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Mastermind of 9/11 Attacks Designs a Secret Vacuum Cleaner
HonorPoncaCityDotCom writes "AP reports that while confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could design a vacuum cleaner. After all KSM earned his bachelor's in mechanical engineering, the agency had no long-term plan for him, but might thought he might someday prove useful and might even stand trial one day and for that, he'd need to be sane. They were concerned that his long imprisonment might do so much psychological damage that he would no longer be useful as source for information. "We didn't want them to go nuts," said a former senior CIA official. So, using schematics from the Internet as his guide, Mohammed began re-engineering one of the most mundane of household appliances. It remains a mystery how far Mohammed got with his designs or whether the plans still exist and even Mohammed's military lawyer, Jason Wright, says he is prohibited from discussing his client's interest in vacuums. 'It sounds ridiculous, but answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design, a Swiffer design, or even a design for a better hand towel would apparently expose the U.S. government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger,' says Wright. So now, says Doug Mataconis, if you happen to start seeing ads for the CIA's revolutionary new home cleaning device, you'll know where it came from." Sounds perfect for In-Q-Tel.
He was tortured in order to obtain the confession, I don't know what good it is.
How is he still alive?
Simple. We threw him in Gitmo instead of treating him like the a criminal, and trying him by jury. He'd already have been executed if we would've done that. But since due process was not afforded, we are now paying the bills for keeping him alive. Funny how that worked out for us..
If the vacuum starts looking like a giant metal guy with a glowing center light maybe they should rethink this idea.
...his design sucked.
Thank you! I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
It's interesting how many terrorists are trained as engineers.
You sound like he should be burned at the stake, even. Why not. But death penalty is useless, and insanely expensive in the US (which doesn't even prevent innocent niggers from being executed regularly)
I don't know why it still exists in a handful of first world countries. Just abolish it : if anything this tends to prevent backwards comment like yours that call to murder in a legal way.
I'd also rather have war criminals, dictators etc. not face execution when tried. E.g. the likes of Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Richard Perle et al. should face trial by a international court and imprisonment in my book, but I don't want to kill them. ICC doesn't do it for instance. Killing prime ministers etc. is hairy, this can even give them an exit way like Goering who managed to commit suicide before getting executed.
Life imprisonment is a good enough sentence and even then the maximum sentence could be life imprisonment with no possibility to be freed before 30 years.
Doctor Octopus
Doctor Doom
Doctor Evil
Doctor No
Doctor Horrible
It's interesting how many evil geniuses have an advanced degree.
Remember the Grahame Greene novel "Our Man in Havana"? The protagonist is a CIA agent who gets tired of his job trying to uncover missile silos and communist plots in Cuba and starts microfilming close-ups of vacuum cleaner schematics and sending those back to Washington.
So now we have a Guantanamo detainee drawing vacuum cleaner schematics? Which are no doubt being photographed and pored over by CIA agents for evidence of terrorist plots.....
This kind of hyperbole is what makes people ignore warnings.
I think that if you were to overlap all of the schematics, you would find that they are in fact for a mechanized suit designed to break out of jail and also prevent shrapnel from entering his heart, via a magnetic push.
But death penalty is useless, and insanely expensive in the US (which doesn't even prevent innocent niggers from being executed regularly
innocent niggers? really? was that necessary?
I read horrible reviews about that new Dyson's cyclone blabla, it sucks everything but dust.
Apparently Microsoft secretly bought out Dyson.
Obviously, they hardcoded DRM into the vacuum cleaner's BIOS then, cause it's borderline useless as a vacuum cleaner. If it indeed did suck, it would be a good design.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Graham Greene rolls over in his grave.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Have any number of qualified and competent engineers (good ol' America-loving ones, of course) pick it apart and analyze it. Boom, problem solved.
There's no danger, it's a chickenshit excuse to avoid the negative PR of a "terrorist vacuum cleaner."
How is this for impressive then:
Britain admits to using 'brutal' vacuum bomb against Taliban
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/britain-admits-using-vacuum-bomb/story-e6frg6to-1111116704067
Is this where KSM got the idea?
The term may usually be considered racist, but his use of it was sarcastic: He was refering to the well-known but somewhat embarassing fact that minorities conficted of crimes in the US tend to recieve much harsher sentences than would a white person convicted of the same crime under the same circumstances.
The country still hasn't entirely gotten over the old racist ways. They are much diminished now, but not eliminated.
"but it's another thing to execute a person without trial."
Osama was executed without trial.
I watched Zero Dark Thirty last night and it made me so sick.
Why America did you act like fucking children?
The state is supposed to be better than that. The state is supposed to represent what's best about a society. If the best that America has to offer is the endorsement of sneaking into a sovereign nation and murdering a bunch of people in the night, then I'll say it again, FUCK YOU AMERICA.
I do not, for the life of me, understand why, if they knew where OBL was, they couldn't invoke regular measures and have the police go to the house and arrest him. He could then be charged and extradited to the US. He could be represented in court. And then once the due process is followed, he could be executed (as per the laws of your own land) or jailed for life (as per the preferred punishment in the rest of the civilised world).
The US does not represent freedom in any form. My advice (FWIW) is to get your shit together and start respecting human rights again!
10 years in prison without due process.
Tortured.
Nice democracy you have there.
After all, how do you know there IS a bomb? If you are already certain enough to torture someone who could be innocent, you must have enough information to find out without torture.
We, as the viewer of 24 hours know that there's a bomb. We saw it being planted. We know that the story is going to be one where there is a bomb.
In Real Life (tm), we don't know that unless we were there like the cameraman was for 24 hours.
I know. I've heard they get to spend all day in a water park ... or something like that.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
A constitutional republic is a type of democratic government.
A direct democracy is not the only democracy.
When the average person says 'democracy', they are merely referring to the fact that the citizens vote to elect their leaders.
Now quit being a douche, pack up your semantics, and kindly fuck off.
...
The Constitution applies to the government wherever it may act. That is frequently ignored but is nevertheless true. So long as the U.S. controls Gitmo, the Constitution certainly applies.
It is *nominally* a republic with a constitution. The actuality is somewhat different.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.