"Competing in goodness" - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's testimony at Guantanamo

By Faisal Devji

In passages much cited by Muslim liberals, the Quran appears to advocate religious and other forms of pluralism by asking different communities to compete with each other in goodness, each according to its own standard. Muslim militants, too, or at least those gathered under the sign of Al-Qaeda, seem to have taken these scriptural passages to heart, a particularly egregious example of which can be found in the testimony of the 9/11 linchpin, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. On the one hand, competing in goodness with the enemy is only the obverse of competing with him in evil, which plays such a large part in militant rhetoric. But on the other hand competing in goodness goes beyond merely the mirroring of another’s actions, and implies caring for the enemy’s goodness as a quality that requires protection. This indeed is the closest the kind of militant I am describing comes to the Christian virtue of loving his enemy.

In the redacted and unclassified version of his hearing at Guantanamo Bay on March 10, 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed pleaded guilty before a tribunal he considered illegitimate, thus turning his hearing into one for the tribunal itself, since his own guilt or innocence had ceased to be an issue for it. Indeed Mohammed’s admission of guilt was so extensive as to place the charges laid against him quite in the shade by reversing the normal relationship between law and criminality, in which it is the person charged whose claims of responsibility tend to be minimal. Acknowledging guilt in this excessive way deprives it of meaning while returning such responsibility into the keeping of the law, where it remains something impersonal with which the person charged has only a formal and not an existential relationship. Perhaps this is why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could afford to speculate upon responsibility as a theoretical category during his hearing, in which he concluded a long list of criminal claims with the following statement about the utterly conventional character of guilt:

What I wrote here, is not I’m making myself hero, when I said I was responsible for this or that. But your are military man. You know very well there are language for any war. So, there are, we are when I admitting these things I’m not saying I’m not did it. I did it but this the language of any war. If America they want to invade Iraq they will not send for Saddam roses or kisses they send for a bombardment. This is the best way if I want. If I’m fighting for anybody admit to them I’m American enemies. For sure, I’m American enemies.

In one way this passage evokes my discussion earlier in this chapter on the difficulty of locating responsibility in a global arena. Thus Mohammed’s lengthy list of claims threatens to spiral out of control and turn responsibility into an absurdity, so that he is finally forced to ground it by reducing these global claims into merely the illustrations of his enmity for America. But in another way this admission of guilt in someone else’s language if not in one’s own ultimately opens the door to a highly pluralistic vision of human relations, in which the refusal to recognize someone’s legitimacy does not preclude the building of a relationship with him. The formal admission of guilt, in other words, functions like a gift that establishes relations even in the absence of recognition. This is how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, described his refusal to present evidence at his hearing under oath:

Take an oath is 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 laws 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.

Having set the terms of engagement with his captors by offering them an admission of guilt without by that token according them any legitimacy, Mohammed went on to discuss the substance of this engagement, which for him consisted in being true to oneself. In fact he spent the whole of his hearing trying to get his American captors to be true to their own principles, which he took to be those of the promotion and protection of human rights, while at the same time treating their accusations as if they were questions regarding his own truthfulness to Islamic principles. Here, then, was an example of the testing in goodness of which the Quran spoke, and of whose pluralist character militants make so much. But while in militant rhetoric more generally it is the willingness to die for one’s principles that demonstrates how true one is to oneself, in Mohammed’s testimony this demonstrative role is played by the admission of guilt, which allows a relationship of mutual testing to occur between the bitterest of enemies. How else are we to explain the detainee’s numerous and often carping objections to the accusations brought against him, as well as to the procedures of the tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, in light of his equally frequent admissions of guilt? It was not his innocence that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried to prove during his hearing, but rather the coherence and internal consistency of the charges levelled against him, which he sought only to correct by their own light. The first of these corrections occurs after the reading of the charges against the detainee:

• Paragraph a. On the morning of 11 September 2001, four airliners travelling over the United States were hijacked. The flight hijacked were: American Airlines flight 11, United Airlines flight 175, American Airlines flight 77, and United Airlines flight 93. At approximately 8:46 a.m., American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, resulting in the collapse of the tower at approximately 10:25 a.m. At approximately 9:05 a.m., United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, resulting in the collapse of the tower at approximately 9:55 a.m. At approximately 9:37 a.m., American Airlines flight 77 crashed into the southwest side of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. At approximately 10:03 a.m., United Airlines flight 93 crashed in Stoney Creek Township, Pennsylvania. These crashes and subsequent damage to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon resulted in the deaths of 2,972 persons in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
• Paragraph b. The Detainee served as the head of the al Qaeda military committee and was Usama bin Laden’s principal al Qaeda operative who directed the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States.
• Paragraph c. In an interview with an al Jazeera reporter in June 2002, the Detainee stated he was the head of the al Qaeda military committee.
• Paragraph d. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained information about the four airplanes hijacked on 11 September 2001 including code names, airline company, flight number, target, pilot name and background information, and names of the hijackers.
• Paragraph e. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained photographs of 19 individuals identified as the 11 September 2001 hijackers.
• Paragraph f. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained a document that listed the pilot license fees for Mohammad Atta and biographies for some of the 11 September 2001 hijackers.
• Paragraph g. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained images of passports and an image of Mohammad Atta.
• Paragraph h. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained transcripts of chat sessions belonging to at least one of the 11 September 2001 hijackers.
• Paragraph i. The Detainee directed an individual to travel to the United States to case targets for a second wave of attacks.
• Paragraph j. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained three letters from Usama bin Laden.
• Paragraph k. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained spreadsheets that describe money assistance to families of known al Qaeda members.
• Paragraph l. The Detainee’s name was on a list in a computer seized in connection with a threat to United States airlines, United States embassies and the Pope.
• Paragraph m. The Detainee wrote the Bojinka Plot, the airline bomb plot which was later found on his nephew Ramzi Yousef’s computer.
• Paragraph n. The Bojinka Plot is also known as the Manila air investigation.
• Paragraph o. The Manila air investigation uncovered the Detainee conspired with others to plant explosive devices aboard American jetliners while those aircraft were scheduled to be airborne and loaded with passengers on their way to the United States.
• Paragraph p. The Detainee was in charge of and funded an attack against United States military vessels heading to the port of Djibouti.
• Paragraph q. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained a letter to the United Arab Emirates threatening attack if their government continued to help the United States.
• Paragraph r. During the capture of the Detainee, information used exclusively by al Qaeda operational managers to communicate with operatives was found.
• Paragraph s. The Detainee received funds from Kuwaiti-based Islamic extremist groups and delivered the funds to al Qaeda members.
• Paragraph t. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained a document that summarized operational procedures and training requirements of an al Qaeda cell.
• Paragraph u. A computer hard drive seized during the capture of the Detainee contained a list of killed and wounded al Qaeda martyrs.
• And lastly, Paragraph v. Passport photographs of al Qaeda operatives were seized during the capture of the Detainee.

Despite their length, these charges are in fact drawn from rather limited sources of evidence—a computer hard drive and an Al-Jazeera interview. As if offended by the meagreness of this evidence, especially given the rich detail of his own lengthy if also uncorroborated confessions, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed proceeded to criticize the charges laid against him on factual and procedural grounds, though without of course trying to claim his innocence while doing so. This made his criticism into an act of reformatory kindness:

PERSONAL REPRESENTATIVE: The Detainee responds to the unclassified summary of evidence with the following key points.

PERSONAL REPRESENTATIVE: “Some paragraphs under paragraph number 3, lead sentence are not related to the context or meaning of the aforementioned lead sentence. For example, paragraph 3-a is only information from news or a historical account of events on 11 September 2001, and note with no specific linkage being made in this paragraph to me or the definition of Enemy Combatant. As another example, sub-paragraph 3-n makes no linkage to me or to the definition of Enemy Combatant.”

DETAINEE: Are they following along?

PERSONAL REPRESENTATIVE: Ah, they have that in front of them for reference.

PRESIDENT: Yes.

DETAINEE: Okay.

PERSONAL REPRESENTATIVE: Point number 3. “There is an unfair ‘stacking of evidence’ in the way the Summary of Evidence is structured. In other words, there are several sub-paragraphs under parent-paragraph 3 which should be combined into one sub-paragraph to avoid creating the false perception that there are more allegations or statements against me specifically than there actually are. For example, sub-paragraphs 3-m through 3-o, which pertain to the bojinka plot should be combined into one paragraph, as should paragraphs 3-a through 3-h, which pertain to 9/11.”

Aware that much of the evidence adduced against him was derived from a computer hard drive and an Al-Jazeera interview, in which he was said to have claimed to be the head of Al-Qaeda’s military committee, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed asked the tribunal to produce two witnesses on his behalf from among the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. One was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who had been with him during the Al-Jazeera interview, and the other Mustafa Hawsawi, with whom he’d been captured and who owned the computer from which the evidence had been drawn. Mohammed’s point was that in the absence of any corroborating evidence, the statements of these two witnesses had to be taken into account, one of whom could state that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did not in fact claim to lead Al-Qaeda’s military committee, and the other that no link could be made between Mohammed and the information found on the hard drive, since the computer in question did not belong to him. The tribunal determined quite correctly that neither of these witnesses would be able to produce testimony relevant to determining Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s status as enemy combatant, and so denied his requests that they be produced. Mohammed’s aim, however, was not to prove his guilt or innocence so much as to reveal the incorrectness of the hearing itself and so to call for its reformation in order that America might be true to itself as the global protector of human rights. Thus he points out that the facts used against him often don’t even belong in the category of circumstantial evidence, such as, for instance finding a picture of the chief 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta on a computer that didn’t belong to the accused. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans, said Mohammed, might well possess such a picture, which turned this particular “fact” into nothing more than a piece of general information elevated into a hollow accusation:

DETAINEE: most of these facts which be written are related to this hard drive. And more than eleven of these facts are related to this computer. Other things are which is very old even nobody can bring any witnesses for that as you written here if it will be ah a value for you for the witness near by you will do it. This computer is not for me. Is for Hawsawi himself. So I’m saying I need Hawsawi because me and him we both been arrested day. Same way. So this computer is from him long time. And also the problem we are not in court and we are not judge and he is not my lawyer but the procedure has been written reported and the way has mostly as certain charged against me; tell him [Arabic phrase].

TRANSLATOR: [Translating] They are only accusations.

DETAINEE: So accusations. And the accusations, they are as you put for yourself ah definition for enemy combatant there are also many definitions for that accusation of fact or charges that has been written for any ah. [Arabic phrase]

TRANSLATOR: [Translating] Person is accused.

DETAINEE: So, if I been accused then if you want to put facts against me also the definition for these facts. If you now read number N now what is written the bojinka plot. Is known many lead investigation it is not related to anything facts to be against me. So when I said computer hard drive/hard disk, same thing. All these point only one witness he can say yes or not cause he is this computer is under his possession him computer. And also specifically if he said Mohammad Atta picture been this hard drive. I don’t think this should accepted. There are many 100 thousand Americans who have a lot of picture on their computer. You cannot say I find Muhammad Atta on your computer then you use this fact against you. Or you find any files in your computer to be what about it’s mine, it’s not my computer. If this witness, he will state that this known and here that has been ninety percent of what is written is wrong. And for Ramzi, for reporter in Jazeera, he claimed that I state this one and you know the media man. How they are fashionable. What they mean in their own way in a whole different way. They just wrote it so he say I state. But I never stated and I don’t have any witnesses and witness are available here at Guantanamo. He is Detainee. He was with me. Which he been mostly in all my interview with him. Me and them, there was three person, me and Ramzi and this reporter. So if you not believe me, not believe him, believe my witness Ramzi. Then he’s what he state the reporter most is false. I’m not denying that I’m not an enemy combatant about this war but I’m denying the report. It not being written in the proper way. Which is really facts and mostly just being gathered many information. General information that form in way of doing, to use in facts against me.

While Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s finicky attempts to correct the tribunal’s procedures had no bearing on his own guilt or innocence, they did have a great deal to do with the fate of others detained in US custody. For Mohammed, while acknowledging his own guilt, altruistically asserted that the lack of procedures that marked his capture had also resulted in the capture and detention of many innocent Muslims, whom he advised the Americans to treat carefully:

DETAINEE: I want to just it is not related enemy combatant but I’m saying for you to be careful with people. That you have classified and unclassified facts. My opinion to be fair with people. Because when I say, I will not regret when I say I’m enemy combatant. I did or not I know there are other but there are many Detainees which you receive classified against them maybe, maybe not vtake away from me for many Detainees false witnesses. This only advice.

So when we say we are enemy combatant, that right. We are. But I’m asking you again to be fair with many Detainees which are not enemy combatant. Because many of them been unjustly arrested. Many, not one or two or three. Cause the definition you which wrote even from my view is not fair. Because if I was in the first Jihad times Russia. So I have to be Russian enemy. But America supported me in this because I’m their alliances when I was fighting Russia. Same job I’m doing. I’m fighting. I was fighting there Russia now I’m fighting America.

Many of these men, claimed Mohammed, had fought in Afghanistan during the first, U.S.-supported war against the Soviets and then stayed behind, having nothing to do either with Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, while others joined any battle in the name of Islam, or anyone in power in Kabul, without any predisposition against America. Even the Taliban, he pointed out, did not share Al-Qaeda’s purpose and entertained no anti-American feelings until the U.S. invasion. Indeed the Taliban had even tried to assassinate Osama bin Laden, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed relished the irony not only of having these would-be assassins detained with him in Guantanamo Bay, but also of asking for the men to be treated fairly despite his enmity for them:

So, this is why I’m asking you to be fair with Afghanis and Pakistanis and many Arabs which been in Afghanistan. Many of them been unjustly. The funny story they been Sunni government they sent some spies to assassinate UBL then we arrested them sent them to Afghanistan/Taliban. Taliban put them into prison. Americans they came and arrest them as enemy combatant. They brought them here. So, even if they are my enemy but no fair to be there with me.

In a remarkable transformation, then, the man who began by proudly admitting to numberless murders and terrorist plots ended up pleading in an almost Christian way that justice be rendered others, and even his own enemies, in accordance with American principles of human rights. Whether or not he did so out of vanity, so that he could be the most notorious Al-Qaeda operative in custody, or in order to save his accomplices, it is nevertheless extraordinary that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should have concluded his testimony at Guantanamo Bay with a plea for the human rights of strangers:

The American have human right. So, enemy combatant itself, it flexible word. So I think God knows that many who been arrested, they been unjustly arrested. Otherwise, military throughout history know very well. They don’t war will never stop. War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people. This is the way of the language. American start the Revolutionary War then they starts the Mexican then Spanish War then World War One, World War Two. You read the history. You know never stopping war. This is life. But if who is enemy combatant and who is not? Finally, I finish statement. I’m asking you to be fair with other people.

Throughout his statement Khalid Sheikh Mohammed referred to war as a language, and even as the common language that enemies shared with each other, one rendered universal by its very partiality. For in a world of differences it was the only common element, whose ironical role it was to bring people together even as it appeared to drive them apart. Mohammed went so far as to describe the intimacy that war wrought by comparing it to a marriage that produces corpses in place of children:

The way of the war, you know very well, any country waging war against their enemy the language of the war are killing. If a man and a woman they be together as a marriage that is up to the kids, children. But if you and me, two nations, will be together in war the others are victims. This is the way of the language.

So in a startling reversal of received views on the subject of human difference, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed described conflict as the element of similarity in men’s affairs, attributing difference to more peaceable forms of interaction. The way to peace, therefore, was to depart the common language of war and be true to oneself, in the way we have seen he asked America to remain true to its principles of human rights. For the intimacies of war had no end, each side being able to justify its actions by those of the other, so that the responsibility of neither could ever be determined. Mohammed used George Washington as an example of this endless intimacy, claiming that it was impossible to differentiate the hero of the American Revolution from Osama bin Laden as far as the universal language of war was concerned:

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 I said I’m not happy that three thousand been killed in America. I feel sorry even. I don’t like to kill children and the kids. Never Islam are, give me green light to kill peoples. Killing, as in the Christianity, Jews, and Islam, are prohibited. But there are exceptions of rule when you are killing people in Iraq. You said we have to do it. We don’t like Saddam. But this is the way to deal with Saddam. Same thing you are saying. Same language you use, I use. 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.

If the heroes and villains of one nation were reversed in another, and Osama bin Laden could play the role of George Washington to America’s Britain, how then might responsibility finally be determined in war? By anchoring its language to some external source of authority—though not of course to an institution like the UN that was as partial as any state. The authority referred to by Mohammed was something freely chosen and highly individual in character, a law for oneself that might or might not be shared with others, something like human rights. Not conscience, in other words, since it presupposed a common law against which to measure one’s actions, but something completely external was required, for the fragmentation of a collective legal order in the global arena seems to have made individual judgements super-legalistic by devolving all the duties of jurisprudence upon them. And this indeed is what has finally happened to Islamic law in the rhetoric of militant pluralism: torn from its traditional moorings to become the source for a thoroughly individualized jurisprudence whose first and only rule is being true to oneself. Thus Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spoke in his halting and ungrammatical way about his own efforts to exit the undifferentiated realm he called the language of war by judging it according to the Sharia as a freely chosen though completely external authority:

I don’t like to kill people. I feel very sorry they been killed kids in 9/11. What will I do? This is the language. Sometime I want to make great awakening between American to stop foreign policy in out land. I know American people are torturing us from seventies. [REDACTED] I know they talking about human rights. And I know it is against American Constitution, against American laws. But they said every law, they have exceptions, this is your bad luck you been part of the exception of our laws. They got have something to convince me but we are doing same language. But we are saying we have Sharia law, but we have Koran. What is enemy combatant in my language?

DETAINEE (through translator): Allah forbids you not with regards to those who fight you not for your faith nor drive you out of your homes from dealing kindly and justly with them. For Allah love those who are just. There is one more sentence. Allah only forbids you with regards to those who fight you for your faith and drive you out of your homes and support others in driving you out from turning to them for friendship and protection. It is such as turn to them in these circumstances that do wrong.

DETAINEE: So we are driving from whatever deed we do we ask about Koran or Hadith. We are not making up for us laws. When we need Fatwa from the religious we have to go back to see what they said scholar. To see what they said yes or not. Killing is prohibited in all what you call the people of the book, Jews, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You know the Ten Commandments very well. The Ten Commandments are shared between all of us. We are all serving one God. Then now kill you know it very well. But war language also we have language for the war. You have to kill.

No less than any Muslim liberal, our militant acknowledged the shared heritage of Christians, Muslims and Jews, as well as the proscription on killing within their common tradition, only to justify his own murders as juridically approved exceptions to this law. Through a translator, Mohammed cited the Quran in support of this exception, reiterating the now standard argument by which responsibility for violence is evaded if it simply mirrors that of one’s opponent. Even this invocation of a legal exception, however, falls into the mirroring practices that characterize the language of war, since it does nothing more than reflect the legal exception that is Guantanamo Bay, with its “enemy combatants” and proceedings conducted without benefit of lawyers and by the use of secret evidence. According to Mohammed, the difference between his form of legal exception, and that by which his captors worked, was that the exceptionality of Guantanamo Bay remained disconnected from any legal norm. But the validity or otherwise of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s reasoning is irrelevant to the point at hand, which is that the pluralistic global society militants inhabit depends upon self-rule rather than the rule of others. And self-rule is being true to the path one has chosen.

Faisal Devji is Associate Professor of History at the New School in New York. He has held faculty positions at Yale University and the University of Chicago, from where he also received his PhD in Intellectual History. Devji was Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, and Head of Graduate Studies at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, from where he directed post-graduate courses in the Near East and Central Asia. He is the author of two books, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Cornell, 2005), and The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (Columbia, 2008).