Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the World's Most Highly Classified Vacuum Cleaner

In one the greater "strange but true" revelations of the War on Terror, the Associated Press has reported that while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was confined to a secret CIA prison in Romania after his capture in Pakistan, he asked his jailers whether he could be allowed to design a vacuum cleaner.

No, really.

Apparently at this point, KSM -- who held a bachelor's in mechanical engineering -- had already been broken by waterboarding and was providing intelligence to his interrogators.* Thus, as a former senior CIA official said about detainees at this stage, "We didn't want them to go nuts," so the request was approved and KSM began re-engineering a vacuum based upon schematics obtained from the internet. (He also passed the time reading Harry Potter books, and holding "office hours" during which he lectured the CIA officers on his path to jihad, his childhood and family. "Tea and cookies were served," according to the AP).

So where is the ultimate jihadi-approved dust buster now, you ask? KSM's lawyer says he is prohibited from "confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design." When the AP tried to obtain copies of the vacuum designs through the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA responded that any record of the designs, "should they exist," would be considered operational files of the CIA and therefore exempt from ever being released to the public.

If Edward Snowden had really wanted to help the American people, I think he should have leaked the vacuum cleaner designs instead of the NSA Prism slides.

Because nothing says "clean" like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed!

*As the article notes, it was after KSM's waterboarding that he began to talk, and inadvertently revealed the importance of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti when he as caught trying to hid a message in a book warning his fellow prisoners not to talk about Osama bin Laden's courier.