WASHINGTON, 17 March 2007 — The most revealing aspect of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s military tribunal testimony wasn’t the detail about the many Al-Qaeda plots he claims to have orchestrated, but the insight it offered into the suspected Sept. 11 mastermind himself.
In an hourlong written and oral presentation to his military captors Saturday, Khalid showed himself to be ambitious, boastful and, when given the chance, quite talkative and even thoughtful about his cause and his craft.
It was the first public glimpse of the man who has claimed credit for not only the deadliest terrorist attacks in US history, but several dozen other plots as well.
But was Khalid revealing the truth about himself and his deeds, or just playing to the jury?
By framing his life as an underdog militant in terms Americans might understand, and by expressing occasional regret and remorse, Khalid could have been seizing the opportunity to make his best and most palatable case to the public about why he and Al-Qaeda have waged war against the United States, US officials and experts reviewing his words suggested.
“It is designed to have an American audience understand that there is another way of looking at the conflict between the West and radical Islam under (Osama) Bin Laden’s leadership, and that is quite striking,” said Dr. Jerrold Post, former chief personality profiler for the CIA.
Post, author of the forthcoming book “The Mind of the Terrorist,” described the “performance” by Al-Qaeda’s former chief of operations as part psychological warfare and part artfully crafted courtroom argument.
“This does not reflect someone who was brainwashed,” either by radical Islamic fundamentalists or US interrogators since his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, Post said. “I take it as confirmation of the significance of his position, that, despite his thuggish appearance, this is a very shrewd and rather precise individual whose attention to detail and careful planning went into his being promoted to such a high position within Al-Qaeda.”
In many ways, Khalid appeared to be a different and more complex personality than most other Al-Qaeda leaders the American public has seen in videotapes, web postings and interrogation reports.
His lengthy exposition — several typewritten pages, single-spaced — wasn’t the usual diatribe against the godless enemy.
Khalid likened himself to an Islamic George Washington, fighting to free his people from the tyranny of an oppressive foreign government. He sought to place Al-Qaeda and the United States on equal footing, in terms of fighting a war in which some innocent lives must be lost.
“Killing, as in the Christianity, Jews, and Islam, are prohibited. But there are exception of rule when you are killing people in Iraq,” Khalid told his captors in broken English.
“You said, we have to do it. Same language you use, I use.”
At times, Khalid sounded like the ruthless killer US officials have portrayed him to be, such as when he boasted of beheading “the American Jew, Daniel Pearl,” after The Wall Street Journal reporter was kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002.
At other times, he appeared contrite and even downright folksy.
Asked if he had any questions about the tribunal process, the US college-educated Khalid replied, “OK by me.”
Two other high-value Al-Qaeda operatives, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, refused to appear at their scheduled Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearings at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Khalid, in contrast, prepared a list of 28 Al-Qaeda attacks for which he was “responsible,” and three more that he supported. Those included plots — some previously undisclosed — to blow up US and Israeli government targets, such as embassies and warships, as well as soft civilian targets, including nightclubs and commercial airliners.
US intelligence and counterterrorism officials cautioned Thursday that Khalid is often viewed as a megalomaniac and might have been exaggerating his role in Al-Qaeda’s operations, in part because he knew the proceedings at Guantanamo ultimately would be made public.
He might have done so to preserve his place in history or to pull off a counterintelligence feint designed to divert attention from other Al-Qaeda operatives still at large and planning attacks, they said.
For those reasons, they cautioned, everything he said — from the number of attacks in which he was involved to the rationale for the attacks themselves — should be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism. “Clearly he is responsible for some of the attacks. But I believe he is taking credit for things he did not have direct involvement in,” said one recently retired senior FBI counterterrorism official.
“In my opinion, it’s excellent,” the former official said of Khalid’s occasionally rambling statement. “It proves the point that these people are not stable or predictable, but that they are lethal.”
A current US counterterrorism official agreed that Khalid probably was using the hearing to exaggerate his role in Al-Qaeda’s many plots and attacks.
“Obviously he saw this as a platform to continue the jihad, so there is an element of that,” said the counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss Khalid. Some of Khalid’s claims to interrogators in recent years have been viewed with skepticism by federal authorities, who say the alleged plot against the Library Tower in Los Angeles, for instance, was one of several that never got past the drawing board.
But the counterterrorism official cautioned that at least some of the claims made by Khalid during interrogations over the past four years had been corroborated by extensive investigation by US authorities.
“He was their operational guy,” the official said. “The view (even) before his tribunal was that he was a barbaric killer, a ruthless terrorist — and this is an admission of that in his own volition. He was a killer bent on inflicting as much harm as possible.”
