Gitmo detainee "confessed" that the White House or Capitol were on the 9/11 hitlist

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, “voluntarily” admitted to an FBI agent that the plan had been to hit the White House or the Capitol as well as the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The “confession” by the former alleged “operations director” of al-Qaeda, was given during an interrogation at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba, according to retired FBI agent Frank Pellegrino during a hearing at the military courtroom, located about a mile from where Mohammed has been held since 2006. “When we went in to speak to him, we were very comfortable that he was speaking to us voluntarily, given every opportunity to walk away,” Pellegrino told the court. At that time, in January, 2007, Pellegrino said he was unaware that since his arrest in Pakistan in 2003 Mohammed had been detained by the CIA in secret “black” prisons (in Poland and Romania) and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including being waterboarded 183 times. The simulated drowning technique was one of many other forms of torture used to extract a confession. However, Pellegrino insisted the 13-hour interrogation he took part in was carried out on a voluntary basis, although he admitted to the court that Mohammed, now 58, was not granted a lawyer when he asked for one. He didn’t get a lawyer for 15 months. With an FBI colleague taking notes, Mohammed freely described the three targets of the 9/11 hijacked-airliner attacks, Pellegrino said: the World Trade Centre as America’s economic symbol, the Pentagon as the military symbol, and either the White House or the Capitol as the political symbol. Passengers on board United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, confronted the hijackers when they realised where they were heading and forced the plane to crash into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All 44 people on board, 33 passengers, seven crew and four hijackers, died. Underlining the easygoing atmosphere of the interrogation at Guantanamo, Pellegrino said he told Mohammed he was envious of the laptop he was using before he was captured. Mohammed responded: “Frank, if you join al-Qaeda, I can get you a good computer.” However, the issue of Mohammed’s treatment at the hands of the CIA in the three years before he was moved to Guantanamo lies at the core of his defence case. In August a military judge ruled that a confession made to federal agents by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of orchestrating the attack on the USS Cole which killed 17 sailors in Aden in 2000, was inadmissible because of the torture he had suffered previously during CIA interrogations. The judge said the years of violent treatment would have weighed on his mind when he volunteered to be questioned by the FBI at Guantanamo. Mohammed and four other Guantanamo detainees are charged with multiple offences including the murder of 2,977 people. They all face the death penalty if convicted. Their trial has been delayed by years of legal arguments, principally linked to the torture they suffered after being captured. One of the charged, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was also tortured by the CIA, has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and a military judge ruled last week that he was delusional and unfit to stand trial alongside the other accused. The five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators are among 30 inmates still detained at Guantanamo, down from about 780 at the peak detention period.