>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6452573.stm
>
> [WS:] What do others think about it? To me,
> it looks so frigging lame that I find it hard
> to believe that anyone with a half a brain in
> the US government would fabricate such crap.
> No wonder that the BBC put quotation marks
> around the phrase "admits guilt."
Two levels of lies. First of all the Gestapo openly admit having tortured this guy. Besides that being utterly revolting, you also must assume the fact value of whatever he said is nil, because all torture is good for is extracting confessions, not eliciting new information; but boy oh boy is it _perfect_ for extracting confessions, as the victim says precisely what the torturers require him to say. So what you read has nothing to do with what Khalid Mohammed ever did or thought; it can only be a detailed fantasy that the torturers made him recite.
Second, it's not even that, because you are receiving this transcript from the Bush Adminsitration. Now which significant event in this "War on Terror" thing have they _not_ lied about? Name one. Not just got confused or concealed details or lied a little bit, who doesn't, but lied hard and long about everything high and low, lied reflexively about insanely petty things, lied with intense conspiratorial concentration about the big important things. And lied with such ineptitude that one after another their lies fell to shreds in public. At this point the question is not "why should I trust them?" but "how in the world could anybody trust them?"
So as far as a news item goes this is actually less than Anna Nicole Smith's death, because at least with that you're pretty sure that, alas, she really is dead, whereas with this business the only thing you do know is that you actually know zip.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net