The waterboarded evildoer

[struggle4progress]

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 ...

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 ...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IC17Df01.html

[madeline_con]

1. And also, not to diss the guy, but...

"Salafi-jihadi mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad..."

I realize the pic shows him just as he's been yanked awake, but he really doesn't strike me as the type who could mastermind much more than making a sandwich. :shrug:


spelling, uv cors

[CJCRANE]

2. If he cracked after 150 *seconds*

how come his "confession" is suddenly being released after four years..?

:shrug: