According to the Associated Press:

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Five men charged with plotting the Sept. 11 attacks told a military judge Monday that they want to immediately confess at their war-crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

In a letter the judge read aloud in court, the five defendants - who could be executed if convicted - said they "request an immediate hearing session to announce our confessions."

The letter implies they want to plead guilty, but does not specify whether they will admit to any specific charges. It also says they wish to drop all previous defense motions.

The judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, asked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants if they were prepared to enter a plea. So far, Mohammed and three others said they agreed with the letter; the fifth remained to be questioned by the judge.

Mohammed, who has already told interrogators he was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, also told the judge Monday that he had no faith in him, his Pentagon-appointed lawyers or President George W. Bush.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081208/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_guantanamo_sept11_trial

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My question to readers on this site is what are we to make of this development in light of all the claims on the left that 9/11 wasn't really perpetrated by al Qaeda at all, that it was really an administration/CIA or Israeli plot, etc., it  intended to besmirch the name of Islam and justify American expansionsism, etc., etc? Does anyone here think that there will be any recanting on the left concerning such claims now?

Don't hold your breath. Conspiracists and those who abet them rarely if ever give up a theory about who really did what to whom. They just redirect their suspicions, as it were, with the arrival of new information. Expect to hear about how the Americans tortured these poor souls into making damaging admissions or how they were subtly and secretly manipulated into doing something that was really against their own interests and desires, etc.

Unfortunately, this kind of conspiracist thinking is not limited to our crazed friends on the left. The supposedly mainstream media has been known to aid and abet these kinds of claims as well as Mark Steyn notes in a recent piece on how many in the media played the Mumbai massacre story:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzA2Y2E2MDU2YjQzOTQwZjUzNjcwZDA0OTE3YmFkYzg=#more

 ". . . the Associated Press . . . filed a story about how Muslims 'found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.' "

Steyn goes on: 

"Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was 'linked' to any religion. . . In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations - 'Islamic terrorists,' 'Muslim extremists' - and by the time of the assault on Bombay [the old colonial name for Mumbai] found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators 'militants' or 'gunmen' or 'teenage gunmen,' as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok...

" Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.

"The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution 'practitioners.' 'Practitioners' of what, exactly?

"Hard to say. And getting harder. Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: 'It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.'

"Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An 'accidental hostage scene' that one of the 'practitioners' just happened to stumble upon? 'I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?' "

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As Steyn notes, our media are so eager to avoid giving offense to some that they seem prepared to bend over backwards to recast events  in ways that enable those who would dissemble to continue deceiving others and themselves. But who will speak up now that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed has 'fessed up to committing the 9/11 atrocities and bring an end to the cultural silliness that seems aimed at making our enemies our victims and our government the enemy?

SWM

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