Uhhh, Wait a minute, I thought Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the events of 9/11? 9/11, EIGHT YEARS LATER: THE GOVERNMENT LIE CONTINUES. Now we have photos of another "Mastermind" of 9/11. I guess it doesn't matter, as long as the media shows an Arabic type with a turban, they figure the American public will buy their Arab hate campaign. The above photo's show Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the Guantanamo Bay prison which have spread quickly on Web sites that experts say "al Qaeda" uses to reach supporters.
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The pictures of the man who says he masterminded the 9/11 attacks were taken by the Red Cross in July and sent to his family. They are the first known photos of Mohammed since he was captured in Pakistan six years ago. The picture (ABOVE) on the left shows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after his 2003 arrest. The picture on the right shows what he looks like now in Guantanamo in 2009.
AP..Hummm, Looks like Guantanamo Bay actually benefitted him.
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On the left he looks down and out and on drugs after his "capture" but on the right, apparently, while he was being detained they let him grow a nice beard and dress himself up in is honorary Arab "garb" to take a picture----How nice of the guards at Guantanamo Bay. But they figured it was important to manipulate the people with another Arab with a turban picture...Find an Arab with a Turban, any Arab will do..... I guess everyday is Halloween for the U.S. government. By the way, is it my imagination, or do these pictures have inconsistencies? Does the "Arab" on the left pluck his eyebrows when compared to his picture on the right? Maybe it's just me....or maybe that's standard practice in Guantanamo Bay for the captors to pluck the eyebrows of prisoners who have been tortured and captured......But maybe that's just me....
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Now, on Sept. 10) -- A day before the anniversary of the Sept. 11 nightmare, there's concern that "terrorists" are getting signals to strike again.
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Alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shown after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003 (left) and in detention at Guantanamo Bay in July 2009 (right) as we've pointed out shows his transformation since the eight years since the worst terrorist attack against America. In that time, you might have thought you'd heard all the stories and seen all the images from that unforgettable day. But there's more out there somewhere and the foundation building the 9/11 memorial wants to collect it. Previously unseen material from citizen journalists will be posted on The National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum's Web site Thursday and the organization is making a worldwide appeal for more pictures, videos and stories.
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The problem with most 9/11 anniversary reports, is that they do nothing to advance the story or deepen our understanding of the historic event. Most of what you'll see over the next few days will be "a media scam designed to exploit audiences ... sell newspapers or boost ratings."
Eight years after, America is feeling "9/11 amnesia," says Daily Beast columnist John Avlon. He blames the Bush administration, saying it politicized what should have remained a day of national unity. As a result, Avlon says, America "wants to turn the page," but can't because there's still little progress in rebuilding at ground zero in Manhattan and a war still raging against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
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h1. But then again, we would imagine it's impossible to bring about "closure" for the American people on an event that is one big lie from beginning to end.
More on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: What About Osama Bin Laden?
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By Rob Scott • March 16, 2007
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Thought I’d chime up with my own tuppence worth on some issues that are raised by the recent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed debacle…
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The first thing I’d like to say is that it appears to have been widely appreciated just how ridiculous the “confessions” obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed appear to be.
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For those who don’t know (if you have been living under a rock for the past week), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has admitted to being the mastermind behind every terrorist atrocity, real and imagined, since about 1980.
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My main point is this: whilst many of us accept that at least some of these confessions seem a little spurious, how, therefore, can we accept any of them?
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What I am saying is this: the actions taken by the American government in releasing the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “confessions” is indicative of either incredible arrogance (in expecting to be believed) or extreme stupidity (in believing the confessions themselves). Let's read right here more about these "confessions" from a London newspaper: London, June 17 (ANI): Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has admitted that he had lied during his interrogation at Guantanamo Bay.
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**Mohammad said he made up stories to prevent the CIA from torturing him during his detention.
According to the transcripts of military tribunals, released as part of a Freedom of Information legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Mohammad cooked up stories to save himself from ‘water-boarding’, a form of simulated drowning.
“I make up stories,” Mohammad said.
He said that when officials enquired about the whereabouts of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, he named a region only to prevent them from torturing him.
“Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me. Then I said, Yes, he is in this area,” Mohammad recalled in his broken English.
The disclosure clearly highlights the unreliability of statements obtained through torture.
Mohammad also said the CIA had told him that he had no constitutional rights, as he was not on his home-soil, The Telegraph reports.
“This is what I understand he told me: You are not American and you are not on American soil. So you cannot ask about the Constitution,” said ACLU director Jameel Jaffer.
Another prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, complained that he was not given medical treatment for his wounds during detention.
“They did not care about my injuries that they inflicted to my eye, to my stomach, to my bladder, and my left thigh and my reproductive organs.Doctors told me that I nearly died four times,” Zubaydah said. (ANI)**
I’m not going to go through and list the 30+ crimes that he has admitted to. Nor am I going to talk about the fact that, after 4 years of rigorous interrogation and probing, potential for torture, and generally inhumane treatment, even I might admit to things I did not do. No, I’m not. What I am going to say, though, is what this whole fiasco means to me. (By the way, I wonder how the "Arabs" got bombs into the buildings: IT'S OFFICIAL, THE TWIN TOWERS CAME DOWN FROM BOMBS INSIDE THE BUILDINGS AND NOT FROM JET FUEL).
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Firstly, the very fact that the American’s have chosen to announce their crime solving and terrorist-busting prowess to the world in this way suggests either a naivety beyond belief, or, more worryingly, a complete underestimation of the world’s ability to make their own conclusions. The persons responsible for announcing this “great” achievement obviously thought that the rock throwing masses would actually buy this story, or they believed the confessions themselves? I’m not sure which notion worries me more: that those responsible believed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s alleged confessions; or that they made (some of) them up, and expected us to?
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Perhaps more worrying, though, is my main point. As we all seem to have realized that these confessions are invalid and “not worth the paper they are written on” (incidentally, how there ever came to be a transcript of secret interrogations is beyond me too) what does this mean for the The American War on Terror (or T.W.A.T, as I have seen it described)? What of WMD? What about all the terrible things we were told Saddam Hussein had done?
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What, now, do we make of those first assertions that it was all Osama Bin Laden’s fault? What of those videos we have all seen, you know, the ones where Osama Bin Laden admits to being a nasty pasty? We all know now that those video tapes and audio tapes are fakes:9/11, EIGHT YEARS LATER: THE GOVERNMENT LIE CONTINUES
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After we have all finished resoundingly poo-pooing these confessions, perhaps we may consider this point more carefully: if these aren’t true (and we know they are not) then what is? Is Osama Bin Laden really responsible for all the attacks on the west of which he stands accused? Could those videos not have been hoaxes or mock-ups? What of all the other countless things we have been fed, through the media, about various unsavoury characters, and their alleged misdemeanors (issued perhaps with the goal of creating one enemy with whom blame could be laid for everything, in order to help a War on Terror which would otherwise seem an incredibly large and impossible task)?
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I ‘d like to see some evidence. For example, how many of us who watched the Osama tapes on the news (at least the little sound-bity excerpts that they showed our tiny attention spans) and read the little subtitles at the bottom actually know what he was saying? By this I mean how many of us can speak Arabic? Further, how many of us actually know that this was absolutely, definitely, Osama Bin Laden making these wild claims? Very, very few. Yet we accept them as true.
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Is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to conclude that such stories may not be as valid as they first appear?
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I admire the American political publicity machine. Really I do. Who else could push their ideas and agendas forward so quickly and easily, and have them picked up by so many news stations across the globe? Who else could make an allegation without producing a shred of evidence (by this I mean actual valid evidence, which would have to be produced to accuse an ordinary man of an ordinary crime) and turn certain individuals into public enemy number 1 (and 2,3,4 etc)?
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But, alas, I fear with this one they may well have shot themselves in the foot. Once people begin questioning the validity of your statements, you are surely in trouble of never being believed, not unlike the boy who cried wolf.
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It is not hard to imagine (though it might require a degree of empathy) how one brought up in the Middle East, or of such extraction, upon whom western interests have had, in their opinion, a manifestly adverse impact on their community and/or country and/or region, might be a little perturbed at having this done by a west which has, as it’s one superpower, a country and Government which is perceived as either a) incredibly arrogant or b) extremely stupid.
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This, surely, cannot help things?
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Iraq, Iran, Russian, Pakistan, Afghanistan: It was an impressive foreign policy list in Obama's Presidential debate, and by all sensible accounts Barack Obama did a decent job convincing Americans that his opponent may not have been the expert that he claims to be. (And he wasn't, he's another illuminati puppet just like Obama).
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Missing from the debate, however, as it has been since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, was any discussion of certain specific locations that have played a key role in America’s foreign policy in the last seven years: Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and a set of far-flung torture chambers in places as diverse as Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Diego Garcia, to name but a few.
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This is, to put it mildly, a disappointment, as it is in these places that much of America’s pride and dignity has been lost, through the use of torture, degrading and inhuman treatment, and the detention of prisoners in a legal black hole between the Geneva Conventions and the US courts. It is only by addressing the horrors that have occurred there, holding those responsible to account, and ensuring that the unfettered executive power that allowed these abuses to occur is repudiated, that America can embrace the change that Senator Obama and so many Americans want to see.
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WASHINGTON – In the biggest trial for the age of terrorism, the professed 9/11 mastermind and four alleged henchmen will be hauled before a civilian court on American soil, barely a thousand yards from the site of the World Trade Center's twin towers they are accused of destroying.
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Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse.
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It's a risky move. Trying the men in civilian court will bar evidence obtained under duress and complicate a case where anything short of slam-dunk convictions will empower President Barack Obama's critics.
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The case is likely to force the federal court to confront a host of difficult issues, including rough treatment of detainees, sensitive intelligence-gathering and the potential spectacle of defiant terrorists disrupting proceedings. U.S. civilian courts prohibit evidence obtained through coercion, and a number of detainees were questioned using harsh methods some call torture.
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Holder insisted both the court system and the untainted evidence against the five men are strong enough to deliver a guilty verdict and the penalty he expects to seek: a death sentence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people who were killed when four hijacked jetliners slammed into the towers, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.
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"After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York — to New York," Holder repeated for emphasis — "to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood."
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It could all have been so different. Between September 2002 and April 2003, the five defendants in the forthcoming 9/11 trial at Guantánamo — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi) and Walid bin Attash — were seized and transferred to secret CIA prisons, where they were subjected to an array of “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. And yet they could, instead, have been questioned by skilled US interrogators for whom torture remains abhorrent, illegal and counter-productive.
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The five co-defendants charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks
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From the top: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash.
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These experts would, no doubt, have spent years building up cases against Mohammed and his alleged accomplices and encouraging them to talk through tried and tested methods. After 9/11, however, the White House and the Pentagon decided that skilled interrogation was somehow soft, and that al-Qaeda operatives were so tough that they had been trained to resist all types of traditional interrogation. But as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer explained in an article last summer, a former CIA officer with knowledge of the techniques used on the al-Qaeda suspects explained, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable.”
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If the same techniques used before 9/11 had been applied after the attacks, it’s probable that by now Mohammed and his co-defendants would have been tried in a US federal court, and the reputation of the United States, as a country that does not torture, rather than one with a lying administration that claims it does not torture because it has cynically redefined what torture means, would still be intact. A case in point, completely overlooked in the administration’s defense of its “robust” new approach, is Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew, and the allegedly the "terrorist" behind the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, who, as Mayer has explained, “gave a voluminous confession after being read his Miranda rights,” following his capture and rendition to the US court system in 1995. (It's amazing what you'll admit to when you're being electo-shocked isn't it?)
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Instead of being condemned as a mass-murdering criminal, however, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a man with an “unimaginable” ego, and one, moreover, at the apex of a system of mass imprisonment in which thousands of innocent men and insignificant Taliban foot soldiers have been brutalized, held without charge or trial and deprived of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, has been allowed to portray himself as a “warrior” in an epic “Clash of Civilizations.”
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Day One
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The action unfolded slowly. At 9 am on Monday, four of the co-defendants gathered in the courtroom for hearings on a series of pre-trial motions, but on, Ramzi bin al-Shibh , was nowhere to be seen. Doubts had already been raised about the mental health of the Yemeni, and his lawyers, whom he is trying to dismiss, so that he can represent himself, like Mohammed and some of his other co-defendants — were seeking permission to appoint clinical and forensic psychologists to examine him. His lead attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, stated that the defense team has doubts about his mental health, and noted that his medications include “a psychotropic drug prescribed to persons with schizophrenia.” As a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) explained, Lachelier “referred to pleadings filed by the bin al-Shibh team that contained considerable additional evidence, which she could not discuss in court, which bolstered the claim that he was mentally ill and might not be competent to stand trial or able to participate in his own defense.”
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In the end, the rest of the day’s planned discussions were derailed, as the authorities tried to work out what to do about bin al-Shibh’s refusal to appear. Although the military could have brought him to the courtroom against his will, they refused to do so without a formal order from Kohlmann. In the first surreal touch of the hearings, protracted discussions between Kohlmann and the prosecution were only halted when, as the Washington Post described it, Mohammed “raised his hand and offered to meet with bin al-Shibh in an effort to persuade him to come to court,” and was backed up by his co-defendants. Bin Attash explained, “I agree with my brother Sheikh Mohammed. We don’t have to do any fight with Mr. Ramzi. He doesn’t trust anyone in government, but he does trust us. With what has happened to us in this situation — we have all lost faith. But we have faith in each other.” Kohlmann refused to allow a meeting, but he did allow the co-defendants to write letters to bin al-Shibh, which they all signed.
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The judge also stated that bin al-Shibh should be given another opportunity to meet with his lawyers, but he refused to let Cmdr. Lachelier meet him in his cell, in the prison’s secretive Camp 7, and explained that he would, instead, have to be “transported, hooded and shackled, in a van with blacked-out windows” to a meeting place. Pointing out that this might only add to her client’s reluctance to meet, Lachelier offered to be hooded herself and taken to Camp 7, but Kohlmann refused. As Denny LeBoeuf of the ACLU explained, it was “a remarkable suggestion that highlights yet again the absurdity of Guantánamo’s secrecy regime.”
Day Two
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As a bizarre spectacle, however, the hearings only really came to life on Tuesday, after bin al-Shibh had responded to the entreaties of his co-defendants, and all five men were in court together for the first time since their arraignment in June.
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In the voir dire process, in which, as Carol Rosenberg explained in the Miami Herald, “lawyers question a judge on his potential bias at trial,” Mohammed was allowed to grill Kohlmann about his background. “For a while,” as the Los Angeles Times noted, he “turned the tables on his captors and made the military judge justify his competency to preside over the trial.”
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“Glaring and poking an occasional finger in the air,” Mohammed told Kohlmann, “The government considers all of us fanatical extremists,” and asked, “How can you, as an officer of the US Marine Corps, stand over me in judgment?” Insisting that he was attempting to work out if Kohlmann was a religious extremist, he continued: “[President] Bush said this is a crusader war and Osama bin Laden said this is a holy war against the crusades. If you were part of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson’s group, then you would not be impartial.’”
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For his part, Kohlmann attempted to maintain his dignity, explaining that he was “currently unaffiliated with a church ‘because I’ve moved so often.’” He added that he had previously worshiped at “various Lutheran churches and Episcopal churches,” and the sub-text — that he was no religious fanatic — was clear. It was at this point that bin al-Shibh spoke out unexpectedly. “As far as I know your last name is a Jewish name, not a Christian name,” he said, prompting a terse response. “With regard to your observation about my heritage and background,” Kohlmann said, “it’s actually inaccurate. And I’ll leave it at that.”
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AMERICA, YOU ARE BEING RAILROADED AGAIN! THESE MEN HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE EVENTS OF 9/11! THEY COULDN'T HAVE CARRIED OUT SUCH A COLOSSAL EVENT EVEN IF THEY WANTED TO. THEY ARE PATSIES AND SCAPEGOATS PARADED IN FRONT OF THE MEDIA IN THIS KANGAROO COURT TO SATISFY YOUR APPETITE FOR REVENGE AND DISTRACT YOU FROM THE REAL PERPETRATORS. THE TRUE PERPETRATORS OF 9/11 ARE THE NEW WORLD ORDER ILLUMINISTS. THAT INCLUDED, GEORGE BUSH, DONALD RUMSFELD, GEORGE BUSH SR. BILL CLINTON, ARIEL SHARON, TONY BLAIR, THE INTERNATIONAL BANKERS WHICH INCLUDE THE ROTHCHILDS AND THE ROCKEFELLERS ALONG WITH TOP RANKING CIA, DEA, FEMA AND WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES HELL BENT ON BRINGING IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER. IF YOU DON'T SEE THAT BY NOW, YOU MOST LIKELY NEVER WILL...
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EPH 5:11:DO NOT PARTICIPATE IN THE UNFRUITFUL DEEDS OF DARKNESS, BUT INSTEAD EXPOSE THEM;
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