Originally published at: 9/11 defendant ruled unfit for trial due to delusions and psychosis following alleged CIA torture | Boing Boing
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… “alleged” 
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seems like either way, the government won. sure, they gotta let the guy go (i think). but dude is so damaged that he will never be free.
can we chant U.S.A.?
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States don’t deal extralegal “justice”: they torture and murder exactly the same as terrorists without even the excuse of asymmetric power as justification.
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It looks like he got away.
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Also … it is over 20 years since 9/11. He apparently entered CIA custody in 2003. And now they want to put him on trial? What was the hold up? Just needed to finish out that 20+ years of torture?
Everything about Guantanamo is awful.
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Don’t forget this guy, who provided the legal excuse for state torture & is still at large:
John Choon Yoo ([Korean]: 유준; born July 10, 1967)
From Wikipedia: John Yoo - Wikipedia
He played an important role in developing a legal justification for the Bush administration’s policy in the war on terrorism, arguing that prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions does not apply to “enemy combatants” captured during the war in Afghanistan and held at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.
ETA: I recalled his name by googling “torture lawyer UC”
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Not only is torture morally wrong, not only does it NOT WORK because tortured people will say whatever they think that you want to hear, whether it is true or not, but it also makes it impossible to prosecute those that may well be guilty of heinous crimes. And of course it has horribly damaged the American “brand” for decades to come.
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it works great if what we want is false confessions
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Of course you only need to prosecute people if you intend on detaining them legally.
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I remember how fantastic (in the outrageous sense) Brazil was when it first came out, and how I realized it was more and more prophetic over time.
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In John Yoo’s defense, he is also the lawyer that told Mike Pence that he couldn’t overturn the 2020 election. It doesn’t excuse his role in the Bush administration’s torture policies, but imagine if a different lawyer had given Pence different advice.
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No lawyer outside the craziest fringes of the MAGA movement would have advised Mike Pence that he’d be within his Constitutional rights to overturn the election results. The only way Pence could have been convinced to go that way would be if he wanted to do it already and went lawyer-shopping to find a Giuliani-type crook to validate his actions.
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So I’m curious- how many other people who played a significant role in the terrorist attacks on 9/11 are still alive? The article mentioned five people on trial. Are there still any conspirators out there not in custody?
The five men on trial are:
- Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man called the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks”
- Ramzi bin al-Shibh, from the article, who has long been considered the “20th hijacker”- he couldn’t get a visa into the US. Supposedly, he would have been the fifth hijacker on Flight 93. Had he been on that plane, the passengers who fought the hijackers may not have been successful.
- Mustafa al-Hawsawi- accused of being one of the money men of the operation. He was seriously injured by his CIA captors, who apparently repeatedly sodomized him. He funneled money from Khalid Shaikh Mohammad to the 19 terrorists in the US as they trained for the attack.
- Ammar al-Baluchi- nephew of KSM, he is also accused of funneling funds to the terrorists while they were training.
- Walid bin Attash- he has been accused of helping in the bombing of the USS Cole, along with acting as Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard. He was one of four men personally selected by Osama Bin Laden in 1999 to lead the 9/11 attacks. He personally trained some of the hijackers in hand-to-hand combat. He tested airline security by seeing how easy it was to smuggle razor blades onto an aircraft.
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What’s sad about my country, is I have no trouble believing that what was done to him by our “black” agencies so was bad as to actually cause the issues the Judge ruled caused him to be incompetent to stand trial.
No trouble whatsoever believing it. Don’t get me wrong, this guy seems like a bad, bad dude who played a role in 9/11, and I hope he faces whatever eternal justice he believes in, but what was done to him in our name was nothing short of evil.
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John Yoo doesn’t believe that people deserve defenses, so why go out of your way to give him one?
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Since John Yoo had already established that he was willing to tell the White House whatever it wanted to hear about the legality of proposed actions, Him declining to endorse Pence subverting the election was probably more about him not falling into Trump’s cult of personality than from any moral sense or belief in following the law. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. If their interests align with yours they may be a temporary ally, (cf the Soviet Union in WWII) but they are not “friends.”
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