The 3,000 and one
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s testimony before a US military tribunal nine days ago offers a strange and illuminating glimpse into the mind of person who is at the center of international terrorism. Mohammed, who was has been held in secret prisons since his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, is accused of being the No 3 in Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida and is the most important member of the organization to have been caught. Mohammed himself claims, in his March 10 statement, to have been the mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. As it is almost certain that neither bin Laden nor his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, will be caught alive, Mohammed appears to be the player who will bear the burden of representing a struggle which – albeit waged by a small number of people – has changed the world we live in. What matters here is not only what the prisoner has to say but also the context in which he says it. Unfortunately, the whole procedure is tainted from the start and it is very difficult to know if Mohammed is telling the truth. He may be confessing to acts of terrorism because he actually did plan them; he may be lying because he wants to claim credit for more than is his due, either to protect others or to glorify himself; he may be saying what his jailers demand of him because he is helpless in their hands. As long as there are secret prisons and trials held outside the normal judicial procedure with all its guarantees, there will be great suspicion over the legitimacy of the process. So what does the man who claims the death of 2,972 people in the 9/11 attacks alone have to say? The most important thing is that he claims responsibility for this attack. His confession could be the product of torture, and he does seem to say that he was tortured, as we can infer from the tribunal president’s comment in a piece of the transcript that was censored. But in his testimony, Mohammed presents himself as a warrior in a legitimate war, in which the USA does as it pleases but demonizes its enemies when they reply in kind. In other words, whether or not he was coerced into making his claims, the prisoner is also given an opportunity to tell the world what he believes with regard to the war he and his comrades have declared upon America and the West. This is surely not the product of torture. And Mohammed makes it clear that he is trying to reach both his followers and his captors, arguing that his war is legitimate and is no different from those waged by countries and revolutionaries. «What I wrote here, is not making myself hero, when I said I was responsible for this or that. But you are military man. You know very well there are language for any war,» the prisoner says, according to the tribunal’s transcript. «If America they want to invade Iraq they will not send for Saddam roses or kisses, they send for a bombardment,» he adds. «Because war, for sure, there will be victims. When I said I’m not happy that 3,000 been killed in America. I feel sorry even. I don’t like to kill children. «If now we were living in the Revolutionary War and George Washington he being arrested through Britain. For sure he, they would consider him enemy combatant. But American they consider him as hero.» He compares bin Laden with Washington, saying that for the Muslims, bin Laden «is doing the same thing.» The tribunal is being held to determine whether Mohammed is being held legitimately as an «enemy combatant,» in other words, outside the normal legal process. The prisoner takes the opportunity to make the case for his war. But in his confession he makes a claim which, if these are his words, shows just how great a chasm lies between him and the world he is trying to reach. «I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,» he says of the 38-year-old reporter who was murdered in 2002. «For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head,» Mohammed boasts. In the general slaughter of war, in the efforts to justify the clash, it remains impossible to understand how, in the name of any cause, a person can, in cold blood, cut the throat of a prisoner. And this brings us to the chilling truth that no matter how big the battle, no matter who is right or wrong, tragedy always concerns the single human being: the victim and the killer.
