questionable terrorist "confession"

[redbird]

The press seem far too credulous about Khalid Mohammed's alleged confession. The BBC at least mentions Amnesty International's pointing out that the statement may have been coerced, but I feel as though I'm the only person looking at these stories and thinking "show trial." Maybe he did everything he said, maybe he did none of it, maybe he's been dead for a year and they'll announce three weeks from now that he's had a fatal heart attack.

To believe the claims that Khalid Mohammed confessed to these crimes means taking the words of the U.S. government for what he said. In the general case, it's not prudent to accept the prosecution's unsupported claims about a defendant. It's not just that the statement may have been coerced: it may never have been made at all. A blacked-out transcript isn't strong evidence.

In the second, I can't think of any motivation anyone involved in this has to be telling the truth: even if Mohammed said everything they claim he did, he may well be lying. He has reason to believe that, best case, he's stuck for life in Guantanamo, away from everyone he knows and cares about. A death sentence might seem like a relief in comparison.

Also, assuming he is an Al-Qaeda supporter, not a random person arrested by mistake, he might think it's tactically useful to draw attention to himself and away from Al-Qaeda members who are still free in the world and could plot further actions. And "we also were going to do X, Y, and Z" might just be a way of making the organization look bigger and more dangerous. Meanwhile, the people running those tribunals want us all to believe that Al-Qaeda is big and dangerous, but that they have captured one of the most important leaders of that group.

[crossposting from my weblog]

Comments

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

I'm with you.

I mean did he say it - and if he did WHY did he say it now.

And does that mean he can be trusted to tell the trueth? Hell no. To be honest he's telling his interigators what they WANT to hear - and that's no way to get to the trueth.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

No, you aren't the only one. That's what I thought. And I thought, I wonder how anyone can credit anything coming out of Guantanamo?

But then I remembered what people's memories seem to be like.

And then I remembered how insistently the spurious question about the validity of torture in an emergency has been pressed upon people, obscuring the fact that you simply can't trust any information extracted that way.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

I thought this right away, too.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

It was certainly MY instant thought.

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

And hey, if Khalid masterminded 9/11, then why should anyone care about Osama bin Laden still being at large? We got the bad guy, right?

Grr.

[rdkeir.livejournal.com]

yet another legacy of the Republican right wing: I have no reason at all to trust anything I am told by the government these days.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I've seen a handful of articles suggesting that he lied, and analyzing what might and might not be true and credible from his confession, but they all attribute the ambiguity to the idea that he's a megalomaniac and trying to take credit for more than he was responsible for. No whiff of "this is a confession extracted under torture and those are notoriously unreliable," which iw what I'm looking for.

[pameladean]

I don't believe a word of it, personally, but then I'm not a major national newspaper.

P.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Two senators watched the hearing on closed-circuit TV and will issue a statement tomorrow:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/15/AR2007031500865.html

That doesn't mean Mohammed wasn't tortured earlier to get this result, but apparently the hearing was straightforward.

[redbird]

Thanks for that link. I have no offhand feeling about their credibility (there are senators I would automatically distrust on this, and ones I would tend to trust: but I can't see them bringing Sanders as a witness).

Addendum

[redbird]

After posting the above, I found something relevant in my morning paper:

In the L.A. Times (picked up by Newsday, Josh Meyer considers the possibility that Khalid Mohammed was "playing to the jury" by framing his actions in terms that might create sympathy in American readers: "framing his life as an underdog militant."

"It is designed to have an American audience understand that there is another way of looking at the conflict between the West and radical Islam under bin Laden's leadership," said Jerrold Post, former chief personality profiler for the CIA.

Post described the "performance" by al-Qaida's former chief of operations as part psychological warfare and part artfully crafted argument.

"I take it as confirmation of the significance of his position, that despite his thuggish appearance, this is a very shrewd and rather precise individual," Post said.

Again, it's taken for granted that Mohammed said what's in the transcript, and did so freely. Nor does the article note that Post is also presenting a carefully crafted argument. [Note in particular the term "thuggish," as if honesty produces good looks, even in a man who's been in prison for years.]