By Hugh
Turley
In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 suspense
thriller, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” assassins kidnapped Jimmy Stewart’s son
to pressure Stewart not to talk to the authorities. Imagine something more heinous, like
government authorities kidnapping children in order to pressure their father to
confess to crimes.
On March 9, 2003, a story in the
respected London Sunday Telegraph was
titled, “CIA holds young sons of captured al-Qa’eda chief.”
The story by Olga Craig said, “Two
young sons of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September
11 attacks, are being held by the CIA to force their father to talk. Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother
Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan…but this weekend
they were flown to America where they will be questioned about their
father. CIA interrogators confirmed
last night that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being
encouraged to talk about their father’s activities. ‘We’re handling them with kid
gloves. After all they are only
little children,’ said one official, ‘but we need to know as much about their
father’s recent activities as possible.
We have child psychologists on hand at all times, and they are given the
best of care.’”
The story said their father,
Mohammed, 37, was being held at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan where
he had been told his sons were being held to encourage him to divulge future
attacks and the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
Another story published the same day by Craig
quoted CIA officials saying, “We fully intend to use
the fact that his two young sons are now in US custody as leverage. We think the prospect of their freedom
will be enormous leverage.”
In the years since the children were
kidnapped some information about them appeared when the Center for
Constitutional Rights published an affidavit of Ali Khan. Khan quoted his son saying, "The
Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area
upstairs, and were denied food and water by other guards. They were also
mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare
them and get them to say where their father was hiding."
This past summer The New York Times said Mohammed had been taken to a CIA black site
in Poland where, “various harsh techniques, including waterboarding, used about
100 times over a period of two weeks — prompted worries that officers
might have crossed the boundary into illegal torture.”
“Let’s just say we are not averse to
a little smacky face,” an informed CIA official told the Telegraph. “After all, if you don’t violate a
prisoner’s human rights some of the time then you aren’t doing your job.”
Not surprisingly, Mohammed confessed
to nearly every terrorist plot during the past 15 years. Mohammed is currently at
Guantanamo awaiting a military tribunal.
The U.S. media have not publicized
the fate of the children. We know
that a state-controlled press would likely conceal such things, but does our
own press meet that description?
The methods used to convict Mohammed
go against every standard of human decency. Are there any limits to what we will do
in this war against an abstract noun, the so-called “War on Terror?” Might we even justify, say, gouging out
the eyes of a suspected terrorist’s child to “forestall an imminent threat?”
This article was published originally
in the November 2008 Hyattsville (MD) Life and Times. It is published on the Internet here for
the first time. Nothing further, to our knowledge, has been said about
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children as of this date.
David Martin
August 18, 2015
See also “Do We Still Have Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed’s Sons?”
Home
Page Column Column 5 Archive
Contact