Probe Al-Qaeda Leader’s Abuse: US Senators

Two senators who watched Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confess to planning the Sept. 11 attacks and other plots said Friday that his allegations of mistreatment by U.S. captors should be taken seriously. “To do otherwise would reflect poorly on our nation,” Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a joint statement, reports The Washington Post.

“Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday that he doesn’t know if Mohammed’s stunning claims were all true or an embellishment.

“At a closed military hearing last Saturday at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval prison in Cuba, Mohammed claimed responsibility for plotting more than 30 attacks and personally beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl.”

For Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s profile, and his days in the US as a student in the 1980s, please click here…

In the 1980s he went to study in the US and graduated in 1986 with a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina A & T State University. After his studies, he travelled to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahidin against the Soviet occupying army; three of his brothers are thought to have died in the conflict.

Excerpts: “Mohammed’s first extended encounter with the West occurred at Chowan College, a tiny Baptist school nestled among the cotton farms, tobacco patches and thick forests of eastern North Carolina, just south of the Virginia line.

“The school was founded in 1848 as a refuge of learning for proper Southern women. Later, it became a two-year junior college, a place where young adults could gain an academic foothold. Its entry standards were liberal, but its values were bedrock and its leafy setting in isolated Murfreesboro, with no bars and a single pizza shop, pretty much ensured that everyone remained on the straight and narrow.

“Students who recall Mohammed invariably describe a studious and private devotee of the library and Allah, but friendly enough in a casual way and capable of a laugh.

” ‘He was a good student — a bit better than a B-type student,’ Garth D. Faile, chairman of the science department, said in an interview.

” ‘He very much kept to himself,’ said Zitawi, now a gas station owner in the Greensboro area. ‘We’d see each other at the Burger King for coffee or lunch. That was our hangout…. He was always polite. He wasn’t a funny guy, but when he’s talking to you, you feel like he’s smiling. He wasn’t rude or anything.’

“Nor did Mohammed spout anti-Western or anti-American rhetoric. ‘Something must have happened later that caused that feeling,’ said Hindieh, who knew Mohammed at both Chowan and Greensboro. ‘I never remember him saying anything like that.’

“By the end of 1986, after just 2 1/2 years, Mohammed had completed his work. He graduated Dec. 18, one of 28 mechanical engineering graduates, almost a third of them Middle Easterners. As at Chowan, there is no photo of him in the yearbook.

“None of almost a dozen faculty members in the department from that era recalled Mohammed. For most of his classmates and teachers, the future terrorist mastermind with a $25-million price on his head did not cast a long shadow, if any at all.”

Here’s another profile…