THE
ROVING EYE The waterboarded evildoer
By Pepe Escobar
Waterboarding involves being bound upside
down to an inclined board, head wrapped in
cellophane. Fear of drowning is inevitable and
kicks in after just a few seconds. Waterboarding
was widely practiced by US-advised military
dictatorships in Latin America during the 1970s.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
customers to waterboarding usually don't last more
then 14 seconds before confessing to anything.
Salafi-jihadi mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad -
or
KSM,
as he is known in the counterinsurgency
netherworld - apparently lasted as long as 150
seconds.
In Bush administration eyes, KSM,
al-Qaeda's former chief of operations, is the
ultimate "enemy combatant". KSM had already
"confessed" to being the brain of the September
11, 2001, attacks when he was captured in Pakistan
in 2002 - in a prosaic police operation, and not
by any "shock and awe" from above.
Apparently he spent all these past years
determined to "confess" again in the US detention
center in sunny Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, claiming,
according to words attributed to him by the
Pentagon, to be "the operational director for
Sheikh Osama bin Laden for the organizing,
planning, follow-up and execution of the 9/11
operation".
KSM's "confession" comes
courtesy of a Pentagon that already gave the world
Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, Bagram in Kabul,
Guantanamo, "extraordinary rendition" and extreme
variations of handsomely paid subcontracted
torture. According to Human Rights Watch,
waterboarding "really amounts to a mock execution,
which is illegal under international law". Those
who believe KSM was not tortured in his more than
four years in Pakistan and in Guantanamo may also
believe in Spider Man. The CIA, just in case, also
kidnapped both of his sons - one is seven, the
other is nine.
The impeccable timing -
although more than four years late - of KSM's
"confession" also happens to knock the scandal
surrounding US President George W Bush's chief law
enforcer and torture apologist, Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, off the media cycle.
So
we have a 42-year-old Pakistani raised in Kuwait
whose political sensibility was fine-tuned in the
late 1980s during the anti-Soviet jihad in
Afghanistan (a graphic definition of blowback if
there ever was one). By himself, and certainly
inspired by the Japanese kamikaze, he came
up with the spectacularly deadly concept of
turning planes into missiles. And this was after a
stellar string of operations - starting with an
assassination attempt on former Pakistani prime
minister Benazir Bhutto (in 1993, by Ramzi
Yousef), the first bombing of the New York World
Trade Center (also in 1993), a failed
assassination attempt on pope John Paul II in the
Philippines - a total of 31 actual or aborted
operations.
KSM met bin Laden in Jalalabad
in Afghanistan in 1996, after the Taliban took
power in Kabul. It may have taken him years to
convince "the Sheikh" of September 11's conceptual
merits: with al-Qaeda's No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
the job was much easier. As to KSM's confession of
personally beheading former Wall Street reporter
Daniel Pearl in early 2002 in Karachi, it does not
make sense. The one man responsible for the whole
Pearl operation was Lahore playboy turned jihadi
turned computer wizard Omar Sheikh, now
languishing in jail in Pakistan.
Who
benefits? In the long run, it will be
enlightening to check whether KSM will be regarded
by Americans as a convenient sacrificial lamb - to
be dealt with by lethal injection - and whether he
will be regarded as a martyr by significant parts
of the world of Islam.
KSM has a known
reputation for boasting. He may really see himself
as a true "revolutionary hero" - in the tradition
of Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara in South
America. That's what the Pentagon says he thinks.
If that is true, he also knows he's got nothing to
lose, so why not forever imprint his reputation in
history?
For the Bush administration, KSM
could not be more convenient. Were this to be a
Hollywood blockbuster (in many aspects it is), the
final scene would focus on a dreary "interrogation
room" in an aseptic Guantanamo where, under the
steely gaze of a Kevin Costner-like investigator,
a dejected KSM does a James Cagney - "Look Ma, top
of the world!" Roll credits. The Bush
administration wraps it all up - mass murder
solved, many other murders and loose ends also
tied up.
The almost forgotten "dead or
alive" hunt for bin Laden is also dead. "The
Sheikh" may languish forever in a mythic dusty
cave in Waziristan or Kunar. What would he be
charged with (in absentia) in the spanking-new
US$125 million air-con US courthouse in Guantanamo
- accessory to the fact? There remains a slight
problem. Super-terrorist KSM may never see the
light of day again, but the top jihadis he has
taught - probably in the dozens - are lurking in
the shadows, ready to inflict blowback to kingdom
come.
Hardcore Salafi-jihadis don't break
under torture - in fact their boot camp teaches
them to turn an interrogation on itself and tell
interrogators exactly what they want to hear. KSM
is wily enough to have engineered a last laugh -
attributing to himself a catalogue of horrors as a
diversionist tactic while globalized
Salafi-jihadis, the post-KSM generation, keep
slouching toward Baghdad to be born.
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