The uses of confession

Most obviously, the Americans see Mohammed’s transcript (PDF 1.35MB) as a political intervention, much needed evidence about their progress in the Global War on Terror. After all the embarrassing revelations about Afghan warlords selling innocents into Guantanamo for the reward money, here’s one Gitmo inmate proclaiming his terroristic proclivities at the top of his lungs.

Yet Mohammed’s remarkable mea culpa also performs a less obvious - and quite contradictory - function. The confession provides evidence of success; it’s also intended to show that success is not possible.

That is, if we take seriously Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s shopping list of atrocities, we can only assume that myriads of similarly diabolical schemes are being hatched by those terrorists not in custody. Al-Qaida boasts, we are told, thousands of adherents, each one a potential Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. If a single person can set in motion so many plots in so many different places, the terrorists can never be totally defeated.

Such is the message from Mohammed’s revelations.

And if that seems counter-intuitive, consider the Moscow Trials once more. The confessions they produced - the claims that behind every misfortune of the Soviet Union lurked sabotage and treachery and intricate conspiracies - justified every fresh purge, each new trial. With hidden wreckers lurking in every cranny of society, vigilance could not be relaxed for an instant. The stronger the enemies of the State, the stronger the State had to become.

In a similar way, Mohammed’s hallucinogenic confession provides a justification not only for Guantanamo Bay but for Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim that the War on Terror, and everything that goes with it, will last for generations.

Amnesty International once described the CIA’s network of secret prisons as the “gulag of our times”. The Soviet camps were more extensive and more deadly, but they operated according to the same self-perpetuating and totalitarian logic.

A conventional trial, with evidence publicly weighed and sifted by argument and rebuttal, would have told the world far more about both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and al-Qaida than any number of ludicrous confessions.

But Stalin needed Bukharin as a monster, not a man, and the War on Terror needs Mohammed in the same way.