I can't find my way around the News and Current Affairs section and don't want to start a new thread, but I wanted to post this somewhere because the second paragraph made me quite happy (well, happy's not quite the word, but still ...):
Reuters - Tuesday, September 23 08:31 pm
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba, Sept 23 - Accused September 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed asked a U.S. military judge at the Guantanamo war crimes court on Tuesday whether he was a member of an "extremist" American religious group.
Mohammed exercised the defendant's right to examine the judge's impartiality, asking Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann about his views on religion and torture at a pre-trial hearing of five accused September 11 co-conspirators.
"We are well-known as extremists and fanatics, and there are also Christians and Jews that are very extremist," Mohammed said. "If you, for example, were part of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson's groups, then you would not at all be impartial towards us," he said, referring to two U.S. evangelical Christian leaders.
Kohlmann replied that he did not belong to a congregation. "When I have attended church, I was a member of various Lutheran churches and Episcopal churches, and I have not attended any of them for a long time because I have moved so often," the judge said.
Kohlmann dismissed as "inaccurate" an assertion by co-defendant Ramzi Binalshibh that he had a "Jewish name."
Binalshibh, Mohammed and three other defendants -- Mustafa Ahmed al Hawsawi, Walid bin Attash and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali -- are charged with conspiring with al Qaeda to kill civilians in the attacks that prompted the Bush administration's global war on terrorism.
The men face 2,973 counts of murder, one for each person killed when the hijacked crashed into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Prosecutors want to execute them if they are convicted.
Mohammed is one of three al Qaeda suspects known to have been subjected to CIA water boarding, a form of simulated drowning used in interrogation that human rights groups consider torture. He questioned Kohlmann on his conduct of a high-school seminar in 2005 on interrogation and torture.
Kohlmann said he had distributed two articles to the class at his daughter's high school, discussing the pros and cons of harsh interrogation techniques in circumstances such as when a suspect knows of an imminent attack. "I set out the scenarios ... to try to show it's a complex question," he said.
