Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024 at No Man’s Blog

I spent the morning transcribing Khalid Sheikh Muhammad’s statements before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing. (The PDF offered by the Department of Defense was a scanned document that didn’t lend itself to cut-and-paste excerpting, so I decided to transcribe it, convert it into PDF format, and offer it here at No Man’s Blog for anyone else to use.)

I omitted everything but the comments made by Muhammad himself. There are two parts: a written statement (read by Muhammad’s Personal Representative at the hearing) and an oral statement.

I did my best to transcribe it accurately, but the task became difficult during Muhammad’s oral statement because the man’s English is so terribly broken. I tried to proof read it as best I could, but with the language being so fractured, I can’t be 100 percent sure I got every nuance of the oral statement verbatim.

You can get my PDF version of his statements by clicking here.

My impressions of the statement:

If Muhammad really “did” all the things he says he did, the dude must be at least 120 years old.

Khalid Sheikh Muhammad

Of course, if you take a look at the list of 31 things the man says he was responsible for, you’ll recognize right away that some—if not most—of them never happened. And that means, in my mind at least, that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was a “terrorist” in dire need of some terrorist remedial training. (Either that or he must have been on the verge of being sacked by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri for failure to perform.)

My favorite part of Muhammad’s oral statement:

For this verse, I not take the oath. Take an oath is a part of your Tribunal and I’ll not accept it. To be or accept the Tribunal as to be, I’ll accept it. That I’m accepting American constitution, American law or whatever you are doing here. This is why religiously I cannot accept anything you do. Just to explain for this one, does not mean I’m not saying that I’m lying. When I not take oath does not mean I’m lying. You know very well peoples take oath and they will lie. You know the President he did this before he just makes his oath and he lied. So sometimes when I’m not making oath does not mean I’m lying. (Emphasis added.)

Ouch! Take that Slick Willie! I wonder how Mr. Clinton feels about being used as an example of malfeasance by one of the world’s most notorious terrorists and killers?

And then there’s the comparisons he made between George Washington and Osama bin Laden:

I consider myself, for what you are doing, a religious thing as you consider us fundamentalist. So, we derive from religious leading that we consider we and George Washington doing same thing. As consider George Washington as hero. Muslims many of them are considering Usama bin Laden. He is doing same thing. He is just fighting. He needs his independence.

[…]

When you are invading two-thirds of Mexican, you call your war manifest destiny. It up to you to call it what you want. But other side are calling you oppressors. If now George Washington. If now we were living in the Revolutionary War and George Washington he being arrested through Britain. For sure he, they would consider him enemy combatant. But American they consider him as hero. This right the any Revolutionary War they will be as George Washington or Britain. (Emphasis added.)

I really don’t know what to think about this stuff—how much of it to believe. It’s very possible that this guy is leading interrogators around by the nose. As Joe Citizen at RightPundits said:

Personally, I think that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has just committed his last act in his Jihad by way of a feeding the tribunal a little misinformation, in the hopes that the feds will close this chapter in the War on Terror, thereby allowing a new group of terrorists to pick up where he left off. (Emphasis added.)

That’s always a possibility. For more on the “confession” check out:

PoliBlog

Jules Crittenden

Sister Toldjah

Newton at Hang Right Politics has a suggestion for KSM’s last meal!