(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Khalid Mohammed confesses to 9/11, shoe bombing, Cole bombing, London bombing, assassination of Kennedy, assassination of Lincoln, assassination of Clinton, collusion with Atlantis over fishing disputes, and everything else his interrogators say they want him to confess to after torturing him for four years.

EDIT: ludickid correctly notes that he also confessed to the disappearance of Judge Crater, the suppression of the electric car, the Black Plague, and the Holocaust

Comments

[chaosrah.livejournal.com]

lol, damn.

[fearmeforiampink]

And remember, he did so in court! In a court where no-one but he and the military prosecuting him are allowed. But we can trust them, honest! Especially when they're blacking out parts of the transcript!

[torrain.livejournal.com]

I actually don't have that much of a problem with believing that he confessed to it.

(Mind you, I actually don't have that much of a problem with believing that after three years in a "secret detention centre run by the CIA"[1], people might confess to things they haven't actually, you know, *done*.)
---
[1] I *do* have trouble believing that's a serious quote. Unfortunately, it seems to be.

[fearmeforiampink]

I can believe that he confessed to it, but I take everything from a place with no impartial observers like that with a hefty pinch of salt.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I am happy to accept as divine TRVTH that he really did confess to all of the things they say he did, and that he really does insist that this is his idea and he really does insist that he was not tortured at all.

I am willing to accept these things absolutely.

Since he *was* tortured for *at least four years*, I fully accept that if they're publicising his statements and possibly letting him talk to the public, that he will literally say *anything they tell him to*.

That's what happens when you use torture.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Addendum:

roninspoon gets line of the day.

[ryusen.livejournal.com]

I say we torture him till he confesses about Jesus... cause we all know those stupid Muslims are to blame!!!

[kjn]

I had a very long comment to this, but LJ didn't want it. So go here, enter 72 in the bookmark box and click "Bookmark".

Or here's the first bit of it:


"Yes! Yes! I did it! I admit everything!" (Here I emitted a horrid shriek.) "I murdered the Popes—all twelve of them at once! The blood flowed like a river! O hideous impiety! And then!" (Here I dissolved into broken blubbering.) "I dismembered them! And ate them! O foul ecclesiophagy!" (Here I threw in the cackle of the criminally insane.) "And then! And then! After letting nature take its course, I defecated on holy ground! Like a wolf staking its territorial claim! Oh! Oh! I am a monster of depravity!"

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Very nice.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Seems like the problem here isn't really the scope of activities confessed to, it's the criteria under which one might be found guilty of some criminal charge simply for investigating whether it was possible.

Inarguably, specialists in violence (read: terrorists, departments of defense, state militaries) do spend a lot of time assessing targets of opportunity. After all, it's their full-time job: 'Hey, wonder if we can kill Person X? Hey, this guy claims he can blow up Place Y for us - let's check him out.' What seems odd about this case for me, then, is not that Mohammed considered or even investigated committing EVERY ACT with which he is charged, but that bendy bendy military justice is willing to judge such conspiracy as tantamount to actually committing the crime.

As for 'torture gets you to confess to anything,' I certainly imagine it can. But uncompromising survivors from Nelson Mandela to John McCain also prove, by their very existence, that it needn't have to. Consequently, I have an easier time reading Mohammed's statement as (a) "I am Spartacus"-style bravado, or (b) simple defiance of the system, than (c) the interrogator-pleasing gibberings of a broken man.

This may seem an odd point to make, but the pointless hyperbole of some posts above indicates that people are using the very extensiveness of his confession as 'evidence' that he must be partly innocent. If J. Edgar Hoover or P.W. Botha had ever been forced to confess to their many, many deviousnesses, would the length of the charge sheet have the same cleansing effect on them?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

But uncompromising survivors from Nelson Mandela to John McCain also
prove, by their very existence, that it needn't have to.

Uh, McCain cracked. In days. He admits this himself. There are videos. He happily signed everything they gave him and told them everything they told him they wanted to hear. Once they stopped being able to torture him any more, he stopped saying everything they wanted him to say.

Mandela was a political prisoner and put to work at hard labour, but I've never heard of him being tortured.

And it's not how long his confession list is that matters, and it's not his guilt or his innocence. He *very well may* have personally accomplished all the things he claims and all the things I've attributed to him.

It doesn't matter how much or how little he confesses to. It doesn't matter what he did or did not do. It matters that he was TORTURED to produce the confession, making the confession's factual value exactly zero. His confessing to things he quite possibly did (planned the WTC attacks) carries exactly the same truth as his confession to things he *might* have done (bombing the USS Cole, beheading Americans in Afghanistan) and his confession to things he *cannot* have done (killing Kennedy or Lincoln). If I torture you, you will confess to things you have done, things you haven't done, and things that haven't happened. You will confess to anything and everything you think I want to hear. If I torture you for four years, I suspect you'll even keep confessing into a kangaroo court military trial - after all, you're never leaving the custody of your torturer, and you're never getting to say anything that isn't going to be filtered through your torturer first. WHY NOT tell them everything they want to hear, since you can't do anything else without being tortured more, and telling them what they want means they'll torture you less?

McCain is a great example. Look around, you'll find videos of John McCain confessing to *everything* his interrogators accuse him of, because that makes the pain stop.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might be innocent and he might be totally 100% guilty. His confession, however, means absolutely nothing except that his captors are guilty of crimes as heinous as anything he's accused of doing.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm no McCain specialist, but my understanding was that apart from signing a confession to 'air piracy' and listing the Green Bay Packers' offensive line as his flight squadron, his 'breakdown' was fairly limited. Certainly, he refused several offers of early release? Which rather seems to substantiate my point that torture victims can 'play,' or mock, their captors through the confession, as a means of defiance. I am ready to be corrected, though.

I'm also not sure that forced hard labor, frequent solitary confinement, and exposure to other physical miseries on windy-ass Robben Island don't count as torture in Mandela's case, but perhaps I just don't understand your definition of torture. Is torture just physical violence you can't handle?

Thirdly, I guess I need more detail on Mohammed's claims to have assasinated Lincoln and Kennedy. I couldnt find that ín the article you linked, and initially read it as simple hyperbole on your part.

Lastly - and again, I stand to be corrected - I fail to be convinced by your suggestion that torture cannot, and never has, produced anything resembling a true confession. Certainly, if I were tortured I'd probably start out concealing stuff, then give in and say the truth, and finally start confessing to anything my torturers wanted to hear out of desperation. I imagine that effective torturers attempt to sift this pile of questionable information and cross-reference it with other torture trasncripts to figure out what is more or less likely to be true. Now, of course, even if it were 100% effective that doesn't mean it should be done. But that is a different argument to the one you're making.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

*Look it up*. Torture never, under any circumstances, produces reliable intelligence results. This has been proven over and over again every single time the question has been examined.

What torture gets you is someone who will say anything to stop the pain. They will tell you the truth, they will tell you lies, they will make shit up. They will agree with everything you tell them to agree to, and they will make things up that they think will make you happy.

You can fuck with a torturer for a time, and give false or misleading information. It's pretty well inevitable that you will, because they're torturing you because they *don't know the answers*, meaning when you give them an answer the only way they have to test it's reliability is to *torture you more to see if your story changes*.

All torture gets you is propaganda - like the Vietnamese with their GIs like McCain explaining why they're sorry they were led into such a horrible war and why they committed horrible crimes against civilians - and terror, like when the US Government tells you to shut up and play nice you you can be "rendered" to a state that will torture you, or that you can be locked away in a little box where you have no rights at all and tortured on an evidenceless accusation of "terrorism".

And yes, assassinating Kennedy and Lincoln is my own hyperbole. If he had confessed to it in "open" court, it would never have been reported since there were no witnesses in the court who were not a party to his torture, and it would have resulted in his being tortured further.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could *look it up* for me? I have reduced access to research sites right now, as I'm not in the US. Amnesty.org and HRI seem the best places to start. Your claim - i.e. that torture has never, in the history of human endeavor, produced better results than other methods - is quite bold, and if you could substantiate that, I would be very grateful for the heads-up.

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Hey! I've got a developing idea about this discussion on my LJ page (http://wytchfynder.livejournal.com/100134.html), and would appreciate your input if you have the time.