JURIST Guest Columnist Anthony D’Amato of Northwestern University School of Law says the sweeping Guantanamo “confessions” of al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed rival the scope of those made in the Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s, and should equally prompt us to question the legal process in which they were made…

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Students of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s will recall the astounding confessions made in open court by the accused persons. They had been severely tortured over weeks and months. But they showed up in court without external marks of torture. With all apparent voluntariness, they admitted subverting the Five-Year Plans that would have provided the Soviet people with necessary food items. They sabotaged factories, making sure the production lines were inefficient. They managed to import inferior metals so that Soviet tanks and automobiles would fall apart after a few months’ use. They infiltrated the Soviet Army and through dint of their persuasiveness, convinced the foot soldier that it was absurd to risk his life defending a dictatorial government. In short these accused persons, briefly in court on their way to the firing squad, took responsibility for everything that had gone wrong for the past two decades in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

So why is it today that no one draws the connection between the Soviet purge trials and the confession of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? Mohammed said that he had been tortured by his American captors. No one contradicted his assertion. Then he went on, with a straight and sincere face, to take responsibility for a long list of crimes recently perpetrated.

Mr. Mohammed personally decapitated “the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” he testified. He must have been on an overnight flight from South Korea, where he personally identified targets “such as American military bases and a few night clubs frequented by American soldiers.” Perhaps it was on that flight that he planned the “Shoe Bomber Operation to down two American airplanes.”

The busy Mr. Mohammed planned, financed, surveyed, trained, and followed up the operations to destroy American military vessels and oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibralter, the Port of Singapore, and the Panama Canal. On a side trip to the Philippines, he masterminded the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II.

What about the Big One, namely, the crash into the World Trade Center Towers on 9/11? Mr. Mohammed was responsible “from A to Z,” he said. He also was responsible for the earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

This person really got around; you’ve got to give him credit for that. Maybe he had a job as a chef aboard Air Force One; he didn’t say. But he did manage to get all the way to Bali, Indonesia, where he supervised the infamous nightclub bombing that killed many British and Australian nationals.

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