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is NOW repeating the SAME Janeane Garofalo segment for the THIRD time, at least, this weekend the Flanders segment was most excellent, with Craig Unger, author of the SHOULD-be Kerry bible, House of Bush House of Saud check these excerpts, which will INFURIATE you, I gah ron tee http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/03/11/unger_1/index1.html remember Abu Zubaydah? well, here: On March 28, 2002, acting on electronic intercepts of telephone calls, heavily armed Pakistani commando units, accompanied by American Special Forces and FBI SWAT teams, raided a two-story house in the suburbs of Faisalabad, in western Pakistan. They had received tips that one of the people in the house was Abu Zubaydah, the 30-year-old chief of operations for al-Qaida who had been head of field operations for the USS Cole bombing and who was a close confidant of Osama bin Laden's.
On Sunday, March 31, three days after the raid, the interrogation of Zubaydah began. For the particulars of this episode there is one definitive source, Gerald Posner's "Why America Slept," and according to it, the CIA used two rather unusual methods for the interrogation. First, they administered thiopental sodium, better known under its trademarked name, Sodium Pentothal, through an IV drip, to make Zubaydah more talkative. Since the prisoner had been shot three times during the capture, he was already hooked up to a drip to treat his wounds and it was possible to administer the drug without his knowledge. Second, as a variation on the good cop-bad cop routine, the CIA used two teams of debriefers. One consisted of undisguised Americans who were at least willing to treat Zubaydah's injuries while they interrogated him. The other team consisted of Arab-Americans posing as Saudi security agents, who were known for their brutal interrogation techniques. The thinking was that Zubaydah would be so scared of being turned over to the Saudis, infamous for their public executions in Riyadh's Chop-Chop Square, that he would try to win over the American interrogators by talking to them.
In fact, exactly the opposite happened. "When Zubaydah was confronted with men passing themselves off as Saudi security officers, his reaction was not fear, but instead relief," Posner writes. "The prisoner, who had been reluctant even to confirm his identity to his American captors, suddenly started talking animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would torture and then kill him. Zubaydah asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the ruling Saudi family. He then provided a private home number and cell phone number from memory. 'He will tell you what to do,' Zubaydah promised them."
The name Zubaydah gave came as a complete surprise to the CIA. It was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of so many legendary racehorses and one of the most westernized members of the royal family.
Zubaydah spoke to his faux Saudi interrogators as if they, not he, were the ones in trouble. He said that several years earlier the royal family had made a deal with al-Qaida in which the House of Saud would aid the Taliban so long as al-Qaida kept terrorism out of Saudi Arabia. Zubaydah added that as part of this arrangement, he dealt with Prince Ahmed and two other members of the House of Saud as intermediaries, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd's, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a 25-year-old distant relative of the king's. Again, he furnished phone numbers from memory.
According to Posner, the interrogators responded by telling Zubaydah that 9/11 changed everything. The House of Saud certainly would not stand behind him after that. It was then that Zubaydah dropped his real bombshell. "Zubaydah said that 9/11 changed nothing because Ahmed ... knew beforehand that an attack was scheduled for American soil that day," Posner writes. "They just didn't know what it would be, nor did they want to know more than that. The information had been passed to them, said Zubaydah, because bin Laden knew they could not stop it without knowing the specifics, but later they would be hard-pressed to turn on him if he could disclose their foreknowledge."
Two weeks later, Zubaydah was moved to an undisclosed location. When he figured out that the interrogators were really Americans, not Saudis, Posner writes, he tried to strangle himself, and later recanted his entire tale.
As for Prince Ahmed, on July 22, 2002, he died mysteriously of a heart attack at the age of 43, so he was never interviewed about his connections to al-Qaida and his alleged foreknowledge of the events of 9/11. this isn't even the worst part, either http://www.houseofbush.combook is rising on various best seller lists, about to be reviewed in the NYTImes this week |
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