Masterminds and confessions

It seems that every so often a new terrorist mastermind emerges who is to be hunted down and brought to justice. Now it seems these masterminds also offer blanket, if remarkably convenient confessions. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the latest individual to fit this description. Mohammed has allegedly confessed to being the mastermind behind the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States and to beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Most of the media has reported these confessions with remarkably little skepticism. In the United States, and in much of the rest of the world, the image of yet another Arab-looking man with scruffy hair confessing to committing a serious act of terrorism is unlikely to solicit much skepticism.

But skepticism is something that is necessary when seeking to understand the present situation, and there are a number of good reasons for this. First among these is the likelihood that the confession was obtained under torture. The United States actively seeks information obtained under torture. A number of Guantanamo Bay detainees past and present have made allegations of being tortured. Pakistan, where Sheikh Mohammed was captured, is known to routinely use torture. There is also the well documented use of torture at a number of prison facilities operated by the United States, Britain and others in Iraq of which Abu Ghraib is but one well publicized example. Lastly, there is the United States’s long standing practice of extraordinary renditions – the secret abduction of individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activities, who are often later found to be totally innocent, to be interrogated in countries known to actively practice torture in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and north and central Africa.

Given the immense importance placed on him as a top Al Qaeda operative, and the nature of the sweeping confessions he has provided, it is not far-fetched to presume Mohammed’s confessions were obtained under torture. This gives good reason to question the evidentiary value of these confessions.

There is a further reason to be skeptical of Mohammed confession and this has everything to do with politics. The Bush Administration has been under immense pressure in the wake of a revitalized Democratic Party and a string of scandals and errors including but not limited to the occupation of Iraq. Immediately prior to the Sheikh Mohammed confession being made public, both Democrats and Republicans started calling for Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’s resignation following allegations that he dismissed a string of federal prosecutors for political reasons, and that the FBI improperly accessed personal information the Patriot Act. On 7 March former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney Louis Libby was found guilty of lying to FBI agents and grand jurors investigating the disclosure of a CIA operative. And in Iraq, an unpopular and illegal war continues to kill more and more Iraqis and Americans with no clear denouement in sight.

Announcing Mohammed’s confession at this juncture gives the Bush Administration an ‘announceable’ – something which tells the public that the Bush White House has delivered on its major stated policy of bringing terrorists to justice, while at the same time diverting attention from its mistakes. Even Mohammed’s capture three years ago on 1 March 2003 seemed remarkably expedient. Debate in the US and around the world in those days was thick with pronouncements of war with Iraq for its alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorists. For the Musharraf regime in Pakistan, there was pressure from within and without. The US was putting pressure on Musharraf to support a further United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq. Within Pakistan, the US’s soon-to-occur invasion was intensely unpopular, some even claiming that any overt support of the invasion by Pakistan could lead to Musharraf’s ouster. Moreover, at a moment when much of public awareness in the West had been focused on the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his alleged support for terrorists, it would not take much imagination to wonder why Pakistan was not the focus of an American invasion. The announcement of Mohammed’s capture at this time therefore gave Musharraf and Pakistan a wonderful bargaining chip with which to sit on the fence – avoid closer scrutiny of the strong links between the State and militant Islamists, and avoid overt support for the American invasion of Iraq.

Following Mohammed’s capture, the former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the most powerful institutions in the country, Hamid Gul spoke to Reuters.com:

Gul said news of the arrest appeared to have been leaked at a critical time, just as Pakistan was facing huge U.S. pressure to support a U.N. Security Council vote authorizing war on Iraq.

On Monday night, a senior ruling party official told Reuters the government, under massive domestic pressure to oppose war on a fellow Muslim state, had decided to abstain in the vote, news that shocked British and American diplomats in Islamabad.

The ISI earlier said it had called its first news conference in Pakistan's history to counter criticism in the Western media that it had not done enough in the war on terror.

Gul said the raid may have been staged -- and news of the arrest leaked -- for the same reason, against the backdrop of the U.N. vote.

Gul, who ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, said the raid was conducted in far too casual a fashion to have been real, with police failing to properly surround or secure the house in a middle-class Rawalpindi suburb.

Unfortunately, the doubt over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed does not end there. Leaving aside whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is actually the mastermind the US claims he is, there is uncertainty as to whether the man who is in US custody is actually Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. On 3 March 2007 The Guardian reported that the family living in the house where he was believed to have been captured denied that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had ever been there:

At no point, the family say, was Mohammed or any other man in the house. The agents did not even ask about them. "The only people in the house were my brother, his wife and their kids," Qudsia said. "I have absolutely no idea why the police came here."

On 11 September 2002, Pakistani officials claimed that they had killed or captured Mohammed during a raid in Karachi, Pakistan. It was later reported in some quarters that he had escaped but no mention was made of efforts to recapture him until the surprise disclosure of his capture almost 6 months later. To add to the uncertainty, following the announcement of his capture, officials from Pakistan and the United States variously claimed that Mohammed was being interrogated in Pakistan, by Pakistan, or outside Pakistan by the United States.

But perhaps the most surprising revelation of all was where Mohammed was allegedly captured. For not only was it claimed that he was captured in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the two most powerful institutions in Pakistan – the Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, the home which was raided was in a district where many retired Army generals and ISI officers live. It is hard to imagine that either the Army or the ISI did not know for some time that Mohammed was there.

Taliban representatives in Pakistan also expressed doubt as to whether the man captured was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. As Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali explained on Australian television in March 2003:

Reports from Pakistan are coming out from what are described as Taliban sources, ie members of the former government in Afghanistan who are now around in Pakistan, who are denying that he has been captured and saying, "We know exactly where the guy they're claiming to have captured is," and until he is produced before a court of law or interviewed or allowed access to the press or lawyers, we will not know who he is.

These uncertainties alone do not indicate that an innocent man has given a false confession to US authorities. It is possible that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is currently facing trial at Guantanamo Bay and that he was involved in the 11 September attacks. The dilemma in the present situation is not that it points to a vast global conspiracy. Rather, it demonstrates the dangers of the very secretive and unaccountable practices of the United States security apparatus and its Pakistani counterparts. In the present climate, it is impossible to know fact from fiction because those arms of government charged with the impartial identification of security threats have been subsumed by political pressures. This creates a dangerous environment of distrust and uncertainty where no one is quite sure who is telling the truth, least of all the public but perhaps by government also. There is a real prospect that the United States’s and Pakistan’s politically motivated revelations of terrorist threats and confessions will mimic the old children’s fable of the boy who cried wolf. The question is will they be ready to respond when the real wolf strikes?

An edited version of this piece is available at New Matilda.