Andrew P. Napolitano on the torture-linked confession of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a lawless system of brutality that profoundly violates natural rights, the Constitution’s guarantee of due process as well as federal law.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2022. (United States Department of Defense /Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
America’s longest current criminal prosecution is in its 15th year, on its fifth judge and still has no trial date.
The defendants are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged mass-murder co-conspirators. Mohammed is the second person that the government has characterized as the ringleader of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Originally, the feds had labeled Osama bin Laden as the ringleader. Yet, rather than charging and arresting bin Laden, in order to keep him quiet it sent a team of Navy Seals to his home in Pakistan to murder him and his wife and their children.
After that, the feds labeled Mohammed as the orchestrator of 9/11 even though that, by the time of bin Laden’s death, Mohammed had been in U.S. custody for eight years. During that time, he was brutally tortured by C.I.A. officers and other U.S. civilian agents.
His torture was truly repellant. He was waterboarded 183 times. He was hanged by his wrists while naked and in well-lit walk-in refrigerators such that he was freezing and denied sleep for days. His head was smashed repeatedly against wooden walls. His rectum, through which he was fed, was so brutalized that he bled for months, often ingesting into his intestines his own blood and fecal material.
At the end of three years of these criminal attacks at foreign sites operated by cooperating intelligence agencies with the torture administered by Americans, he told his torturers what he thought they wanted to hear. Then he was transferred to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has remained since 2007.
Seeking a Second, Torture-Free Confession
A Navy guard patrols the recreation area of a detention facility at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, July 2010. (Joint Task Force Guantánamo Bay/Flickr/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
Upon his arrival at Gitmo, a different set of interrogators took over. The video tapes of his hundreds of torture sessions were destroyed but not the transcripts of his confession. The purpose of the second round of interrogations was to elicit another confession by agents who could testify to a judge that they did not torture him, and that his confession to them was not coerced.
Though some of these interrogators at Gitmo were F.B.I. agents, no one read him his Miranda warnings, advising him of his right to silence, to counsel and to the legal implications of anything he told his new interrogators. Mohammed made admissions to this second group of interrogators substantially similar to those he made to his torturers.
The government, which once denied but now admits to the torture, nevertheless was prepared to argue that his second confession was voluntary. Then, the feds had a change of heart. And, two years ago, his lawyers entered into plea negotiations, at the request of the government because the military lawyers and their Department of Justice legal colleagues concluded that they could not ethically defend torture in an American courtroom.
Federal law, the federal rules of criminal procedure, the canons of legal ethics and state bar licensing authorities all prohibit lawyers from using coerced testimony in a courtroom.
The government and all defense lawyers entered into a plea agreement that provided for full public confessions, a public confrontation by family members of 9/11 victims during which the defendants agreed to reply truthfully to their questions, and, of course, life in prison at Gitmo.
The Army general in the Pentagon in charge of all Gitmo prosecutions — herself a former military judge — approved the plea agreement, as did the military trial judge and all five defendants.
Then, the Biden administration Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin fired the general who approved the plea agreement and revoked the Pentagon’s approval. A federal appeals court upheld his revocation. At that point, Mohammed was on his fourth military judge and his fifth team of prosecutors.
Austin at a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., in February 2024. (DoD, Alexander Kubitza)
After the court affirmed the Pentagon’s change of heart, the military judge who had approved the plea agreement retired. The current and fifth judge has presumably read the 44,000 pages of documents and transcripts that 15 years of litigation has generated as he announced last week that he will rule on the admissibility of the second round of confessions this summer.
The present judge, who did not preside over any of the hundreds of hours of proceedings in the case, including those during which the horrific tortures described above were related in an American courtroom, must now decide if the second confession was voluntary. Though the government now admits that the first confession was not voluntary, its relevance here is not the words Mohammed told his torturers but the degradation of his mental faculties due to the egregious tortures such that the second confession was also not voluntary.
Was Mohammed so conditioned to the power of his interrogators that his will was attenuated?
The standard of proof that the government must meet to get the second confession admitted is voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. That’s the same high standard for proving guilt in all American courts. If the feds fail to meet this standard to the satisfaction of the judge, the case will proceed to trial without the jury hearing the confession.
This is a two-edged sword for the government. If the confession is read to the jury, then the defendants and their experts can relate to the jury all the horrific things the government did in order to produce the confessions. But if the confession does not come into evidence, then the jury will not hear of the tortures unless there is a conviction and the torture testimony is presented in mitigation of punishment.
What we have here is a lawless system of brutality. Torture and all it produces is a profound violation of natural rights, the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, as well as federal law. Even practitioners of this medieval behavior have acknowledged it produces unreliable statements. It is the tool of monsters.
On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, we are asked to accept government at its worst; one that the Framers thought they had prohibited and one to which the governed never consented.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, was the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel and hosts the podcast Judging Freedom. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit here.
Published by permission of the author.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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June 8, 2026
Geopathology and the Econopathology Behind it
Michael Hudson
Why does ‘the’ Judge not have guests such as Michael Hudson on his podcast ‘show’ who directly address fraudulent monetary policy?
Promoting the purchase of Gold seems to be the main motivating factor for his program.
How many of his listeners/viewers are part of the 1% class with the resources to partake of his constant investment advice?
By international standards, American prisons practice torture. IIRC, objects like ‘restraint chairs’, and practices such a prolonged solitary confinement are both regarded as torture under international regulations. Chemical weapons can be used against citizens and prisoners as required by police or guards. Medical treatment in prisons is often limited or denied. Deaths in custody occur, often without much public notice. We have had prisoners die of neglect even before they reach trial. America has literally had prisoners we have ‘forgotten’ about while stuck in pre-trial detention waiting for trials that never come. These were of course people too broke to afford bail or lawyers. America keeps a high-occupancy rate in its for-profit prisons, and judges have been convicted of taking bribes from the for-profit prison companies to keep it this way. We are of course told that this was only one bad apple. Today, even protesting outside a prison camp is cause for police to attack the protestors. See Delaney Hall in Democrat controlled New Jersey.
It is now forgotten that in Iraq, American reserve soldiers were torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It is even more forgotten that many of these reserve soldiers had ‘day jobs’ as American prison guards. Notice that I did not use the term “ICE” in any of the above, and the only above instance related to ICE is when the Dem governor of NJ sent the riot squad against the protestors outside Delaney Hall. ICE’s practices during arrests, and in its vast archipelago of prison camps and warehouses appear to take the torture of detainees, with deaths in custody, even further than the standard American practices listed above.
It is even more “more forgotten” how the dehumanizing econopathy supported by both parties produced the U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib. Read Joe Bageant’s searing 2007 /Deer Hunting with Jesus (Dispatches from America’s Class War.)/ Joe was from the same Appalachian area as Lynndie England, made notorious for the photo of her with weapon, cigarette hanging from her mouth, standing over a prisoner. Towns 25% of American population but half the U.S. military deaths. Joe pointed out “Most of the young soldiers were fleeing economically depressed places, or dead end jobs like the one Lynndie had at the chicken processing plant.” Places notorious for workplace danger. Yet V.P. Al Gore as head of ‘streamlining govt.’ pushed aside OSHA so processors could inspect themselves. Joe continues: “These so-called volunteers are part of the nation’s de facto draft–economic conscription. Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring classes.”
Fast forward to the last presidential election. The Dem loyalist admin and professional class 20%ers are bewildered by the results, explaining it as voters are “stupid.” But how smart is it never to have noticed 4 decades of suffering in the Rust Belt with the well documented deaths of despair? After the ’08 crash the Ds bailed out Wall St. while the millions of us who lost jobs, pensions, houses got nothing. That callous disregard for peasant lives engenders a rage that serves the war machine.
This is not news to the poor people of America. They already know exactly how this system works.
Police get promoted for the number of ‘busts’. If they bust innocent people, this helps their ‘numbers’ and leads to promotions. Prosecutors get promoted for ‘conviction percentage’. For having a high percentage of these ‘busts’ lead to convictions. Judges are almost always former prosecutors. The path to a judges robe almost always comes via being a prosecutor with a high conviction percentage. Defense attorneys do not tend to become judges. Read the resumes of most judges. This of course sets the standard of the courtroom, with a former prosecutor becoming the ‘unbiased’ judge granting the current prosecutor’s motions.
Coercion is a big part of the system. Busted people are threatened by prosecutors with absurd sentences in order to get them to plead guilty to a lessor crime. To get a trial by jury, the defendant has to risk extreme prison sentences, as well as being able to pay extreme legal fees. The system makes it both cheaper and less dangerous to just sign that paper and plead guilty, thus justifying the ‘bust’ and raising the prosecutor’s conviction percentage and moving them one step closer to promotion to hanging judge. This helps the occupancy rate at the for-profit prisons.
The whole injustice system is a “lawless system of brutality.” At least for ordinary people. There is of course a completely different system for the rich. There is wide bi-partisan support against any changes to this, and the political system is happy with the way each class is treated. Voters in both parties love tough prosecutors with high conviction percentages, like Rudy Giuliani or Kamala Harris.
Thank you Mr. Napolitano, Consortiumnews and all others involved, for always standing proudly where others dare tread.
I still remember Obama fobbing people off with “We tortured some folks”, like it had merely all been an accident or something and not a deliberately hidden, oft-used foreign policy that they’d been caught doing after denying it for years.
One can but inform The People of the commonplace abuses made against them and the repeated disregard for Law both at home and internationally.
The rest is up to The People.
If people don’t fight to ensure that the so-called “inalienable” rights they’ve so far enjoyed continue on to help their children’s children, there will be none on offer by the time those children arrive, for ‘human rights’ are not only inconvenient but detrimental to every personally profitable governing body and we all (should) know by now that individuals actively seeking such politically dominant positions don’t choose to run a country for the extreme effort it requires to actually do a good job – no, they do it simply for the personal gain & power on offer.
However. I’m of the opinion that telling people their way of life contains rights that ‘cannot be removed’, merely makes them complacent and under the assumption that they don’t have to fight for any rights that supposedly can never be taken from them, yet we still see such ‘rights’ being taken away from people every day, in all parts of the world!
IMO, “inalienable rights” are one of the biggest lies ever told – try telling a killer meteor heading towards the planet, or a wolf stalking you in the wilderness, or the edge of the cliff that’s just given way underneath you, or a killer virus that your life is more special that any other on the planet and that it’s been guaranteed to you and it will make just as much difference as it does when you try and remind your ‘government’ of the same as they’re kicking in your door and filling your body with bullets because you frightened them by putting a hand in your pocket.
Just the fact there’s constant drive to ensure these rights are not stripped away means that they cannot be eternally guaranteed or considered anything other than a 100% humanistic attempt to take some control over the often scary and absolutely untameable reality we find ourselves in.
We can nobly TRY and ensure such rights are available to all humans as we seek to rise above being the basic animals we fundamentally are, but unfortunately we’re still just creatures living in a very wild jungle where there only exists predators and prey – those that choose a third option can do so, but that usually just means they’re essentially prey as apposed to becoming something that gets preyed upon less (being a predator in this sense does not mean you have to prey on the weak due to the fact we’re gifted with an enormous brain so need not resort to such base animalistic behaviours, it simply means one is not considered (easy) prey to actual predators such as we tend to get leading countries, governments, ect. Predators will always prefer prey over another equal or superior predator, when it’s lunchtime).
The only right that’s truly “inalienable” is the right to exist until you don’t. No different than every single other ‘lesser’ creature living on this planet – which incidentally, is probably why we, believing ourselves far, far above mere animal status, struggle with such concepts like there actually being no special, intrinsic safety net just for us, other than what we can create for ourselves.
“Then, the Biden administration Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin fired the general who approved the plea agreement and revoked the Pentagon’s approval.”
I lost a lot of friends who strongly defended Genocide Joe, the great humanitarian. The United States of Terrorism … May its reign of terror end soon.
My daughter with a masters in Torture Science has stepped up to big pay. Ask me how!
911 was a a stitch up from the get go. That’s why they have to torture the designated patsies into confessing. The real perpetrators will never be prosecuted. That’s why we are where we are.
The real perpetrators (Langley and Tel Aviv) will brook no criticism, ask JFK/RFK.