Mastermind of 9/11 Attacks Designs a Secret Vacuum Cleaner 284
HonorPoncaCityDotCom writes "AP reports that while confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could design a vacuum cleaner. After all KSM earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering, the agency had no long-term plan for him, but might thought he might someday prove useful and might even stand trial one day and for that, he'd need to be sane. They were concerned that his long imprisonment might do so much psychological damage that he would no longer be useful as source for information. "We didn't want them to go nuts," said a former senior CIA official. So, using schematics from the Internet as his guide, Mohammed began re-engineering one of the most mundane of household appliances. It remains a mystery how far Mohammed got with his designs or whether the plans still exist and even Mohammed's military lawyer, Jason Wright, says he is prohibited from discussing his client's interest in vacuums. 'It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger,' says Wright. So now, says Doug Mataconis, if you happen to start seeing ads for the CIA's revolutionary new home cleaning device, you'll know where it came from." Sounds perfect for In-Q-Tel.
Many terrorists are engineers (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting how many terrorists are trained as engineers.
Life Imitates Art ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember the Grahame Greene novel "Our Man in Havana"? The protagonist is a CIA agent who gets tired of his job trying to uncover missile silos and communist plots in Cuba and starts microfilming close-ups of vacuum cleaner schematics and sending those back to Washington.
So now we have a Guantanamo detainee drawing vacuum cleaner schematics? Which are no doubt being photographed and pored over by CIA agents for evidence of terrorist plots.....
Re:admitted? (Score:5, Interesting)
nor does it mean he's guilty of the dozens of other crimes that they tortured him into confessing to
To the best of my knowledge he didn't give them jack shit despite being waterboarded around 180 times. For a while there was this pro-torture narrative going around that he "broke" after ~30 seconds of waterboarding when later it turned out that the real story was closer to the CIA gave up waterboarding him after ~30 days of doing it to him 5 times a day and getting nothing.
Re:admitted? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup, the sad fact is that torture actually works and it can save lives when executed properly.
That has never happened and never will.
The example that people bring up is "what if the is a bomb and you need to find it before it detonates."
What would happen in those cases is that the subject will tell you anything as long as it stops the torture. He will give you a false location that you need to verify, thereby stopping the torture temporarily. You could keep torturing him continuously until the bomb is found but that removes the connection between answering and removal of torture so that is also inefficient.
Torture never works in a time critical scenario because then the subject knows that he only has to stall for a fixed time.
For torture to even theoretically work you will need an unlimited time frame and ask about something that can be quickly verified. (Preferably within a 10 minute span or so. Without a strong connection between the correctness of the answer and the torture all answers will be lies.)
In those cases you can work just as well without the torture.
Re:admitted? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for costing in other ways, guess who tried to kill off the President of France some years ago? It was a group of returned soldiers from Algeria that had tortured doctors, priests and plenty of others that they had seen as authority figures so they didn't see why they shouldn't kill off their President. This sort of stuff has a way of following people home, which may be when some torture was outsourced to Egypt and Syria (two we know about) as part of the "extraordinary rendition" that had large numbers of suspects being flown to places where US law does not apply with people that won't be setting foot in the USA committing the atrocities.
In my view it's another thing to add to the list, not just having atrocities committed but being cowardly weasels about it.
Re:admitted? (Score:5, Interesting)
US Soldiers are more likely to engage in spousal abuse, whether that's rape or pugilism. This distinction doesn't even involve combatants; there's enough brainwashing and rape to achieve this goal even for a non-com. I presume it's the same elsewhere. You teach people to solve problems with violence and that they are better than other people (as enlisted typically feel) and guess what happens?
Re:admitted? (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt the truthfulness of this statement, on the basis of numerous studies, history, and a basic understanding of human psychology.
If I had information and if someone wanted to pull my fingernails or gouge my eyes, I think I would consider giving up that bit of information (discounting obvious external factors). Ofcource at the same time, I would be scared that my torturers would think I was lying and continue torturing me for information that I *DONT* have. Then ofcource as you say, people make up any kinds of shit to make it stop.
You can't make blanket statements like "it works" or "it never works", etc. Like everything else in the world, its a large grey area.
The fact that there is a debate about the merits of torture is absolutely astounding to to me. Astounding and abhorrent.
A debate does not necessarily validate any POV. In fact good debates can serve as a great arguments against certain points of view.