Noah Shachtman wonders whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession isn’t a bit overdone. Like Wee-Bey, who confesses to nearly every murder in Baltimore at the end of the first season of The Wire, Shachtman suspects that KSM may be trying to take one for the team:
was he personally responsible for everything from “attempting to destroy an American oil company in Sumatra owned by…Henry Kissinger” to to “launching a Russian surface-to-air missile at an El Al airliner leaving Mombasa” to masterminding “an assassination attempt on President Clinton in the Philippines in 1994 or 1995?” And he personally beheaded Daniel Pearl, too?
Sorry, that feels just a little too pat, a little too tidy.
But our own Bill Roggio responds:
Bill Roggio isn’t buying the Wee-Bey theory. “KSM was implicated in the Bojinka Philippines plot – as well as the Clinton and Pope assassination attempts in the 90’s — long before he was captured. KSM was Al-Qaeda’s operational commander, when the organization was far more centralized prior to 9-11. In other words, KSM wasn’t a one-trick 9-11 pony,” Roggio tells the DANGER ROOM.
“That’s like saying General McCrystal, the SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command] leader who runs [the Al-Qaeda hunting] Task Force 145, doesn’t have operational knowledge of the TF-145’s operations — including in the deaths of Zarqawi, Khalifa, etc., the attacks on al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan (Chingai, Danda Saidgai, Damadola, Zamazola, etc.), and the hunts for Islamic Courts fighters in Somalia.
