Waterboarding the Jihadists !!!!

[Nbadan]

The Carpet-bagger provides a interesting prospective into the John Kiriakou and Abu Zubaydah stories...

Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in March 2002. The White House has identified him as al Queda’s chief of operations. Ron Suskind reported, however, that Zubaydah turned out to be mentally ill. We were torturing a man who was, in effect, re ed.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3″ — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. […]

“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.”

At this point, I have no idea who’s right about this. Either Zubaydah was an unstable schizophrenic who had no useful intelligence at all, or Zubaydah was a valuable al Qaeda asset who offered key information that saved lives. I have no reason to suspect that Kiriakou is intentionally trying to deceive anyone, though I would add that Kiriakou was not personally involved in torturing Zubaydah, but was part of an interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan after he was captured in 2002. I mention this because, it’s possible that Kiriakou was told Zubaydah produced actionable intelligence, when the truth might be the opposite.

Link

[Nbadan]

Republicans are chapped because they didn't get to muddy-the-intelligence-waters and spin the NIE before they were forced to release it....

Some in GOP skeptical of intelligence finding that Iran has abandoned nuclear weapons program
By PAMELA HESS , Associated Press

Some Republicans in Congress are second-guessing a government intelligence report that Iran has abandoned its nuclear weapons program. They want a second opinion.

The National Intelligence Estimate, released last week, concludes Iran halted its weapons development program in 2003 and that the program remained frozen through at least the middle of this year. That reversed a key finding from a 2005 intelligence report, which said Iran was intently developing a nuclear bomb. An unclassified summary of the new report was released specifically to correct that impression.

The new report was received skeptically by some Republicans on Capitol Hill who believe Iran's nuclear program remains an immediate threat, and think the 2005 report is closer to the truth.

Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada plans to introduce legislation to create a bipartisan commission to produce an alternative report on the same intelligence.

"We just see politics injected into this," said Tory Mazzola, Ensign's spokesman. "When it comes to national security we really need to remove politics. We're saying, let's take a second look."

The proposed commission is based on similar review panels convened in the mid-1970s to reconsider the intelligence agencies' analysis of the Soviet Union, and an effort in the mid-1990s to reassess the threat of ballistic missiles to the United States.

Last week, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., said at a committee hearing he does not trust the new findings.

"I'm not sure we have a good, clear signal of what's really happening inside Iran," he said. "We've got a very big batch of mixed signals."

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Star Tribune

[Winehole23]

US walks back claims about Zubaydah.

[DarrinS]

I love reading 9/11 nutter takes on torturing jihadists.

[Winehole23]

You didn't read , Darrin.

[SnakeBoy]

I mean, we've only been in this war for six years...and, are winning...

Why do you think we are winning?

[Blake]

.

[SnakeBoy]

God only knows what has gone on by our troops/government
in past wars. We know the public utterances but have no
real idea of what really happened under actual conditions.

I do know that after the wars in Europe and Asia (WWII)
that the occupying forces took what they wanted, when
they wanted it and you have to wonder if maybe some
of the people on the receiving end didn't consider that
a form of torture. Like losing ones home and you are out
in the cold looking for shelter.

I know in Vietnam "enhanced interrogation" involved taking a group of prisoners up in a helicopter, asking them questions and if they wouldn't talk throwing them out of the helicopter.

[Winehole23]

It's one thing if these things are done in theatre, in the heat of combat. Not excusable, but understandable.

It's a whole nother thing if it's official US policy, and the targets are detained indefinitely, far from the action, and tortured. It's a really big difference.

[Winehole23]

Same thing happened with Padilla. When it was time to put up or shut up, most of the serious charges disappeared.

Physical duress sure compromises the value of confessions, eh?

[LnGrrrR]

It's a whole nother thing if it's official US policy, and the targets are detained indefinitely, far from the action, and tortured. It's a really big difference.

This is the biggest thing that people don't seem to get, IMHO. On the battlefield, killing someone is somewhat justified, as they might have a weapon. But once they're in permanent holding, there should be no threat to you. Again, I'm in favor of treating them humanely, because I have this crazy idea that it will be tough to win over people if we're possibly capturing innocent civilians and torturing them, or we're indiscriminate when bombing them. But obviously, I'm the crazy one.

[Winehole23]

Glad you recognize that.

Today's front page headline in the Washington Post informs us that an ex-CIA officer who participated in the interrogation of Abu Zubaida believes that the waterboarding of this terrorist "probably saved lives" but cons utes "torture." The interrogator in question, John Kiriakou, says that Zubaida wouldn't provide any information until he was waterboarded. After 35 seconds of that procedure, he broke down. The Post quotes Kiriakou as saying that, as a result of the information the CIA obtained, "several" planned attacks were disrupted. In fact, Kiriakou told ABC's Nightline that the information "disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." Post reporters Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick decided, in other words, to downplay the positive effects of getting Zubaida to talk.

Kiriakou is probably well-positioned to report on the efficacy of the waterboarding of Zubaida and the positive results achieved by virtue of the information the CIA obtained. On the other hand, Kiriakou's view that the technique cons utes torture, which was not his view at the time, seems largely worthless, particularly if one construes it as a legal opinion.

It's understandable that Kiriakou has held conflicting views on whether waterboarding cons utes torture, just as it's understandable that Nancy Pelosi saw nothing objectionable in the procedure when she first was briefed about it. Waterboarding has some elements in common with practices which are universally deemed torture, but lacks other elements. For example, it causes no physical harm; indeed, we subject some of our own servicemen and agents to the procedure. Kiriakou was one of them.

Under these cir stances, a metaphysical discussion of whether waterboarding fits the "torture" category is probably not the best way to decide whether to use the procedure in an exigent case. The more promising approach is to consider the actual practice (not a label) and the level/duration of the distress it inflicts, evaluate its likely efficacy, consider whether less drastic methods will work, and weigh (as best we can) the need for information that the detainee is thought to possess. If Congress objects to this case-by-case approach, it should specifically ban waterboarding.

It's easy to believe that the decision-making process just described would favor the use of waterboarding in at least a few cases, and there’s no indication that we’ve used it more than a few times. Based on Kiriakou's statements, it certainly seems that waterboarding Zubaida was the right call. Those who disagree should explain either (a) how they would have gotten Zubaida to talk or (b) why the lives of innocent people (the ones Kiriakou says were probably saved) should have been put at serious risk to spare this terrorist 35 seconds of extreme duress.

.

Federal authorities arrested a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and charged him with leaking to reporters the iden y of agency employees as well as classified information about an interrogation program.

John Kiriakou served 14 years as a CIA officer and later became a commentator who described in a 2007 television interview the use of waterboarding, a technique intended to simulate drowning, in the interrogation of alleged al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.
A Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., alleges that Mr. Kiriakou was the source of classified information provided to reporters, including the iden y of two CIA officers and of an investigative technique used to capture Mr. Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002.



Mr. Kiriakou, 47 years old, is charged with violating the Espionage Act and the Intelligence Iden ies Protection Act for allegedly disclosing the iden y of a covert officer. He also is charged with lying to CIA employees who reviewed a book proposal he wrote, and of lying to FBI agents when questioned about the leaks.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...=googlenews_wsj

[Winehole23]

accused of similar to Lewis Libby in L'Affaire Plame: outing US intelligence.

[Winehole23]

and lying to investigators.

[Winehole23]

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:


(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.


(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.


(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any en lement to see the inside of a courtroom.


(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.


So warped but clear are these Rules of American Justice that they produced darkly sardonic applications yesterday. Mazahir Hussain said: “Bradley Manning should’ve really considered committing some war crimes instead of exposing them.”



Regarding this heinous story about a campaign manager of a Democratic House candidate in Arkansas coming home to find his child’s cat murdered with the word “LIBERAL” scrawled on the cat’s corpse, a picture of which made its way to the Internet to highlight how horrible a crime it was, one commenter applied the Obama mentality as follows: “We should look forward, not back on this cat killing. But perhaps whoever released that photo should be prosecuted.” And about the Kiriakou case, John Cole sarcastically celebrated: “At Long Last, Someone Will Face a Waterboarding Related Prosecution, and then added: “He’s being prosecuted for blabbing about what happened- not the actual crime itself.”


It’s long past time to rip those blindfolds off of the Lady Justice statues. When the purpose of American justice is to shield those with the greatest power who commit the most egregious crimes, while severely punishing those who talk publicly about those crimes, it’s hard to imagine how it can get much more degraded or corrupted than that.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/rule...ses/singleton/