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| "I dunnit, and I...would like a couple aspirin and an icepack A really big, really cold icepack." |
In acknowledging his role in more than 30 terrorist attacks and plots, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly simplified the case against himself and may have effectively signed his own death warrant when he eventually faces a military trial. But those same statements, released this week by the US Defence Department, may complicate the prosecution of his former colleagues.
Speaking to a military tribunal that considers just the narrow question of whether Guantanamo detainees were properly designated as enemy combatants, Mohammed was so expansive in his acceptance of responsibility that other defendants might be able to use his statements in their own defence.
In a transcript of the hearing, Mohammed also disavowed information he had told CIA interrogators about his accomplices, again potentially helping the other defendants. A revised version of the transcript released on Thursday added another chilling confession. Mohammed said he decapitated Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, in Pakistan in 2002. The military said it had held back the passage about Pearl while it notified his family. "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," he said. "For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the internet holding his head."
It has long been known that a video of Pearl's slaying has circulated on a number of different radical Islamist websites and that Mohammed most likely committed this horrific execution. But Mohammed's chilling confession at Guantanamo that he decapitated Pearl was the first time he had publicly talked about Pearl's death. That confession could figure in the case of Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who is appealing his death sentence in Pakistan for his role in Pearl's abduction and murder.
Mohammed and the other al-Qaeda leaders will eventually face charges before military commissions that they are guilty of war crimes, many of which carry death sentences. Unlike the recent proceedings before Combatant Status Review Tribunals, these trials will largely resemble ones before civilian criminal courts. Officials have said they intend to charge the men this year and that those trials could start early next year.