Khalid Sheikh Yerbouti

In 1979 Frank Zappa dressed up like a member of the Saudi royal family to have his photo taken for his new album, "Sheikh Yerbouti." One of the songs it featured, "I'm So Cute," has now been sung by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, whose comprehensive confession to every terrorist act ever committed has made fools of the Bush regime (if that's possible) and cast in sharp relief the credulity and fanaticism of people stupid enough to be snookered by this Soviet-style farce.

Stalin's show trials of the 30's were the same kind of exercise. Paul Craig Roberts recalls a conversation he had years ago with Stalin survior Vladimir Bukovsky, "about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He (told Roberts) that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process."

Mohammed signaled that he's pulling our chain by confessing to participation in or planning 31 terror plots, including blowing up the Panama Canal, and assassinating Presidents Clinton and Carter as well as the Pope. Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press wrote that the torture masters who extracted Mohammed’s confession don't believe it.

"(W)hy is it today" asks Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University Law School, "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..."

(Snip)

"This person really got around;" D'Amato continues, "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."

We might be forgiven for asking, "What's the point?" Why is the regime going to the trouble of concocting a ridiculous and impossible narrative, shopped by the credulous and sold to the gullible? Why do they have to create this counterfeit Beelzebub?

D'Amato again: "The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don’t know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 'high value detainees.'

"In other words, the government has nothing on 99 percent of the detainees who allegedly are so dangerous and wicked that they must be kept in detention without charges, access to attorneys and contact with families."

What we're looking at here is really the essence of fascism. Caring nothing about objective truth, the fascist is by nature and inclination a blind follower, and wants to be told what to think. Having assumed a position of abject obedience to the Beloved Leader, such a person is willing to believe that the earth is flat, that water runs uphill, and that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did everything he confessed to.

This case, and the regime's need to focus publicity on what is obviously a crude farce, directs us to study the essence of fascism. It's only by understanding that essence that we can come to know how we got to be as dumb as we are now.