy Britain’s Heathrow Airport, the Canary Wharf Building and Big Ben.

- Shared responsibility for plots to assassinate Pope John Paul in the Philippines and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Oh wow. That’s quite a list! I especially enjoy the one about ’surveying and financing…the assassination…of Jimmy Carter’. Huh. If I’m not mistaken, if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was doing this when Carter was president, Mohammed would have been 13 years old at the time!!!! Freaking hysterical!

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed buried the dinasours too!

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- A plan to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.

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Oh wow. That’s quite a list! I especially enjoy the one about ’surveying and financing…the assassination…of Jimmy Carter’. Huh. If I’m not mistaken, if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was doing this when Carter was president, Mohammed would have been 13 years old at the time!!!! Freaking hysterical!

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And he may have planned to bomb the International Labour Organization headquarters in Geneva because no union has come forward to challenge the child labour practice of Al Qaeda and protect the over-worked and underpaid (with just prayers) Al Qaeda operatives !

[ 16 March 2007: Message edited by: bohajal ]

Germany:

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Berlin's Tageszeitung criticized Washington's decision not to try Mohammed in a public court. "It may well be that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed actually is 'responsible' for the long list of carried out, attempted and planned attacks that he admitted to in his long statement," the paper wrote. "But the world will never find out if that is the case. The USA has done everything it could to keep this 'confession' from being permissible in any proper court in the world."

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Austria

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Mohammed's confession comes from a hermetically sealed world where there are not defense lawyers, no media openness, where judges and prosecutors do not have names," Austria's Der Standard wrote from Vienna. "Certainly, it's easy to make suggestions from afar. But human rights have to remain non-negotiable, even in the fight against terror.

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Russia

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Moscow's Kommersant daily was skeptical about the confession's veracity. "The confessions sound horrific but also fantastic," it wrote. "If you were to believe the accused, he wanted to attack NATO headquarters, the Empire State Building in New York, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and Library Tower in Los Angeles as well as US warships in the Persian Gulf, Gibraltar and Singapore. The alleged plans to blow up the Panama Canal or several US nuclear power plants have less to do with reality than with a terrorist's daydream.

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http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2386638,00.html

[ 16 March 2007: Message edited by: bohajal ]

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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.

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[ 18 March 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

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Originally posted by M. Spector:
Why does it not even make a blip on the media radar when a suspect testifies in court that he was tortured to obtain a confession? Is this the new "business as usual"?

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This is about another GTMO suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri:

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Here's what the Bush administration has done to the values, traditions and honor of the United States of America: An accused terrorist claims he confessed to heinous crimes so that agents of the U.S. government would stop torturing him, and no one is shocked or even surprised. There's reason to believe, in fact, that what the suspect says about torture is probably true.

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Conditions for detainees at the US military jail at Guantanamo Bay are deteriorating, with the majority held in solitary confinement, a report says.
Amnesty International said the often harsh and inhumane conditions at the camp were "pushing people to the edge".

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I was in the audience February 12, 2007 during the Washington, DC screening of the new HBO documentary “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.” After watching the documentary, panelists Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Kennedy discussed prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib.

To the amazement of the audience, Graham said, with a twinkle in his eye, that “Americans don't mind torture, they really don’t.” Then he smiled broadly, almost gleefully, and said that the US had used certain interrogation techniques on “Shaikh Mohammed, one of the "high value" targets,” techniques that "you really don't want to know about, but they got really good results."

I firmly believe that Graham’s statement acknowledged that US officials have tortured prisoners, and he, as a Senator, knew what was done and agrees with the torture because “it got results.”

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