KSM and the shadow of evil

It took Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) less than 10 months to mastermind the 9/11 attacks. It took the CIA more than 10 years to catch him.
KSM, the alleged principal architect of these attacks, and the force behind the most significant terrorist plots over the last 20 years, including the World Trade Center bombings in 1993, the Bali nightclub massacre in 2002 that resulted in the death of 202 people, and the murder that same year of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, last week appeared, along with four co-defendants, for his arraignment at a military court in Guantanamo Bay. The proceedings will now enter a lengthy period of litigation, with the first motions argued next month. The trial itself is at least a year away, when the selection of a jury — composed entirely of military officers — and opening arguments begin.
It’s been a long way to Tipperrary for KSM, who was captured 10 years ago, held by the CIA for three of them in secret overseas prisons where he was reportedly waterboarded 183 times before getting transferred to Guantanamo in 2006. It will not be till 2014 before a verdict is handed down by the bench. So we may as well get used to the name, for KSM, as he is widely known in the American media, will be around for the stretch. Meanwhile, the public debate over the issue will heat up, suffused by commentary from the left against military courts trying foreign nationals captured on foreign soil, prisoners coerced to confess under torture and the legality of the military commissions themselves. It is a system that human rights activists and civil rights groups want to see shuttered altogether.
And all this brouhaha to ensure complete due process to a man who has flamboyantly confessed to committing acts of mass murder that go back to the time he was in his twenties!
It is unclear whether KSM, who was born in Kuwait on March 1, 1963 to Pakistani immigrant workers from the region of Balochistan, was celebrating his 40th birthday when he was captured by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of Pakistan (along with an attack team from the CIA) on the night of March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, in the Punjab region. Perhaps not. For a man with a $25 million bounty on his head, celebrating a birthday would have been the last thing on his mind.
But for the CIA that night the hunt for KSM was over. For Al-Qaeda it was a mighty blow. According to one of its intercepted communiqués, leaked to the press: “The loss of KSMohammed is like the melting of an iceberg. We can never replace him.” The US seemed to concur with its nemesis on that assessment. The Chairman of the House Intelligence Committeee at the time, Peter Gross, resorting to ostentatious hyperbole, likened it to “the liberation of Paris in World War II.”
To be sure, unlike many of his colleagues who were being captured right, left and center or targeted by drones because of their irresistible penchant for using cell phones — which projected their locations into the ether, as it were, where electronic detectives from the CIA watched and listened — KSM was able to roam free for so long because he put his faith only in personal couriers and trusted friends. Yet in the end it was one of these putative confidants who would betray him, a fellow Balochi and a long-time family acquaintance, who had out of the blue contacted the agency a year earlier with the expectation of laying claim to the $25 million reward. It took that long for “Balochi,” as the CIA dubbed its walk-in informant, to finally arrange a meeting with KSM, who was then holed up in a safe house in the Westbridge district of Rawalpindi, one of the city’s nicer neighborhoods.
According to several narratives of the capture, in particular the one detailed in the recently published book The Hunt for KSM by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer, after Balochi arrived there and talked with his host for more than an hour, he excused himself, went into the bathroom, took out his cell phone and texted his agency handlers: “I’m with KSM.”
It was all that unbelievably easy, that improbably simple. The paranoid vigilance that KSM had evinced in his years-long dealings with associates had deserted him. The birthday boy was nabbed, and Balochi, who in due course pocketed the reward money, went on to live with his family in the US under the Witness Protection Program, never again having to deal with chump change.
The CIA, whose agents on the ground did not like any of the photos that the Pakistani media was circulating of KSM after the fugitive was caught, which showed him as a handsome, rugged young man, including one of him in a suit and tie, ordered another one taken for distribution to the American media that showed him instead as looking, well, not so attractive. The result was the one that has by now become his famous image and his first introduction to the Euro-American world: exceedingly over-weight, gorilla-hairy, half-dressed in a rumpled T-shirt, with the wild, droopy eyes of a mentally-dull individual.
At their 10-hour arraignment in Guantanamo last week, the five defendants attempted to be disruptive by refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the military commissions, read magazines, shouted at the judge, talked constantly to each other and took their shirts off to show the marks of alleged ill-treatment at their detention center.
Edward Bracken, a New Yorker who lost a sister in the attacks on the World Trade Center and went to Guantanamo Bay for the arraignment, was quoted by the Washington Post as saying: “They are complaining, and our families can’t complain. But this is our justice system, and they have rights ... It’s hurtful because they have no remorse. I don’t think they have any souls.”
I doubt that KSM, or any of his co-defendants, could convince me that Edward Bracken’s sister, along with the overwhelming majority of those who were killed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, deserved to die a fiery death.

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