LawFuel.com – The confession to masterminding the 9/11 terror attacks could be either deception or delusion, according to some reports following an analysying of the wandering monologue of Khalid Mohammed.
TIME magazine, for one, asks whether his claims can be believed noting that Mohammed has long been described — notably in The 9/11 Commission Report — as prone to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement, fond of portraying himself as a “superterrorist.”
The notes to the Commission’s conclusions mention the possibility of Mohammed “inflating his own role.” He may also be attempting to defend his part in the 9/11 planning against the testimony of other terror suspects. The Commission’s notes indicate that, according to another terror chieftain, Abu Zubaydah, Mohammed originally offered Osama bin Laden a more modest proposal for attacking the U.S., but that bin Laden reportedly berated him, saying “Why do you use an ax when you can use a bulldozer?”
What’s more, Mohammed has also used disinformation in the past. He admitted under previous interrogation that a list of 30 supposed U.S. targets, which he circulated shortly after 9/11, was a lie to exaggerate the scale of al-Qaeda’s planning. Terrorism experts say that though there is no doubt Mohammed played a major role in planning 9/11, he’s famous among interrogators for his braggadocio. “He has nothing else in life but to be remembered as a famous terrorist,” says Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institute and a 29-year veteran of the CIA. “He wants to promote his own importance. It’s been a problem since he was captured,” says Reidel, who went on to say he wouldn’t be surprised is Mohammed was exaggerating his role in other plots.
At one point in the transcript, Mohammed compares himself to revolutionaries like George Washington, and concedes that he is an “enemy combatant,” his formal U.S. designation and a status that restricts his legal rights. If the British had arrested him during the Revolutionary War, Mohammed said, “for sure they would consider him enemy combatant.” One of the ostensible reasons for the current Guantanamo hearings is to determine whether Mohammed and others can be held there indefinitely as “enemy combatants” prior to facing military tribunals that could sentence them death. The hearings at Guantanamo will process 14 “high-value” prisoners brought to Cuba last year shortly before President Bush announced the shut-down of the CIA’s overseas secret prisons.
