By continuously arguing aspects of the legality of torture, we may be missing the bigger picture which is the gross lack of transparency in the prosecution of terrorists. For instance, the basic issue of the confirmation of the identity of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has been brought into question. It was reported in Asia Times that on September 11, 2002 Shaikh Mohammed was killed in a joint ISI-FBI raid in Karachi, Pakistan.
Ever since the frenzied shootout last month on September 11 in Karachi there have been doubts over whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed head of al-Qaeda's military committee, died in the police raid on his apartment.
But now it emerges that an Arab woman and a child were taken to an ISI safe house, where they identified the Shaikh Mohammed's body as their husband and father. The body was kept in a private NGO mortuary for 20 days before being buried, under the surveillance of the FBI, in a graveyard in the central district of Karachi.
More after the jump:
Later, the Pakistani press carried pictures of a message scrawled in blood on the wall of the flat, proclaiming the Muslim refrain of Kalma, in Arabic: "There is no God except Allah, Mohammed is his messenger". An official who was present in the flat at the time of the shooting has told Asia Times Online that the message was written by Shaikh Mohammed with his own blood as his life drained from him.
This news went unreported outside Asia. Strangely enough, the origin of KSM’s confession of plotting terror came not under interrogation in the cell of a CIA ghost prison but freely from an al-Jazeera interview in April 2002 by Yosri Fouda. A suspect alleged to be KSM was arrested in March 2003 after the ISI raided a wedding in Pakistan.
Until his arrest this week the only known photograph of him was a strange passport picture of a man staring out from under a Gulf Arab headdress, his thick beard and glasses obscuring most of his features. It glowers at you on the FBI Most Wanted website, along with an electronically enhanced version of the same picture showing him wearing a shirt and collar and cleanly shaven.
The details on the website are sketchy and contradictory: he was born on 14 April 1965 or 1 March 1965. His place of birth is Kuwait or Pakistan. He is olive or light skinned. He wears a full beard, a trimmed beard or a shaven face and is also known to wear glasses to hide his brown eyes.
It was only after my 48-hour encounter with the masterminds of the "Holy Tuesday" operations in New York and Washington that the world, including the CIA and FBI, came to learn that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is al-Qaida's number three and that his importance to the group as a terrorist organiser in the field exceeds that of his boss, Bin Laden.
While officials celebrated the arrest, the Pakistani family who had been raided gave a very different account of the event.
Dr Abdul Quddus Khan, 78, a retired microbiologist who runs a respected cardiology institute lives at the house with his wife Mahlaqa, their son Ahmed, 42, his wife and their two young children. Dr Khan and his wife were at a wedding in Lahore on Friday.
At 3am on Saturday a squad of around 20 armed police and intelligence officers kicked open the door and burst into the house. They dragged away Ahmed and held his wife and children at gunpoint for an hour as they ransacked the house, according to Ahmed's sister Qudsia.
"They left clothes and books strewn on the floor and took a bundle of dollar bills which were locked in a cupboard," she said. "The bedrooms were turned upside down, one door upstairs was broken and they took the new computer," she said.
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."
The captured suspect was shipped off to a CIA ghost prison in an undisclosed location to be detained for 3 years until his transfer to Guantanamo Bay. Despite the fact that KSM already freely admitted to al-Jazeera a bigger role in the 9/11 attacks than bin Laden, this individual was tortured (including being waterboarded 183 times in one month) and made to confess to everything the interrogators asked of him. The confession included not just 9/11 but every major terrorist plot which had been hatched over the previous 15 years.
This point gets back to the unsteady legal ground of the Bush administration’s torture program. If KSM (or another captured person) was really the mastermind behind 30 major terrorist plots, how does this effect the convictions which have already been legally brought for some of these cases such as against Omar Sheikh for the murder of Daniel Pearl and Omar Abdel-Rahman for the 1995 NY bomb plots?
The suspect would later recant his confession due to it being obtained under torture. Without a confession what exactly is the evidence against this person of having been involved in 9/11? Was the person captured even the same one that was wanted? How can this person be considered an enemy combatant if he was snatched not from a battlefield but from a wedding in a sovereign country?
The invasion of Iraq taught us that torture can be used to obtain false intelligence which supports a political agenda.
This last warning was borne out when the CIA and the Egyptians tortured an Al Qaeda detainee named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Al-Libi, who ran some of those terrorist training camps you see in stock footage of Al Qada thugs, was the subject of a battle royale between the FBI, which wanted to subject him to standard, lawful interrogation techniques, and the CIA which wanted to render him to Cairo for torture. Tragically, the CIA won that fight after a personal intervention by George Tenet.
What happened next? Al Libi was subjected to the torture techniques George Bush want[ed] Congress to authorize. He ultimately broke down and started making shit up, telling his interrogators what they wanted to hear. Most perniciously, he invented a tale of collaboration between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein out of whole cloth. In this tale, discredited once again in the latest Senate intelligence report, Saddam’s regime was providing WMD training to Al Qaeda operatives.
In order to truly prevent another terrorist attack we must prosecute the crimes which were committed as accurately as possible. Closed-door military tribunals using confessions gained under torture are by their nature the worst possible method of doing this. Whatever the outcome of torture prosecution we still need to address the core issue of restoring the framework of our legal system.