You remember it from Orwell's classic 1984.
Believe it. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri does.
What do we know about Al-Nashiri?
Unless otherwise noted, the following information is from the 9/11 Commission Final Report.
- Al-Nashiri was propelled into al-Qaeda's senior leadership after the success of the USS Cole bombing.
- He joined his cousins and uncles in militant Islam after completing intermediate school in Saudi Arabia. He took part in Khattab's insurgencies in Tajikstan and Chechnya and became a trainer at Khalden camp in Afghanistan in 1992.
- Accompanied by Tawfiq bin Attash, he first met bin Laden in the mid-1990s, but al-Nashiri initially refused to pledge loyalty to him because he found the idea distateful.
- In 1997, he joined the Taliban and later began work for al-Qaeda. He and his cousin Azzam were tasked to smuggle Russian AT-3 Sagger antitank missiles into Saudi Arabia to use against American targets there. The attack did not take place.
- In late 1998, he was tasked by bin Laden to attack an oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. This plot was modified in 1999 to a U.S. Navy warship. Nashiri's operatives failed on their first attempt when an overloaded bomb boat sank in January 2000, but the Cole attack 10 months later succeeded.
- His cousin Azzam was the suicide bomber at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998.
- An associate described him as utterly committed to al-Qaeda, suggesting he "would commit a terrorist act 'in Mecca inside the Ka'aba itself' (the holiest site on Islam) if he believed there was a need to do so."
- At the time of Nashiri's arrest, he was involved in a number of plots, including one to crash a small plane into the bridge of a U.S. or allied warship in the United Arab Emirates.
- He was one of 14 key al-Qaeda operatives and associates transferred from CIA custody to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.
Oh, really?
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, March 30 -- A high-level al-Qaeda suspect who was in CIA custody for more than four years has alleged that his American captors tortured him into making false confessions about terrorist attacks in the Middle East, according to newly released Pentagon transcripts of a March 14 military tribunal hearing here.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who U.S. officials believe was involved in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and who allegedly organized the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, told a panel of military officers that he was repeatedly tortured during his imprisonment and that he admitted taking part in numerous terrorism plots because of the mistreatment.
Source: Washington Post
As Eugene Robinson writes in an op-ed in this morning's Washington Post, Here's what the Bush administration has done to the values, traditions and honor of the United States of America: An accused terrorist claims he confessed to heinous crimes so that agents of the U.S. government would stop torturing him, and no one is shocked or even surprised. There's reason to believe, in fact, that what the suspect says about torture is probably true.
There's little reason to doubt that al-Nashiri is guilty of all charges, whatever illusive charges those might be. On edit, this is much more accurately framed in the context of reasonable doubt, provided by Lithium Cola, whom I thank for a valuable perspective.
And yet:
We can't be sure, because George W. Bush disgraced himself and his country by ordering extrajudicial kidnappings of suspects in the war on terror, indefinite secret detention and interrogation by "alternative" methods that the civilized world calls torture.
The following is what we are allowed to know of Nashiri's response when asked how he was tortured:
"What else do I want to say? [REDACTED]. Many things happened. There were doing so many things. What else did they did? [REDACTED]. They do so many things. So so many things. What else did they did? [REDACTED]. After that another method of torture began. [REDACTED]. They used to ask me questions and the investigator after that used to laugh. And, I used to answer the answer that I knew. And, if I didn't reply what I heard, he used to [REDACTED]. So many things happened. I don't in summary, that's basically what happened."
I guess that's how the U.S. government extracts information from detainees: [REDACTED].
The Pentagon told reporters that Nashiri's claims were censored because of "national security concerns" about disclosing where detainees were held and how they were treated. But that would be unnecessary if Nashiri were lying, since no harm could come from disclosing a bunch of made-up stories. The censorship makes sense only if some or all of what Nashiri alleges is true.
Nashiri said, according to the transcript, that he "invented" some information just to "make people happy" during his interrogations. One of those statements was that Osama bin Laden, whom he had met numerous times, had procured a nuclear weapon.
"They were extremely happy because of this news," he said, according to the transcript.
So, the incredible irony here is that five years into the global war on terror, we don't know what Nashiri knows. The opportunity has been lost. Nashiri's interrogators are happy and this, evidently, is more important than knowing the truth of what did - or did not - happen.
As Nashiri stated in the transcript: "If you think that anybody who wants the Americans to get out of the Gulf as your enemy, then you will catch about 10 million peoples in Saudi Arabia that have same opinion."