The Trials of KSM

Remember, if you can, those halcyon days when What?, full of a righteous sense of vengeance and employing the language of a West Texas subterranean mammal exterminator, promised to smoke the terrorists out of their holes, get 'em running, and bring 'em to justice? Bush was magnificent in those days, and his poll numbers reflected his glory. Can that have been only five years ago?

I confess to a certain weakness for psychoanalytic theory when it comes to Bush. I can't help myself. I read Justin Frank, M.D., on the Huffingtonpost, I love throwing around terms like sociopathic, psychopathic, will-to-fail, antisocial personality disorder, adult attention deficit, etc. Is it just Bush's misfortune to have been president when amateur usage of such terminology became en vogue, or is it something else?

Maybe the something else is fear, although this may simply be another personal effort to wrap my mind around the problem psychologically. If we can label Bush, categorize him, get a handle on his protean awfulness, maybe we can control him. I suspect that's what might be going on. Who knows if any of these diagnoses-at-a-distance hold any water. Bush, in my view, seems like one of the least introspective people one is likely ever to encounter, and we're certainly never going to have the benefit of a professional analysis from anyone with actual access to Bush's inner turmoil. So we have to sift through evidence we gather second hand, work with behavioral inferences, make educated guesses. Such as:

What is Bush's problem with success? Get this, from the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9-11 conducted four years ago: George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), testified that “a common thread runs between the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993 and the 11 September attacks.” The thread is Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, also known as Mukhtar or “the Brain.” According to the DCI, Muhammad, “a high-ranking al-Qa’ida member,” was “the mastermind or one of the key planners of the 11 September operation.” The DCI noted that Mukhtar is Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, and, after the World Trade Center attack, Muhammad joined Yousef in the 1995 airplane plot, for which Muhammad has been indicted by a federal grand jury.

Apparently, we got Khalid runnin' out of his hole, we nabbed 'im, but we ain't brought 'im to justice yet. Recently, this omission, this critical third step in the gopher analogy, has received some comment from critical commentators. Conventional wisdom on the subject suggests the problem is that the Brain has been shipped around to various Third World dungeons, including Pakistan and Jordan and subjected to torture; thus, if he's brought back to New York for trial (under existing indictments or under those subsequently obtained), he's not likely to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege and refuse to testify. Since the Joint Inquiry has him on record as essentially copping to a conspiracy to commit 3,000 murders, silence is not an option. The Brain is going to prefer tabula rasa, and one way to wipe the slate clean is to argue KSM's confessions were coerced. Coerced how?

Water-boarding, so we are told, involves strapping the prisoner to a board, his feet slightly higher than his head, covering his face with cellophane, and then pouring copious quantities of water over the nose and mouth. The dowsing sets up an immediate gag reflex which puts the victim in an immediate, terrifying fear of drowning. In general, CIA operatives who have practiced on each other can withstand the procedure on average only 14 seconds. Some reports from the torture frontlines have it that agents were impressed that KSM actually lasted 2-1/2 minutes before he began begging to confess. To anything, just stop pouring this goddam water on my face. As an initial reaction, it's disturbing to think that someone who personally endured even a practice run at water-boarding could administer, or even watch, the technique on another human being for 2-1/2 minutes without profound psychic damage, but perhaps we're training a cadre of CIA agents who function solely through the brain stem.

So all of The Brain's lavish descriptions of the 9-11 plot, and his role in it, may have happened under less than pristine Miranda conditions. The government might have to start from scratch to prove his complicity, and we can be fairly certain that 19 key witnesses against him are unavailable. As are a couple more, Osama bin Laden and his Man Friday (or Goebbels), Zawahiri. Thus the preference for Show Trials, for throwing the book at mental cases like Zacarias Moussaoui. Put him in SuperMax, down the cell block from The Brain's nephew, Ramzi Yousef, whom the Clinton Administration captured, tried and convicted. Sort of like the old days. That's not the way we do things anymore. KSM was indicted once, in New York, but he's in no danger of ever standing trial in the United States, not while W is president. He may not have realized it (or maybe - given his background - it's all he expected), but those gargling days on the water-board were as close as he's ever going to get to a day in court.