Plus 9/11 and about 30 more acts of terrorists.

Gun? Rope? Needle?

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not a nice guy, by any means. But... he was taken prisoner in Pakistan in March 2003, and has been held prisoner since. The tribunal was ostensibly to determine if he should be held, since only "enemy combatants" (terrists) are held there of course....

But since he had not been designated an "enemy combatant" before March 07.... under what authority and reasoning was he held prisoner for the past 4 years? Who should  be held accountable for illegally imprisoning someone who is not an "enemy combatant" for 4 years? And what should the penalty for doing so be?

Oh, yeah - I forgot - Bush said he was a terrist. So he was. So Bush is accountable? Of course not. How silly of me.

Two senators who watched Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confess to planning the Sept. 11 attacks and other plots said Friday that his allegations of mistreatment by U.S. captors should be taken seriously and investigated.

"To do otherwise would reflect poorly on our nation," Sens. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich., and Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), R-S.C., said in a joint statement.

That's funny; all I see here is trolling. And baiting. And flaming. And personal attacks. Very little discussion of the matter at hand. Oh, well, it's your site, and I'm just a guest.
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What I think:

KSM probably was the key planner for al-Qaeda. He was also in charge of propaganda--think about that for a few minutes. It doesn't seem humanly possible to have been deeply involved in even half of what he's confessed to. I don't care whether he's confessing because of his ego, harsh interrogation, or to cover for others. It would be a world record for naivete to presume that we've now got all of those cases solved.

Note also the timing of the announcement, and of the special ceremony to present the findings, which featured special invitations to Senators. We've had him for, what? Three years? More? I think it's merely a ploy to distract from the towering inferno of White House scandals. Whatever you think of this administration's use of the words "Nine" and "Eleven" spoken in quick succession, with the emphasis on the second syllable of "Eleven" (nine uh-LEV-en), you're a clueless fool if you think it their utterance of it has any meaning except, "Now shut up and listen." Whether what they have to say merits listening any more is left as an exercise to the reader.

It's the height of desperation to pounce on this like it means anything at this point. If we were going to make KSM the scapegoat for 9/11, the time for that passed years ago. Think about it: YEARS AGO. Either we got nothin' on the guy, or we've had plenty on him and either failed to follow up, or just plain dropped the ball. Again.

It's Khalid Sheik Mohammed, FFS. The mastermind behind the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. The event that changed the world, for ever. How in the world do we not already have this guy in prison, executed, or frozen in carbonite? I'd have thought that we'd have invented some revolutionary science to extract facts directly from his brain. It's like we captured Satan himself without his armor, and we've just let him chill out for a few years before suddenly parading what's left of him onto a stage to confess.

Think carefully. If this was your project, would you really have waited for so long just to announce what he'd confessed to? Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that you had seventeen solid reasons for waiting. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you wouldn't have already had at least one of the confessions fully investigated, corroborated, and proven to have led to the arrests of other dangerous terrorists? Let's assume that you didn't, that it really, really, really took you years to get the confession. Maybe you got a few confessions up front, then he clammed up for a few months, then a little more, you know, maybe he nickel-and-dimed you. Okay, fine. I think I've been very generous here.

Given all of that [implausible] point-spotting, now tell me with a straight face that you never once considered investigating at least one of his claims. You really thought your job was simply to extract confessions? Did you, maybe, pass this information along to whomever you thought might have the job of investigating?

I feel exactly the same way about KSM that I do about the invasion of Iraq. During "shock and awe", I was indeed awed by our military might. I had high hopes--even after the naive soldiers and/or Marines put the American flag where Saddam's statue had been*--but now that we're coming up on the FOURTH ANNIVERSARY of the invasion with nothing to show for it but 3000+ dead and tens of thousands wounded, I conclude that our leadership is incompetent--and in denial.

[Surely someone will pounce on this and spew a load of talking points, e.g., "We do so have something to show for it!" Rattle on. You're twice as entertaining as a circus geek.]

KSM: We caught him, or at least the Pakistanis did and turned him over to us. That's worth a lot of points. Way to go. Sitting on him for years on end, though, is further evidence of incompetence.

You fools who are still backing this administration probably wouldn't kick the preacher out of your church for anything--except maybe getting caught having sex with an intern.

And if you think for even a moment that KSM's capture did anything but teach al-Quaeda a lesson, you're dumber than my dog. Al-Qaeda is decentralized. Designed to operate with the head removed. Think "cockroach", or more accurately, "cockroaches". We caught a really big one, and we got him to talk, but there are many, many more in the walls, and they're multiplying. The big roach has confessed to eating the Jell-O, running across the baby's face, flying into Mom's hair, and showing the other roaches how to get into the baked goods on the counter. Meanwhile, the house is infested with vermin, and we're too busy watching TV to do anything about it today.