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Friday, March 16, 2007

Consider the source

We don't know what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did. We don't know what he said. We don't know if what he is alleged to have said is true. All we have is the word of a five-sided serial liar that KSM confessed to having planned pretty much every terrorist attack in the last 20 years. Even if he said what the Pentagon claims he said, we don't know if he said it to brag, or to deceive, or in the vain hope of getting the torture to stop. In short, this may be the most meaningless "confession" in history.

Thus it distresses me to see worthy individuals treat it like fact, as Juan Cole did yesterday:
A lot of commentators will note that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad has admitted that he planned out the 9/11 attacks. What they will miss is that he claimed the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as his idea, as well, and as an al-Qaeda operation. Remember that Paul Wolfowitz, following the frankly kookie Laurie Mylroie, blamed Saddam Hussein for the 1993 bombing. Wolfowitz was then the number 2 man in the Pentagon and enormously influential. His conviction that Bin Laden was "one little man" and that 9/11 had to have had a state sponsor (i.e. Iraq) helped drive us into the current quagmire. Wolfowitz was wrong, dead wrong. Has he ever admitted it? Should someone so wrong on so much really be heading the World Bank?
Of course Wolfowitz was dead wrong, and of course he shouldn't be running the World Bank. But the supposed KSM "confession" adds precisely NOTHING to that argument. The ONLY fact of any note here is that the Pentagon decided that this week was a propitious time to release some propaganda.