khalid shaikh mohammed

Of all the talking points emerging from the conservative side about the 9/11 trials, the prospect of attack architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed getting set free in the U.S. is perhaps the most far-fetched, at least until the next round of trials are announced. I didn’t take it seriously enough to debunk, but The American Prospect’s [...]

This comes from September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a survivors’ group that has urged the Obama administration to shut down Guantanamo Bay:
We, the members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, support the Attorney General’s decision to bring the trials of the five individuals currently accused of plotting the attacks of Sept 11, 2001 [...]

Depending on who you ask, the sentencing yesterday of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri to eight years in prison is either evidence that the civilian federal judicial system can successfully handle terror cases, or evidence that it’s a dismal failure.
Yesterday, Jonathan Hafetz, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented Al-Marri in his challenge to military [...]

It’s not just former Vice President Dick Cheney who misrepresented what the CIA inspector general’s report says about the effectiveness of torture. Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard reports on a “GOP memo” he says is being circulated on the Hill that’s a laughable tissue of decontextualized bullet-pointed quotes from the report. For instance, its [...]

There has been some confusion for years over what exactly “waterboarding” has meant in practice. Does it induce the sensation of drowning? Or does it actually replicate it? The differences between the two may seem academic, but the CIA inspector general report on torture says that the way the agency practiced waterboarding was different from [...]

Imagine what would happen if Mir Hussein Moussavi disappeared into Evin prison this afternoon and then a few days later Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged to say that Moussavi, under the kind of harsh questioning necessary to protect the Islamic Republic from outside subversion, had confessed to being a paid agent of the CIA. Then imagine Ahmadinejad [...]

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell assured reporters yesterday, “I see nothing to indicate that that date” — that is, the date to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, set by President Obama in a January executive order by year’s end — “is at all in jeopardy.” OK. The Democratic-controlled Congress removed all money for the closure [...]

It’s a rhetorical gambit predicated on a mostly false hypothetical that pretty much assumes its conclusion: There’s a bomb set to go off but you don’t know where. You’ve got a detainee in custody who knows where it is. He won’t talk. You’re running out of time. When are you going to torture him, already? [...]

Apropos of this post about Lawrence Wilkerson’s charge that the torture apparatus built by the Bush administration was concerned with manufacturing an al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein link as a pretext for invading Iraq, look what HuffPost’s Sam Stein pulls out of the memory hole. This is an account of the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed:
[A] [...]

Then here, read this:
It is unclear from unclassified reports whether the information gained was critical in foiling actual plots. Mohammed later told outside interviewers that he was “forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop” and that he “wasted a lot of their time [with] several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.,” [...]