I've been mulling over the revelations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and you know it is a real shame that we will never know if any of it is true. Because our government, under Bush and Cheney, has insisted that "sending a message" of toughness will make suicide bombers and other folks with terroristic ideas just give up. Worse yet a President touting the false idea that confessions, no matter how obtained, are supposed to be believable we now have no way of knowing if anything this guy says is true. By all accounts this dude is a very bad man and that is probably as far as you can go and still be on solid ground. But the details of his confessions are meaningless because of this administration's short sighted and immoral policies.
When a government has made a grand statement out of torture which rails against all the values our civilization hold dear and which virtually anyone with sense knows are unreliable you can't be too surprised when people are just a little skeptical of the torture induced transcripts of a terrorist's confessed plots. Plots which, I might add, are complete with all the lurid details about beheadings and plans to assassinate the Pope and Jimmy Carter. I won't mention the added difficulty of noting that these sensational revelations are released right in the middle of an exploding White House scandal especially since they have had custody of this particular terrorist for years.
Try and imagine what kind of impact these confessions would have had in a legitimate war crimes trial. If Bush and Cheney had followed civilized practices and maintained a shred of moral authority and credibility we might have had some actual information that we could use in the GWOT. Instead we have nothing but a picture of a grumpy man that looks like he just got rolled out of bed.
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