The Heart of Evil

The Moscow Trials were a series of trials of political opponents of Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge. After Nikita Khrushchev's revelations in the 1950s, the Moscow Trials are today universally acknowledged as show trials in which the verdicts were predetermined using extorted confessions. The defendants were accused of conspiring with the western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism, according to Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code).

At the time, most Western observers who attended the trials said that they were fair and that the guilt of the accused had been established. They based this assessment on the confessions of the accused, which were freely given in open court, without any apparent evidence that they had been extracted by torture or drugging. Communist Party leaders in most Western countries echoed these views and denounced criticism of the trials as capitalist attempts to subvert Communism (it is now known, in light of revelations from decrypted Soviet codes and KGB archives, that many party leaders were ordered to support Moscow's viewpoint of the trials and subsequent purges.

And we have come full circle. Performing a Soviet show trial presenting evidence beaten out of a man in prisons the Soviets used to do exactly the same thing. After being tortured for years in an ex-Soviet Polish prison, Guantanamo and who knows where else, after we abducted and tortured his 7 and 9 year old sons KSM has confessed to:

9/11; plot to kill Jimmy Carter, and other former presidents; "the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II"; managing an anthrax and biological weapons cell; cut off "with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl"; 1993 WTC bombing; planning the Richard Reid shoe-bombing plot; the killing of American soldiers in Kuwait; the Bali bombings; plot for a post-9/11 series of 'Independence Day'-style attacks on American monuments; plot to bomb the Panama Canal; plan to attack U.S. military ships and oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Gibraltar and the Port of Singapore; plot to bomb suspension bridges in New York City; plan to use burning fuel trucks to take down the Sears Tower; a plot to destroy Big Ben, Canary Wharf tower and Heathrow Airport; attempt to attack Thai nightclubs frequented by US soldiers; a post-9/11 plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange; plot to use Saudi planes to blow up Israeli buildings; plot to attack US embassies in Indonesia, Austrial and Japan; sending "several mujahadeen" to Israel to survey potential targets; bombing a Mombasa beach resort in 2002; attempt to hit an Israeli plane departing from Kenya with a rocket; plot to attack Nato headquarters in Brussels; plans to attack nightclubs visited by the US in South Korea; Operation Bojinka, plan to take down 12 American airliners; plot to assassinate General Musharraf; plan to attack an oil company in Sumatra which is allegedly owned by Kissinger; plot to attack Nato headquarters; plot to attack nuclear power plants in the US; plot to attack American, British and Jewish targets in Turkey.

And they called the event where he stated all this a "closed door hearing" for a secret tribunal. So the monstrous becomes normal.

In our lifetimes we will grasp the significance of the past 6 years. You will tell your grandchildren what happened when civilisation as we knew it died. Tell them that when things like the rule of law and the right to a fair trial died no one said anything because we didn't want to seem biased. That we had to equivocate between darkness and light, sew clothes of empty words for naked evil so that there could be two sides to every story.

Tell them that you were afraid that demanding people like KSM get the same rights paedophiles, rapists, drug dealers and murderers get would mark you as a terrorist sympathiser. Tell them you gradually became afraid of loving justice and knowing what was right. That you nodded quietly while fools and madmen busily destroyed every last thing that made our society great.

Tell your grandkids that even after all that you gave up to be safe, you are still afraid, and the monster you created demands more from them.