THE KSM CONFESSION….Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has confessed to everything. His statement (released yesterday) takes responsibility for 31 separate acts of terrorism, ranging from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the bojinka plot, and 9/11 to attempts to assassinate Henry Kissinger and Pope John Paul II. It’s an astonishingly wide array of plots, and Noah Shachtman wonders if KSM, knowing he’s doomed anyway, confessed to all this stuff just to avert suspicion from others:
Sorry, that feels just a little too pat, a little too tidy. It could be that KSM is, as the 9/11 Commission noted, someone who sees himself as “the self-cast star — the super terrorist” in “a spectacle of destruction.” But to me, it sounds like a man taking on as many bodies as he can, so the rest of his group can go free.
Maybe, though one assumes U.S. intelligence is bright enough to see through this. Still, if you read the transcript of Saturday’s tribunal session, it’s striking how often KSM asks that other prisoners at Guantanamo be treated “fairly.” This might be merely a reference to interrogation methods, but it might also be a plea to give all these other guys the benefit of the doubt when they say they had nothing to do with any of this stuff. It’s not likely to work, but it might explain why he decided to so fully take the rap for everything under the sun.
