A Terrorist's Daydream

Berlin's Tageszeitung criticized Washington's decision not to try Mohammed in a public court. "It may well be that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed actually is 'responsible' for the long list of carried out, attempted and planned attacks that he admitted to in his long statement," the paper wrote. "But the world will never find out if that is the case. The USA has done everything it could to keep this 'confession' from being permissible in any proper court in the world."

The Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung opined that even if the evidence against Mohammed were clear, the US is not in a position to provide him with a fair trial, as Washington is concerned about how he could use the process to cast himself as a martyr. "Of course there is a danger that the big mouth uses the trial for propaganda," the paper wrote. "But a sovereign, constitutional state can live with that -- Spain is doing it right now with the terrorism proceedings in Madrid." The paper continued that by not providing him with a fair trial, Mohammed would use his remaining time show a "lack of constitutionality and strength in the American judicial system. Terror can also show its effect in this way."

"Yes, it is useful to take men like KSM out of circulation," Britain's The Guardian wrote, using the initials under which Mohammed is known to US intelligence officials. "But few intelligence analysts working on al Qaeda are very optimistic about the years to come. Though the global uprising of the Muslim masses that Bin Laden and other hoped for has not come, the threat from militant Islam is growing rather than diminishing."

"Mohammed's confession comes from a hermetically sealed world where there are not defense lawyers, no media openness, where judges and prosecutors do not have names," Austria's Der Standard wrote from Vienna. "Certainly, it's easy to make suggestions from afar. But human rights have to remain non-negotiable, even in the fight against terror."

Moscow's Kommersant daily was skeptical about the confession's veracity. "The confessions sound horrific but also fantastic," it wrote. "If you were to believe the accused, he wanted to attack NATO headquarters, the Empire State Building in New York, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and Library Tower in Los Angeles as well as US warships in the Persian Gulf, Gibraltar and Singapore. The alleged plans to blow up the Panama Canal or several US nuclear power plants have less to do with reality than with a terrorist's daydream."