Will the Real 9/11 Master mind please stand up?

[PhantomWolf]

Not that the Truthers will believe it for a second.

9/11 Court Confession

[3onthetree]

phantomwolf said:

Not that the Truthers will believe it for a second.

9/11 Court Confession

Hearing at Gitmo eh, I believe.

[Jason]

Because of course nothing good can come out of Gitmo, right?

[echnaton]

That is quite a lot of terrorist activities to have plotted in one lifetime. Well, we'll see if he also claims responsibility for the Hindenburg fire as well.

[lenbrazil]

I’ll have to go with the CT’s on this, not that I have any reason to think KSM’s confession was false, but I don’t think we can be sure how reliable it was. He was tortured by his interrogators and moral considerations aside this puts everything he said in doubt. I don’t think we should fall into the CT trap of unquestioningly accepting all evidence that backs our position no matter how dubious.

CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described

Sources Say Agency's Tactics Lead to Questionable Confessions, Sometimes to Death

By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO

Nov. 18, 2005 — Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March 2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence officers and supervisors.

They say they are revealing specific details of the techniques, and their impact on confessions, because the public needs to know the direction their agency has chosen. All gave their accounts on the condition that their names and identities not be revealed. Portions of their accounts are corrobrated by public statements of former CIA officers and by reports recently published that cite a classified CIA Inspector General's report.

Other portions of their accounts echo the accounts of escaped prisoners from one CIA prison in Afghanistan.

"They would not let you rest, day or night. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. Don't sleep. Don't lie on the floor," one prisoner said through a translator. The detainees were also forced to listen to rap artist Eminem's "Slim Shady" album. The music was so foreign to them it made them frantic, sources said.

Contacted after the completion of the ABC News investigation, CIA officials would neither confirm nor deny the accounts. They simply declined to comment.

The CIA sources described a list of six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" instituted in mid-March 2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use the techniques:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.
2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.
4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.
5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.
6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess. "The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

The techniques are controversial among experienced intelligence agency and military interrogators. Many feel that a confession obtained this way is an unreliable tool. Two experienced officers have told ABC that there is little to be gained by these techniques that could not be more effectively gained by a methodical, careful, psychologically based interrogation. According to a classified report prepared by the CIA Inspector General John Helgerwon and issued in 2004, the techniques "appeared to constitute cruel, and degrading treatment under the (Geneva) convention," the New York Times reported on Nov. 9, 2005.

It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough," said former CIA officer Bob Baer. Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and a deputy director of the State Department's office of counterterrorism, recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust … than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets."

One argument in favor of their use: time. In the early days of al Qaeda captures, it was hoped that speeding confessions would result in the development of important operational knowledge in a timely fashion.
However, ABC News was told that at least three CIA officers declined to be trained in the techniques before a cadre of 14 were selected to use them on a dozen top al Qaeda suspects in order to obtain critical information. In at least one instance, ABC News was told that the techniques led to questionable information aimed at pleasing the interrogators and that this information had a significant impact on U.S. actions in Iraq.

According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals.

His statements became part of the basis for the Bush administration claims that Iraq trained al Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. Sources tell ABC that it was later established that al Libbi had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

"This is the problem with using the waterboard. They get so desperate that they begin telling you what they think you want to hear," one source said.(con't)

abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=1322866&page=1

[Jason]

While he may be exaggerating his role in some of the actions he confessed to, it seems that he is guilty of many of them - especially the murder of Daniel Pearl:
"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, [Wall Street Journal reporter] Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."

I fully expect him to be tried for war crimes and executed.

[frenat]

We must consider that some of the confissions are the result of torture, however, there are also some people that would never admit to a crime they didn't commit no matter what torture they are subjected to. Is he one of those people? We may never know. But we should be open to that possibility as well.

[PhantomWolf]

I think one telling thing is that a lot of the things on the list no-one knew about because they never come to fruition. About 2/3 of the list they did the planning for, but the attack never occured for whatever reason. Why would he make up stuff that no-one knew, and why leave off prominent and well known Al Qaeda attacks such as the USS Cole, the US Barraks in Saudi, and the Kenyan Emabasy attacks if he was just "confessing to everything"?

[sts60]

FYI. www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1599861,00.html

You'll have to copy and paste the text into your browser's address line.

[Apollo Gnomon]

In addition to the doubts raised by Len and others, we have to consider that KSM may be motivated by ideology to over-confess for others, to "take one for the team." He's already in custody, he has to consider his career and possibly his life to be over. But if he can convince the enemy that he's the biggest threat, perhaps the enemy is weakened.

[twinstead]

Well, he did 'confess' to al-Jazeera before his capture, so unless they tortured him I would tend to believe him.

www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,906911,00.html

BYW, you'll have to cut and paste the link. how DO I get entire URLs to be hyperlinked here?

[LunarOrbit]

Instead of pasting the link directly, use the forum's URL tags and give the link a description like this:


[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,906911,00.html]The Guardian[/url]


The link will look like this:

The Guardian

[twinstead]

admin said:

Instead of pasting the link directly, use the forum's URL tags and give the link a description like this:


[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,906911,00.html]The Guardian[/url]


The link will look like this:

The Guardian

Excellent. Thanks.

BTW, I just noticed I typed BYW instead of BTW on my earlier post

[PhantomWolf]

Well over on JREF I did a break down of the things he confessed too.

Out of the 31, 20 either never occured, were just scouting missions, or providing money to other groups.

That leaves 11 actual missions that were undertaken.

Of those 4 were failures, all of which were tied back to Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda sponsered groups (or admitted to by Al Qaeda) and in one case KSM was named at the likely mastermind.

Of the 7 successful missions, all were known or suspected Al Qaeda operations, so it is likely that the head of their operations would have been involved in the planning and execution of them.

Interestingly, there are a number of Al Qaeda operations that didn't make the list, such as those I mentioned above. If he was just confessing to a string of Al Qaeda operations "to take one for the team" or because he was "tortured into confessing to them all", then why not add in those major operations as well?

[tofu]

lenbrazil said:

He was tortured

really? You call that torture?? Standing up while naked? That's torture?

Having seen pictures of this guy, I might call having to *see* him naked torture, but I would reserve serious use of the word torture for cases that actually involve torture.

It's a bit like how the government wants to call everything "terrorism" now. If someone robs a bank, that's terrorism. It dilutes the term and I'm certain that you understand why it's bad to do that. Well, I think you're doing the same thing with the word torture.