Was torture a good faith effort to prevent more attacks?
A dramatic and damning narrative account of how America has fought the "War on Terror" In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken.
The radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of utter chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Dick Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long held agenda to enhance Presidential powers to a degree never known in U.S. history, and obliterate Constitutional protections that define the very essence of the American experiment.
LinkRich B. was in Chief of Alec Station from mid-'99 until sometime after 9/11. On his watch, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar roamed around the US from January 2000 until 9/11. One wonders why Tenet kept him on after 9/11. Not only was he not fired but evidently he had enough pull for Tenet to make the case for CIA to get interrogation control. Rich B. was promoted to head the reopened Kabul station in 12/01 where he replaced Gary Berntsen.
A CIA officer known as Rich B, who is now chief of the CIA’s station in Kabul, Afghanistan, objects to the FBI interviewing high-ranking al-Qaeda detainee Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The FBI obtained access to al-Libi after he was handed over to the US, and is obtaining some information from him about Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, who will be prosecuted in the US (see December 19, 2001). However, according to FBI agent Jack Cloonan, “for some reason, the CIA chief of station in Kabul is taking issue with our approach.” CIA Director George Tenet learns of Rich B’s complaints and insists that al-Libi be turned over to the CIA (see January-April 2002), which promptly puts him on a plane to Egypt (see January 2002 and after), where he is tortured and makes false statements (see February 2002). Rich B was in charge of the CIA’s bin Laden unit on 9/11 and has only recently become chief of its Kabul station. The FBI, which has long experience interviewing suspects, will continue in its attempts to use rapport-building techniques (see Mid-April 2002), whereas the CIA will employ harsher techniques, despite not having much experience with interviews (see Mid-April 2002).
LinkWere CIA officials were too busy reading SERE manuals to find an experienced counterterrorism interrogator?
The very fact that Mr. Martinez, a career narcotics analyst who did not speak the terrorists’ native languages and had no interrogation experience, would end up as a crucial player captures the ad-hoc nature of the program.
LinkBush didn't want to look bad? Torture is an excellent method for attaining false confessions and incredibly enough the CIA was able to attain false confessions from Zubaydah.
Suskind sees a deliberate management choice: Bush ensnared his director of central intelligence at the time, George J. Tenet, and many others in a new kind of war in which action and evidence were consciously divorced.....
“I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "'No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
LinkWhere is the good faith aspect of the torture? I know it makes a nice narrative to say the Bush team was freaked out and only resorted to torture because they absolutely felt it was required. Maybe this narrative is bullshit.
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