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9/11 and Self-Incrimination
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by Kevin Barrett
"No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." - 5th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America
Why shouldn't anyone be compelled to be a witness against himself?
The 5th Amendment's prohibition of compelled self-incrimination is a radical concept. Since time immemorial, the self-styled forces of law and order have been forcing people to incriminate themselves. Why? Simple. People everywhere believe that once someone has confessed, the case has been solved. Those in the business of solving cases are rewarded for success, and penalized for failure. So they do whatever it takes to get confessions. Usually that boils down to torture, whether physical or psychological.
Every day in America, despite the 5th Amendment, many people are forced into confessions through a mild form of psychological torture. Prosecutors over-charge them and promise them a relatively lenient punishment if they "confess" (plead guilty), while threatening a relatively harsh punishment if they do not.
Forcing confessions has many advantages. It is much cheaper and easier than doing the kind of careful, exhaustive investigations that might (or might not) turn up enough evidence to secure a conviction in the absence of a confession. Because it makes it easy to "solve" crimes, forcing confessions creates the public perception that most crimes are solved, and most criminals punished. That dissuades potential criminals. It's good for law and order.
The problem is that innocent people, like guilty people, can be forced to confess. Offer someone a severe punishment if they don't confess, and a lighter one if they do, and most people will confess, regardless of whether or not they are guilty.
At its worst, the process of forcing confessions becomes a horrific and degrading spectacle. From self-styled Christians torturing witches and heretics on the rack, to Stalin's show trials and Mao's self-criticism sessions, to U.S. interrogators videotaping themselves sodomizing Iraqi children in front of their parents in order to torture the parents, it is clear that forcing people to confess often brings out the darkest side of human nature.
Forced Confession and the Crimes of 9/11/01
Many people believe that the crimes of 9/11/01 have been solved, despite the fact that there have been no criminal prosecutions or convictions. Perhaps the biggest reason why so many people believe this is that the media has fostered the impression that Osama Bin Laden and some of his alleged associates have confessed to the crimes.
Terrorists who commit crimes of violence in order to publicize their cause almost always do confess. In fact, they do not just confess--they immediately issue a manifesto taking credit for the crime, explaining why they did it, presenting a list of demands, and threatening to do it again if those demands are not met.
What is odd about 9/11 is that nobody took credit for it in the usual way. In fact, Bin Laden specifically denied responsibility, deplored the murder of innocents, and called the attacks un-Islamic.
So why do people have the impression that Bin Laden and some of his radical Muslim colleagues have confessed to the crimes of 9/11? In the case of Bin Laden himself, the media has focused attention on a single videotape, allegedly discovered in Afghanistan in November 2001, which appears (at least at first glance) to show Bin Laden bragging of his foreknowledge of 9/11 and rejoicing in the success of the attacks. Upon closer examination, it is clear that this "confession video" is a fraud. The "Bin Laden" in some of the frames does not look much like Bin Laden, and there are many other anomalies that show this tape is an obvious fraud. Top academic Bin Laden expert professor Bruce Lawrence says the tape is "bogus." (Listen to him here.)
Close analysis, even one by a journalist who thinks the fat guy is Bin Laden, shows that the video cannot have been the "al-Qaeda home video" we were told it was. And there is no chain of possession. We do not know the name of the U.S. soldier who supposedly discovered the video, nor the place where it was discovered, nor the name of the superior to whom the soldier supposedly delivered it, nor the identities of those who possessed it thereafter. Had this video been authentic, the soldier who discovered it would have become an instant celebrity, military publicists would have had a field day hyping the story of its discovery, and the U.S. Department of Justice would have used it as evidence to charge Bin Laden with the crimes of 9/11. In reality, the military has refused to reveal anything about the video's provenance and chain of custody, Bin Laden has been indicted for other crimes but not 9/11, and the FBI continues to this day to insist that Bin Laden is "not wanted" for the crimes of 9/11 because there is "no hard evidence" against him.
When it is pointed out that Bin Laden has neither confessed to the crimes of 9/11, nor even been charged with them, true believers in official story change the subject and try to lay the blame on a certain Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). The 9/11 Commission Report claims that KSM was the mastermind of 9/11. The Report's story about how 9/11 was planned and executed by radical Muslims is almost entirely supported by one, and only one, source: alleged CIA reports about what KSM supposedly said under interrogation.
Unfortunately, the 9/11 Commission Report is worthless because (among many other failings) it neglects to document KSM's statements. The Commissioners were not allowed to meet with and question KSM or any other suspects. Nor were they allowed to see videotapes of the alleged interrogations.
What happened during the alleged interrogations of KSM? Was he tortured into a false confession? For that matter, was he ever really arrested and interrogated? Though at first glance such questions may seem presumptuous, there are good reasons to doubt the KSM story we have been fed. For one thing, it appears that U.S. and Pakistani authorities colluded to produce an obviously fake video supposedly showing KSM being arrested. When the video was shown to a roomful of journalists, they collapsed in laughter at the inanity of the bogus "arrest footage." (“Foreign journalists looking at it laughed and said this is baloney, this is a reconstruction.” [Fox News, 3/10/2003])
There are reasons to doubt not only the hilariously bogus story of KSM's "arrest," but also whether KSM was a radical Muslim at all. Sources ranging from Nafeez Ahmed in The War on Truth to the London Daily Telegraph have pointed out that KSM's lifestyle before his alleged arrest resembled that of James Bond, not a Muslim extremist. KSM, like many of the alleged 19 hijackers, was a hard-drinking party-hearty playboy--meaning he was not a practicing Muslim at all, much less an extremist. Intelligence assets, unlike actual radical Muslims, are often party-hearty types, and many of them use the money they are paid for their services to buy drugs, women, and fancy toys. KSM fits the profile. He once impressed one of his many girlfriends by putting her up in a nice hotel, then flying by her window in a helicopter and waving at her.
Why does this matter? The historical trajectory of the West, and the rest of the planet, changed radically due to the official claim that 9/11 was the work of radical Muslims. Since this claim rests almost entirely upon allegations about what KSM, and to a lesser extent other suspects, said under interrogation, the videotapes of those interrogations are among the most important historical source materials that have ever existed on planet earth. One would expect them to be guarded religiously as the founding documents of the post-9/11 world.
Instead, these tapes have been destroyed. The CIA has admitted that it didn't just destroy two tapes, as it had previously claimed. Actually it was NINETY-two tapes. (Apparently somebody left out the 9.)
If the CIA was asked why it destroyed these critically important judicial and historical documents, it might plead the 5th Amendment. If we (re-)suspended the Constitution and captured top CIA officials and tortured them, we could get them to say anything we wanted them to say: They did it to protect Cheney, to protect Osama, to conceal evidence for the existence of UFOs behind al-Qaeda...anything to stop the torture.
That's the problem with forced self-incrimination. Ultimately, it's just putting the torturer's words in the victim's mouth.
One last thought: Asking Americans to face the truth about 9/11 and the other war crimes of the past eight years involves asking them to incriminate themselves. For an ordinary American to admit the truth of 9/11, is to admit his or her own emotional and psychological complicity in the crime. Those who have not been resisting these crimes are to some degree complicit in them, just as the French who failed to aid the Resistance were complicit in the Nazi occupation of their country.
How can people who have done wrong be brought around to admitting it, accepting the consequences, and helping right the wrong?
This process can only happen among people who have reached a certain level of psychological and spiritual development. Professional criminals, especially the kind selected by the intelligence services to perform black ops, almost never confess. Anyone who expects the criminal mercenary types who planted the nano-thermate charges in the Twin Towers to feel guilt pangs and come forward to assuage them is terminally naive. Such people can only be dealt with through some form of forced self-incrimination, such as offering them lighter sentences in return for truthful testimony.
In a sense, a freely-offered self-incriminating confession is a contradiction in terms. Anyone who offers a repentent, heartfelt confession to a bad action sees that bad action through a new pair of eyes, and is therefore not quite the same person who performed the action. The self they are incriminating is no longer the self that is doing the incriminating.
This process of genuine repentance, of turning from a wrong path to a better one, is both a prerequisite and product of spiritual progress. When the USA collectively incriminates itself (and especially its leaders) for 9/11 and the other crimes of empire, and when Israel collectively incriminates itself (and especially its founders) for the Palestinian holocaust, both nations will have turned away from the road that leads to destruction, and set out on a path toward better things.
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