WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times and 83 times on another al Qaeda suspect, The New York Times said on Sunday.One hundred and eighty-three times in one month, that is. So, does this mean they stopped as soon as Waterboarding Month was over? And does it mean they nearly drowned him only 183 times in total that month, or that they subjected him to 183 sessions, in each of which he was nearly drowned several times?
Let's not quibble. For KSM is, as Reuters and the NYT tell us, "the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks". (I thought that was the late Osama bin Laden, or rather Mohammed Atta, he of the Evil Eyes, but let's not quibble.) No doubt KSM, this quite exceptionally Bad Guy, also admitted to shooting Abe Lincoln. Who wouldn't, under the circumstances? I know I would, especially if my kids, like KSM's, were being tortured simultaneously.
Fuck it, I'd admit to being responsible for the Great Fire of London.
Fine things, admissions. And useful. Note that KSM's grotesque and utterly worthless "admission" was a major prop (in all senses of the word) of the worthless yarn issued by the grotesque 9/11 Commission, commanded by the equally grotesque Philip Zelikow, who is undoubtedly worth something to some grotesquely powerful and ruthless people.
Perhaps some fine day the opinionmakers of the Anglo-Saxon liberal left (from Cockburn to Corn to Taibbi to Monbiot to...) will finally have the minimal decency to admit, without being waterboarded, what everyone else in the world has long since noticed: that the official account of The Crime That Served to Justify Everything is an insult to the intelligence of a budgie, and that this still matters enormously, for many more reasons than one.
Much more likely, though, we shall hear not a tweet from those prominent pro- and semi-pro dissenters. They will continue to be a) prudently silent and b) very carefully and selectively ignorant, because it's safer that way, and by god they know it. (See Chomsky and Herman, passim.) So the torture of "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed" (if indeed it is he) and his children, and what this entire filthy story tells us about the Trifecta administration and its universal casus belli, will remain discreetly unmentioned and wholly unmentionable.
Meanwhile, the "trial" continues, not that you'd notice if you restricted your reading to left websites, while the Fourth Estate continues to report with a straight face.
Well, we all have our trials. It would be too easy to cite Kafka here, and anyway, Beckett sums it up better:
"Human nature. Marvellous thing."
Nice article. And it throws up something that has long bothered me. It's surely true that vast numbers - if not the majority - of the world's population must know that 9/11 ia a heap of fraudulent shit and yet the media (mainstream and "alternative") continue to chatter as if no-one's noticed. Do we therefore have a situation where no-one believes the official account but everyone believes that everyone else believes it.
ReplyDeleteThanks, George.
ReplyDelete"Do we therefore have a situation where no-one believes the official account but everyone believes that everyone else believes it."
No. We now have a situation where everyone who doesn't write for a living can see and state the ballsachingly obvious, but where those who do write for a living are (increasingly desperately) determined to ignore the obvious, because acknowledging it might possibly cost them their jobs, or their doctorates, or their prospets at the Guardian or the BBC. Even worse, it might expose them, in the pub, to the sniggering charge of being "conspiracy theorists". Which is clearly more than any man (yes, man) can be expected to bear, much less resist.
Morally and intellectually, not to mention politically, the mainstream left's respnse to 9/11 has just been indescribably feeble. In fact: contemptible. (See the prominent names listed above, and that's a heavily truncated list.)
With a Left like this, who needs a Right? No one. QED.
Here's a prediction: Not one of the above-named tremblingly "subversive" (ooh la la) media-tarts will ever have a single solitary *serious* fucking word to say about this outrageous and utterly disgusting case. And add Lenin's Tomb to that illustreous list.
ReplyDeleteProve me wrong; please. Anyone.
The most obviously fraudulent of those media tarts must surely be Noam Chomsky who told us that even is 9/11 was an inside job then (1) the “left” shouldn’t go near is since it would mean their self destruction (Why? No answer.) and (2) actually it doesn’t matter anyway (Why? Again – no answer.)
ReplyDeleteNow you don’t have to be a genius to spot a certain tension between these claims but the most depressing thing is that Chomsky is saying: – even if it’s true that 9/11 is bollocks, don’t touch it. Oh what fun – let’s play our little game of searching for the truth with our eyes constantly averted from that one censored area.
Clearly this guy is at it. And yet such is his reputation that somebody, on hearing his second evasion thought, “My God! Chomsky’s right. It really doesn’t matter!”
As Qlipoth’s blog entry noted – “Human nature. Marvellous thing."
I meant:-
ReplyDeletethe “left” shouldn’t go near IT since it would mean their self destruction
Got a bit excited with my typing. Sorry
Speaking of Lenin’s Tomb, I don’t believe Lenin ever answered Nafeez Ahmed’s excellent dissection of him which you can read here:
ReplyDeletehttp://nafeez.blogspot.com/2007/07/lenin-and-77-review-of-review-part-1.html
It’s deeply sobering stuff for a former Lenin admirer. But you have to know these things.