Today’s news is taken over by a story of such a sexy character that it knocks every other story for a loop. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-confessed Al Quaeda mastermind, is on the front pages of newspapers, he is the lead story on national newscasts. KSH, as the intelligence people call him, told a tribunal at Guantanamo Bay that he is responsible for the World Trade Center attacks of 2001 and 1993, and also for other attacks covering a very long period of time. According to news reports today, KSM said that he was tortured during the time he was held at secret US prisons starting in March 2003. At the hearing that generated the confession we hear about today, a member of the. military tribunal asked KSH whether he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay since he was moved there six months ago, but the answer to that question was heavily edited.
China Flores is not so well known:...He is a New York criminal who might have seen New York City police shoot 51 bullets into a car in Queens last November. We’ll get back to him later... as we say, below the fold.
Maybe is is from watching too many TV shows in which a criminal confesses to a crime that he did not commit. Maybe it is from reading about DNA exonerations of real death-row inmates whose trials were made certain by confessions. Perhaps it is the details that have come out about the kinds of physical torture and psychological manipulation that US forces have used at Abu Graib and Guantanamo.
Diogenes thinks that KSM was held and subjected to the full range of everything that the most ruthless people at CIA and Mr. Rumsfeld’s domain could do to him. Indeed, it would be totally amazing if they did not use everything they could against KSH. The question that torture advocates always ask is "If you knew a terrorist had planted a bomb, and it was set to go off in 15 minutes, would you use torture to get the location, or would you let thousands of innocent people be killed?"
The timing of the appearance of this story is problematic, however. One presumes that the majority of the story was wrung out of KSH, about four years ago, when the new information might have been able to save the innocent lives of civilians.
The Defense Department has not wanted to talk about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. They have been saying for four years that anything we say about KSH and the way he has been questioned, and the answers he might have given us, all of those things would be immediately useful to our enemies. As the President says, those who want to take away our Freedom. What ever could have persuaded the people who are holding KSH, that today is the day the story must break? What is there about this day that makes it OK to spill the information that would enable Al-Quaeda to harm us?
Yesterday was the day the Attorney General showed himself to be a liar, a knave, a corrupter of public morals. Also, he is a bad man and an unconvincing liar. The US Senate is now investigating Mr. Gonzalez and his lies. Senator Arlen Spector, formerly the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, denies having altered the Patriot Act to allow Mr.Gonzalez to appoint new US Attorneys without Senate confirmation, and is now anxious to get to the bottom of that mess. Senator John Sununu, another Republican, is actually calling for the removal of Mr. Gonzalez as Attorney General.
The Republicans lost control of the committees of the House and the Senate. Extremely inconvenient truths that Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Bill Frist would have thrown into a locked dumpster, are now exposed for everyone to see. There will be hearings of the Judiciary Committee about the subversion of the entire Justice Department as a campaign tool of the Republicans.
Friday, Congressman Henry Waxman will open hearings about the way the Republicans in the White House manipulated information about creating the need for the war in Iraq. Nothing the Republicans can do, will prevent the truth from coming out at these hearings, and other hearings that will expose the criminal activities of the Bush Administration.
However, they can make it more difficult for the Mainstream Media to cover the truths that come out of these hearings. One truth after another, drop by drop, can corrode the edifice of lies built up by the Bush people and his congressional enablers. But we can count on the Republicans to come up with a show at any time, to try to grab the headlines. They are very good at it, and have been doing it for a long time. In 2002, when Mr. Bush was suffering from to much truthful reporting about his Presidency, we were treated to a run-up to war, complete with fake evidence that Saddam Hussein was getting Yellow Cake from Niger. It is bad enough that the President took us into a war that has destroyed the military strength of the United States. It is extremely bad that the President has used the war to generate headlines and to control the media. It is a crime for the President to have done this to win a majority in the Senate in 2002, and to win re-election in 2004.
It is time for every committee of the House and every committee of the Senate, to investigate every crime the Bush people and their Republican henchmen have committed over the last six years. The announcement of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed at this exact moment, presents the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with a perfect time to go into the whole subject of secret CIA prisons, and secret proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, and use of intelligence for political purposes exactly the way the firing of the US Attorneys was used for political purposes.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, it is time for your close-up.
By fortunate coincidence, and this probably really is a coincidence, the confession of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was announced at the same time that a witness has appeared out of the darkness, who will testify that the police killing of Sean Bell and severe injuries to three other men, the 51 bullets fired at that Nissan in Queens, was all OK.
The mystery witness is China Flores, whose name appeared in articles about the Sean Bell case in the NY Daily News in November 2006. According to reports today on the radio, Mr. Flores is coming forward now because his conscience as a Christian requires that he come forward right now.
Mr. Flores is a career criminal, and has been linked to this case for several months. According to lawyers who are defending the police officers involved in the Sean Bell case, it is only an accident that Flores came into a police station, ready to testify, on the day the Queens Grand Jury started their deliberations. He came forward, according to these lawyer, and talked to detectives exactly at the time that is most inconvenient for the Queens District Attorney Richard Brown. Of course, if Flores had come forward in December, there would be a good deal of time for the Queens DA to investigate whether Flores is telling the truth, of it some Queens cop had put him up to it. It is a wonderful show of timing by whoever is responsible, and Diogenes tips his fedora to the individual, who of course cannot accept the kudos.
It is a shame that the person who is responsible for the timing of the Flores testimony cannot be acknowledged. There is going to be an opening soon at Department of Justice, and this person would have to be on the President’s short list to sit at the desk of Anthony Gonzales and John Ashcroft.