Look! Over there!

Ooh, big news! Three years after his capture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed finally confesses to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z,” Mohammed said during a military hearing at Gitmo last Saturday.

Last Saturday?

Excuse me if I find the timing of this monumental admission just a little ... suspect. Even anticlimactic. After all, the man has been in U.S. custody since 2003, held somewhere in the CIA’s network of overseas prisons they denied even existed. Mohammed was moved to Guantanamo Bay in September of last year in preparation for an actual military hearing. And we’re only now getting the big news of his confession?

I’m guessing that having him “confess” just before the November elections might have been just a little too-too. Well, it's still a little too-too for me. For one, I’m leery of that “A to Z” quote, which is an Americanism if I’ve ever heard one. Can’t we write scripts that at least stick to the ethnic and cultural background of the torturee?

I note that the man we were told was actually the mastermind of Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden, is not mentioned at all in the linked news story. Nor is there any mention of Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein or Iraq.

Of course, the big story right now is the U.S. Attorney purge, which appears to have been undertaken by the Bush administration in order to oust and perhaps punish lawmakers who wouldn’t play Republican dirty tricks on demand -- and replace them with Bush functionaries and cronies who would.

The other big news is that the U.S. housing bubble is bursting, fueling what could be a massive, prolonged correction in the the U.S. stock market which could have wide-ranging and even devastating economic ramifications not only for us, but for the rest of the world.

And then, of course, there’s George W. Bush’s bloody Iraq war, which drags on as usual, flinging bodies and prevarications in all directions. Let’s stop for a moment and think, once again, of the lies we were told to convince us we needed to launch that war back in March of 2003. That’s right ... Saddam was involved in 9/11. He had weapons of mass destruction. He could even get nukes, if we didn’t hurry up. He might give them to bin Laden’s al Qaeda, and the “smoking gun” might become a “mushroom cloud.”

Right.

What other news might have prompted the release of this sudden “confession?” Ah, yes. There will actually now be a debate in the Senate over Bush’s arrogant, in-your-face-America escalation of troops to Iraq (the numbers of said escalation seem to keep rising, too). The whole idea of a “debate” seems beside the point to me, since the escalation was already underway when Bush announced it in January and he's made it quite clear that he doesn’t give a flying fuck what the American people think of it.

Ah, well. It wouldn’t do to just bring the troops home, I guess – at least not until Halliburton has decamped safely to Dubai, where it can thumb its nose at us and count its stolen millions. Or is that billions?

I know. I should be pleased at the news that we’ve caught a bad guy and he (allegedly) actually (allegedly) confessed to being one, rather than simply being another one of the hundreds of innocent but brown-skinned unfortunates who got rounded up and tossed into jail cells because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All this news does is convince me that once again, the Bush administration is doing the full spin-and-bamboozle tango in yet another desperate attempt to take our eye off the ball. They haven’t realized yet that their credibility is shot, and that while our weak, crooked Congress waffles and sputters, most Americans are just getting more and more angry – and boy, are we tired of being played for fools.