Too much of a good thing

The derision that has greeted the recent confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (better known as KSM to his friends) underlines just how contemptuous the public has become of the investigative and judicial processes synonymous with the Bush Administration.

As Paul Craig Roberts explains, the whole farce has backfired.

The sheer number of crimes and terrorist attacks (both successful and otherwise) that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has allegedly admitted to masterminding goes beyond the bounds of credulity.

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.

This was not helped by the fact that the Military Tribunals classified the details of whether any of the confession were coerced. Some of the alledged plots bordered on the impossible:

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.

If these revelations had any validity, they would be startling and ground breaking, but after a string of discredited foiled terror plots, not to mention, just as many in Britain, the public is growing wary of a government who has cried wolf about a dozen times too often . You know when something so implausible has failed when even the right wing bloggosphere can’t even get excited enough to discuss it.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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