Bin Laden: Moussawi not a 9/11 Hijacker
Anyone who has actually read a transcript of anything Zacarias Moussaoui has said has immediately recognized that he is not a high-powered al-Qaeda operative on the model of Muhammad Atta. In fact, anyone who has half a brain has been able to see that Moussaoui is just mentally disturbed. I.e. he is one bulb short of a chandelier. That doesn't mean he is insane or could not cope with daily life. Mental disturbance exists on a broad spectrum. Moussaoui, if he had not come under the influence of bad characters in a London mosque, might have gone through life as a ranting, odd bird. (You encounter people like that all the time on the streets of a big city. Also increasingly on the pages of our newspapers, but that is a different story).
No professional and highly competent terrorist organization would ever send a man like Moussaoui to do anything important. So it comes as no surprise that Bin Laden now says that he was not part of 9/11. Bin Laden quite plausibly, for a mass murderer and terrorist mastermind, explains that he would have pulled the hijackers out of the United States if he had heard that one of the team had been captured. Moussaoui was arrested two weeks before 9/11.
On the other hand, the old monster is blowing smoke up our posteriors when he says that there are no al-Qaeda in Guantanamo. The Pakistanis captured over 600 fleeing Arab members, and turned most of them over to the US. This part of what Bin Laden says is just manipulative. He is trying to convince Muslims that the US only has innocents in custody, and that it was unsuccessful in capturing the real al-Qaeda operatives. It did have a handful of innocents in custody. But most of these guys (who should be charged and put on proper trial) were on the battleground trying to kill our guys. The late comedian Richard Pryor once made fun of those silly liberals who thought only innocent people are in prison. He said he had visited a penitentiary, and there were Mofos and father molesters in it, or words to that effect.
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/24/2006 12:14:00 AM
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3 Comments:
Finally, someone talks sense about Moussaoui.
I do, however, have to disagree with you about Guántanamo. YES, Bin Laden is exploiting it, YES I'm sure there are some guilty people inside it, but don't toe Bush's line and assume that everyone there is guilty. An Informant inside the detention center said he only thought 10% were guilty. FYI, the camp is growing, they just added more Saudis.
You said "It did have a handful of innocents in custody." It still does, and it's a travesty that the tribunals haven't proceeded, or that people like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad haven't been put on trial. (Oh whoops, we tortured him, we can't face a trial or use his confession now can we?)
Prof. Cole, I think you should reconsider your characterization of the prisoners in Guantanamo as having been on a battlefield trying to kill our guys. By 'our guys' do you mean the Northern Alliance, and are you including fighting before 9/11?
I am surprised and appalled at your view of the men held at Guantanamo. Did you not hear of or read the National Journal covery story from February of this year by Corinne Hegland?
Here's a summary of its key conclusions by the NJ editor, Stuart Taylor:
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Corine Hegland's exhaustively researched cover story in this issue -- studded with probative details and human stories that every serious student of the war against terror should read -- provides powerful evidence confirming what many of us have suspected for years:
A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).
Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.
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end excerpt.
There may be some detainees at Guantanamo who were terrorists or truly in combat against U.S. soldiers, but they are a small minority. And all should have been treated as prisoners of war and given the protections of the Geneva Conventions. If they had been, most of them would now be out of that prison, and the others would be being tried for their crimes.
As it is, we have subjected hundreds of men to indefinite, extended, illegal detention and abusive treatment, along with pointless interrogation. And we have nothing to show for it. Indeed, the lawlessness with which Guantanamo was set up has come back to poison this country, as well as shaming us before the world.
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