Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Confesses To 9/11 Through A "Personal Representative"

[Gold9472]

US senators urge probe into 9/11 suspect's claims of abuse

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_sena..._03162007.html

Published: Friday March 16, 2007

Two US senators who witnessed the questioning of the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks have urged officials to investigate his allegations of being badly treated.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin and his Republican colleague Lindsay Graham revealed in a joint statement that they were allowed to watch a hearing for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay via a video link in an adjoining room.

Mohammed confessed to 31 acts of terror or plots including the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, according to a transcript of the hearing released by the Pentagon this week.

The senators agreed the transcript of the proceedings, which lasted more than an hour on Saturday, March 10, was accurate.

And they confirmed that Mohammed, who has no right to a lawyer and was represented by a military officer, had handed the panel a written statement "alleging mistreatment during his captivity prior to arriving at Guantanamo."

This statement has been censored and was not released along with the transcript of his hearing.

"The panel said the allegations will be submitted to appropriate authorities. Allegations of prisoner mistreatment must be taken seriously and properly investigated. To do otherwise would reflect poorly on our nation," the lawmakers said in a joint statement.

They also agreed that a hearing at which the detainee admits the allegations against him was not "the true test" of a process which would be in "a case in which the detainee disputes those allegations."

Mohammed, thought to be the number three leader of the Al-Qaeda network, told the panel that he had planned the September 11, 2001 attacks from "A to Z".

He also claimed to have been behind a host of other attacks and plots, most of which were never realized, such as assassination attempts on former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and the late Pope John Paul II.

He also said he had personally beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl, who was abducted in January 2002 in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi and then killed.

"It was apparent that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed views himself as a warrior, motivated by religious teachings, and seeks his place in history," the senators said.

They added they would "continue to review the process and will explore possible ways to improve this process through congressional action."

Mohammed has been held in controversial circumstances, most of the time in complete secrecy, since his capture in Pakistan in 2003. He has no access to a lawyer and allegations have been made that he was tortured while in US custody.

Human Rights Watch called Thursday for the United States to release Mohammed's separate statement in which he claims to have been tortured while held by the CIA.

No media or human rights monitors were allowed to watch the hearing.

[Gold9472]

Sounds rather "crusadish" to me.

[PhilosophyGenius]

I've read that before also, where there were contradictory reports on KSM and bin Al Shibs arrest, apprently there's some sort of conspiracy there but it hard to follow since pictures and videos of there capture are there.

[Gold9472]

The Confession Backfired

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts201.html

by Paul Craig Roberts
3/17/2007

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.

[Gold9472]

Pearl Family Doubts KSM Confession

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...ive_pearl.html

Dana Hughes
March 16, 2007 7:04 PM

The father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl says he doesn't believe al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is the man who beheaded his son, despite Mohammed's confession to a US military tribunal.

"He wants to take credit for doing it, and he wants to exonerate al Qaeda, blame Pakistan, and whatever," said Judea Pearl, Danny's father. "When a person confesses and he has nothing to lose. You have to take it with a spice of doubt."

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Pearl said that from what he knows about the investigation there are still many unanswered questions trailing back to Pakistan. "We still don't know the whereabouts of the guy who owned the nursery , Memon, where Danny was held," said Pearl. "We don’t know the identities and the whereabouts of the three Arabs who came the last day [of Danny's captivity] and performed the murder." While Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claims to be one of them, Pearl says the facts "don't match his story."

Pearl worries that since KSM has confessed to his son's murder, it will be easy for the U.S. Government to slow down or close the investigation into the tragedy.

"Governments are tired, they have bureaucracy, they have other pressing issues that are higher priorities, so they tend to forget the human injustices," he says. "If one person is murdered, a government tends to forget it."

Law enforcement sources insist that there is hard forensic evidence that links KSM to the murder of Pearl.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales personally called the Pearl family to inform them of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s gruesome confession, Pearl said.

Judea Pearl voiced objections that the world was allowed to read the transcripts of KSM's confession.

"There's no need for the public to read his diatribes about how bad America is and read graphic details of his crimes," he says. "You know what this does? It sends a message to his comrades in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. We don’t understand that these people are aroused by cruelty."

Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who worked with Daniel Pearl and became a close friend of his family, told ABC News the release of the transcripts has brought up painful memories for his family and friends.

"It's a place that's very dark, and for it to go again and be splashed on the front pages of newspapers is like going back down into a very very terrible nightmare," she says.

Danny Pearl was staying with Nomani in Karachi when he was abducted and murdered. She also expressed doubts that KSM murdered Pearl.

"Anyone who saw the tape of Danny’s murder could confess to those details," she told ABC News. “From everyone I've talked to in Danny's family there isn't closure. Really at the end of the day there's not convincing evidence that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was the killer."

Now a visiting journalism professor at Georgetown University, Nomani is heading up The Pearl Project, a university sponsored investigative reporting project where a team of journalism students and professors will spend a year investigating who killed her former colleague.

The project has the blessing of Judea and Mrs. Pearl, as well as that of as Danny Pearl’s widow Mariane. Judea Pearl says finding the real killers and bringing them to justice is not only about the family’s healing, but will serve a greater purpose.

"It sends a message to the millions and millions of youth that are currently on the verge of joining the ideology of unruly violence that there will always be people like Asra or Danny; reporters that are probing, courageous, truth-minded and open-minded. They will be after you."

For now, he says, the family is trying to concentrate on how Danny lived, and not how he died. "I'm not going back, I’m looking at the future."

The family runs the Daniel Pearl Foundation, dedicated to using journalism, music and community dialogue as a way of fostering understanding between young people in the Arab world and the United States. Pearl says he wants to counter what he says is the extremist propaganda that comes out of some Arab media. In particular, Pearl was outraged at Al Jazeera's use of quotation marks around the term "terror plot" when the Qatar-based network describing the acts to which KSM confessed. "They are contributors to the hate that killed my son," he says.

"I see myself as a soldier. History has given me a combination of tragedy and opportunity, and if I don’t exploit the opportunity then all I’m left with is tragedy," says Pearl.

"I'm compelled to harness all the energy that this tragedy has evoked for a good cause, and the cause is to eradicate the hate that took Danny's life."

[PhilosophyGenius]

Wow. Pearl family speaking out is big. I've seen that HBO documentary on this where they go in depth with Marial Perle, she really knows her stuff.

[Gold9472]

Confession of 9/11 architect backfires on US

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...cle2368990.ece

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published:^18 March 2007

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's dramatic confessions before a US military hearing are beginning to backfire on the Bush administration. Legal experts are casting serious doubt about their validity as evidence, and human rights activists say they only illuminate a "sham process" of justice in the US war on terror, including the apparent use of torture on Mohammed and potentially dozens of other al-Qa'ida suspects.

Mohammed's claims to have been fully responsible for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the murder of Daniel Pearl, the 2002 Bali disco bombings and a host of lesser plots, both hatched and fully realised, were made public to great fanfare last week.

Almost immediately, however, legal experts said he appeared to be exaggerating his role for his own self-aggrandisement and may also have deliberately floated false claims to send US investigators on wild goose chases.

The CIA denies that Mohammed was tortured, but evidence to the contrary has been building for years. Two years ago, a CIA official told ABC News that he had been water-boarded, and had won the admiration of his interrogators because it took him two to two-and-half minutes to start confessing - well beyond the average of 14 seconds observed in others.

[Gold9472]

9/11 Attacker's Words Put Doubts On Confession

http://wjz.com/topstories/topstories...075100704.html

3/18/2007

(AP) WASHINGTON Wearing an orange jumpsuit and with his hands chained, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed quoted from the Quran and cited George Washington as he attempted to justify the horrors of 9/11 - providing the first glimpse into the mind of the alleged architect of the attacks.

Mohammed's statements during a hearing at Guantanamo Bay, in which he confessed to planning 31 terrorist attacks, also raise questions about the effect that years of rough CIA interrogations may have had and whether his confession is valid.

"As a result of torture, KSM himself falsely implicated various other people who he says are innocent," said Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for several other Guantanamo detainees. He cited Mohammed's statements, which did not name names.

In a censored transcript of Saturday's hearing issued late Wednesday by the Pentagon, the tribunal president noted that Mohammed complained that he had been tortured by the CIA, and asked if he made statements because of the torture. Mohammed, who was transferred to Guantanamo from CIA custody in September, responded, "I cannot remember now," but the rest of his sentence and other remarks on that point were censored by the military.

Later in the encounter, Mohammed said he and other prisoners had made false statements during interrogation, apparently under torture. He submitted a written statement about how he allegedly was tortured, but the military refused to divulge it. Human Rights Watch on Thursday urged its release.

"It is a glaring misuse of the classification power for the government to classify information simply because it might be embarrassing or unlawful," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "Mohammed's claims of torture should be investigated rather than concealed."

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano denied the torture allegations. "The United States does not conduct or condone torture," he said.

Two psychiatrists, in interviews with The Associated Press, said Mohammed's admissions on Saturday do not appear to be the result of torture but might be exaggerated for tactical reasons, as part of his continued fight against the United States.

The three-member U.S. military panel - their names were censored - aims to determine whether Mohammed is an enemy combatant and should continue to be held at the military prison in Cuba. Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, who has the ultimate say on the matter, is expected to make a decision within days.

Military guards brought Mohammed, dressed in the orange jumpsuit reserved for noncompliant prisoners, into the hearing room in a doublewide trailer inside the prison complex at Guantanamo Bay, then left. Only those with the proper security clearance can be present when the detainee speaks. The guards left Mohammed in handcuffs and sitting on a chair, his feet connected by a chain to the floor.

Mohammed is now much slimmer than the chubby man who was captured in 2003, according to an official who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

According to the transcript, Mohammed cited a verse from the Quran that said Allah forbids Muslims to become friendly with those who fight them because of their faith. He also said many Muslims view Osama bin Laden as a heroic figure like George Washington.

Two psychiatrists, who reviewed his statements, said he appears committed to his cause.

"There's no evidence in his statements that he has relinquished any sense of purpose or mission," said Michael Welner, an expert on terrorism and confessions and an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine.

In a statement read by an Air Force lieutenant colonel, designated as Mohammed's personal representative, Mohammed claimed responsibility for planning Sept. 11 and 30 other attacks, many of which were not carried out. After the list was read, a U.S. Navy captain serving as the tribunal president, immediately asked Mohammed if those were his words.

"Yes," Mohammed responded.

"I want to be clear, though, is that you were the author of that document," the president asked again.

"That's right," Mohammed insisted, adding at another point that he is an enemy of the United States.

"I see him as rather feisty and combative and nothing indicating a guy confessing things after being ... tortured," said Jerrold M. Post, director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University and a 21-year veteran of the CIA. "He's somewhat proudly stating, perhaps overstating, the extent of the operations he has been involved with."

Mohammed might be exaggerating the number of targets he intended to attack in order to spread "the message of fear," Post said.

Welner said Mohammed may have been misleading interrogators, mixing in information about false plots along with ones that were real.

"If he decides there is something he wants to misinform interrogators about he can do it, and only he will know he is doing it," Welner said. "It presents a tremendous challenge for law enforcement ... and the motive could be to divert investigators away from a more significant plot.

"He is still invested in his cause," Welner said. "He is still fighting his war. That's not going to change."

[Gold9472]

Experts dispute Sheikh’s claim about Pearl

http://www.dawn.com/2007/03/17/top12.htm

GUANTANAMO, March 16: The claim of suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that he had personally beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl has been dismissed by experts and his journalism colleagues as baseless.

“It's ludicrous and preposterous,” said Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor, of the claim made at a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay. The journalist’s parents said it was impossible to know whether the claim “has any bearing in truth.”—AP

[Gold9472]

Lawyer to appeal Pearl case conviction

http://www.centredaily.com/135/story/44565.html

By SADAQAT JAN - Associated Press Writer
3/19/2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The lawyer for a man convicted of killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl said Sunday he will file an appeal using an al-Qaida lieutenant's recent confession that he beheaded the reporter.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed that he planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, claimed at a U.S. military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he personally beheaded Pearl for being an Israeli intelligence agent.

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," Mohammed told a military panel, according to a Pentagon transcript released Thursday. "For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."

In 2002, an anti-terrorism court in Karachi sentenced Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born militant, to death and gave three other men life in prison for involvement in Pearl's killing.

Rai Bashir a lawyer for Sheikh and the other three men said on Sunday that he will study the Pentagon documents on Mohammed's claim and file his confession as evidence to prove Sheikh's innocence.

"He has not abducted Daniel Pearl, and he, along with his co-accused, is innocent ... But now we are happy that this version has been verified by the Pentagon after the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," Bashir told AP Television News in a separate interview on Saturday.

Pearl was abducted in January 2002 in Karachi while he was researching a story on Islamic militancy. Months after his abduction, the journalist's body, his throat slit, was found in a shallow ditch in a compound on the outskirts of the city.

Sheikh and the three others - Salman Saqib, Fahad Naseem and Sheikh Adil - are in jail and have appealed their convictions.

"What we were saying for so many years in our trial, in the appeal, (is) that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is innocent and he has not committed that murder," Bashir said in the interview from the eastern city of Lahore.