Leading article: The revealing confession of a lethal terrorist

The extravagant confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief organiser of the September 2001 attacks against the US, should be treated with a pinch of salt. First, it is unclear to what extent it was influenced by the torture (or in Dick Cheney-speak "harsh interrogation") to which he was subjected by the CIA after his capture in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003. Second, as the independent 9/11 Commission report noted almost three years ago, Mohammed saw himself as "a self-cast star, the super-terrorist" of al-Qa'ida. His lead role in the September 11 attacks is beyond dispute and, according to an additional transcript released yesterday by the Pentagon, he boasts of personally beheading "with my blessed right hand" the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. But it seems unlikely that Mohammed was directly involved in all of the 31 terrorist plots - some carried out, others merely intended, and several never made public until now - for which he has claimed responsibility.

Third, he is a man with nothing to lose. Last Saturday's hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Mohammed is being held, was merely to establish whether he had been correctly designated an "enemy combatant". Sometime in the future a trial awaits, at which he will surely be found guilty and sentenced to death. If he is to die, he doubtless calculates, far better to do so not as a small terrorist fish, but as one of the main architects of what George Bush describes as the first global conflict of the 21st century.

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Nonetheless, some of his ruminations on the broader nature of terrorism, conveyed in a mixture of broken English and translated Arabic, are worth listening to, and not only because they come from a man who knows his murderous business inside out. It may be small comfort indeed to hear from this organiser of the deadliest terror attack of the modern era, in which 3,000 people died, that "I don't like to kill children and the kids". But then again, as he notes, "the language of war is victims," and whether the death or suffering of those victims is justified is very much a matter of perspective.

Mohammed likens Osama bin Laden to George Washington, Britain's enemy in the American revolutionary war. In one sense, the comparison is absurd. Random violence and the intimidation of civilians is the terrorist's stock in trade, but it was not the strategy of Washington when he led the 13 colonies to independence. But Mohammed reminds us of a truth the Bush administration often and self-defeatingly ignores, that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Washington might not have been a terrorist. But he most certainly would have been classified as an enemy combatant by the government of King George III and, if had been caught, hanged. For Americans. however, the first president is a hero of mythical status, just as bin Laden's campaign against the US presence in the Middle East has made him a hero for many Muslims today. As for the seizure of parts of Mexico in the 19th century, Mohammed further notes, that might have been "manifest destiny" in American eyes. But for their opponents, wanton imperialism would have been a better description.

Finally, Mohammed makes a plea for mercy - not for himself, but for the dozens or more detainees being held without trial at Guantanamo Bay, even though the evidence that they were "enemy combatants" is flimsy or non-existent. Five years on, it is ludicrous to argue that these wretched individuals, whose main mistake was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, have some vestigial intelligence value. It is not too late for the Bush administration to heed this suggestion, even if it comes from one of the most lethal enemy combatants of all.