Sunday, August 30, 2009

Katherine Graham must be turning over in her grave. In a piece appearing on  Saturday, August 29, 2009, Washington Post writers Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate penned a chirpy missive enthusiastically defending torture as a means to flip Khalid Sheik Mohammed from a “truculent enemy” into what the CIA considered its “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda.

The Post alleges this was accomplished after Mohammed “was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.”

According to the Post’s two “unnamed sources” who are cited as the source for the tale of Mohammed’s transformation depict him not as broken man suffering from “learned helplessness,” but almost professorial, holding court in the interrogation room, lecturing forth on Greek philosophy and admonishing his American captors for their shortcomings. “In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture,” the Post claims.

Keep in mind, this an interrogation subject who was waterboarded 184 times by the FBI.

If Mohammed, referred to as KSM, was reduced to “learned helplessness,” as the Post’s unnamed sources claim, how could he possibly risk scolding his FBI interrogators? This is a specious assertion at best and doesn’t pass the smell test. Yet, the Post’s writers are ready to believe it and even troubling,  they want their readers to believe it too.

Reading the article made me wonder if Dick Cheney himself was in the room when Post writers Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate typed away at their computers holding a gun pointed at their heads? I never thought I would see day when the Washington Post would outdo the Moon-owned, right-wing Washington Times for pure, unabashed, neocon propaganda but, that day has arrived