A name I haven’t heard in some time is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He’s been sitting in Guantanamo Bay for so long I’d almost forgotten he existed at all. So imagine my surprise when he popped up in the news, confessing to pretty much every terrorist attack that ever happened ever. Ever ever ever.

The section said: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Mr. Mohammed, long said to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, he confessed to them and acknowledged full or partial responsibility for more than 30 other terror attacks or plots.

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said.

The list is quite long of over 30 items, from 9/11 to the shoe bomber to a nightclub out in Bali, the assassination of the pope and now the claim of Daniel Pearl. Every terrorist plot you’ve heard of and some you haven’t, this guy apparently thought them all up. He also apparently wanted to assassinate former presidents Clinton and Carter. Peculiar he went after extremely liberal presidents and not the Bush family. And here I thought we liberals had an agreement with Al Qaeda!

Anyway, it struck me as peculiar that this one guy happened to be in charge of abso-dang-lutely everything. Seems I’m not alone in that suspicion.

One official cautioned that many of Mohammed’s claims during interrogation were “white noise” - designed to send the U.S. on wild goose chases or to get him through the day’s interrogation session.

In the Defense Department transcript, Mohammed said his statement was not made under duress. But Mohammed and human rights advocates have alleged that he was tortured, and legal experts say that could taint all his statements.

That second bit’s important. Mohammed says at one point that he made prior statements thanks to the “interrogation” techniques but that now they aren’t. To me that seems like a “well I was lying then, but I’m for real this time!” kind of statement. If prior statements are being considered invalid because he was saying them under pressure and duress, why aren’t they now?

I’m just skeptical, and I refuse to believe that any one man can have all of terrorism plunked on his head. And it detracts from the hunt for, you know, the actual leaders of Al Qaeda. If I was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, I probably would have said it just for that reason.