Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The Language Of War

The Pentagon just released the redacted, unclassified transcript of Khalid Sheik Muhammad's Enemy Combatant Status Review. It makes for some pretty fascinating reading, if only for how banal the whole thing comes across on paper. All the emotion of 9/11 and its aftermath, including two wars and the resulting national upheaval, reduced to the dry back and forth of a legal proceeding. (With the exception being that in most court transcripts, the names of the judge and officers aren't redacted.)

I could talk about the summary way in which the presiding JAG denied Muhammad's witnesses. Or the Kafka-esque effect of seeing the following in an American legal proceeding:

But the upshot is that Muhammad confessed to being responsible for planning and organizing the 9/11 attacks, as well as a long list of other terrorist attacks and assassination attempts (Bill Clinton, Pakistani President Musharraf & Pope John Paul II). He called death "the language of war", and regretted killing innocents, but claimed it was no different from America targetting the homes of terrorist leaders while their families were present. He also claimed, in a written statement that was filed but only briefly mentioned, that he'd been tortured.

Muhammad was responsible for both military planning and media operations, and it's striking how capable he was in both regards. One of the targets he admitted to planning for was the Panama Canal, which is about as well-chosen a target as I can think of in terms of its combination of low profile and high impact.

And in his defense he pointed out that were George Washington to have been captured by the British, they would have labelled him an enemy combatant. Which doesn't stop us from calling him a hero.

We sometimes fall prey, I think, to picturing our enemies as a bunch of backwards guys in caves reciting verses from the Koran. But if we can learn anything from Khalid Sheik Muhammad, it's that these guys are pretty competent at what they do. More so, from the looks of things, than some of the guys who've been running gonzo operations out of the Pentagon and OVP for the past six years.

And like it or not, there are a lot of people throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa and Southeast Asia who think of them as heros. We'd do well to start integrating that into our conception of how to defeat them, so that two hundred years from now no one's calling Khalid Sheik Muhammad a Muslim George Washington.

Posted by Judah in:  Global War On Terror   Human Rights   

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