Vanity Fair article says Torture does't work, by David Rose

Tortured Reasoning
Part 1

George W. Bush defended harsh interrogations by pointing to intelligence breakthroughs, but a surprising number of counterterrorist officials say that, apart from being wrong, torture just doesn’t work. Delving into two high-profile cases, the author exposes the tactical costs of prisoner abuse.

by David Rose WEB EXCLUSIVE December 16, 2008

This is from the online article that was published by Vanity Fair. You can read it in it's entirety by clicking the title above. It is very detailed and very well done at debunking the entire story Darth has been spinning this week about all the intell we supposedly got from the torture he ordered.

By the last days of March 2002, more than six months after 9/11, President George W. Bush’s promise “to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act” was starting to sound a little hollow. True, Afghanistan had been invaded and the Taliban toppled from power. But Osama bin Laden had vanished from the caves of Tora Bora, and none of his key al-Qaeda lieutenants were in U.S. captivity. Intelligence about what the terrorists might be planning next was almost nonexistent. “The panic in the executive branch was palpable,” recalls Mike Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official who set up and ran the agency’s Alec Station, the unit devoted to tracking bin Laden.

Early in the morning of March 28, in the moonlit police-barracks yard in Faisalabad, Pakistan, hopes were high that this worrisome intelligence deficit was about to be corrected. Some 300 armed personnel waited in silence: 10 three-man teams of Americans, drawn equally from the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., together with much greater numbers from Pakistan’s police force and Inter-services Intelligence (ISI). In order to maximize their chances of surprise, they planned to hit 10 addresses simultaneously. One of them, they believed, was a safe house containing a man whose name had been familiar to U.S. analysts for years: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Hussein, a 30-year-old Saudi Arabian better known as Abu Zubaydah. “I’d followed him for a decade,” Scheuer says. “If there was one guy you could call a ‘hub,’ he was it.”

The plan called for the police to go in first, followed by the Americans and ISI men, whose job would be to gather laptops, documents, and other physical evidence. A few moments before three a.m., the crackle of gunfire erupted. Abu Zubaydah had been shot and wounded, but was alive and in custody. As those who had planned it had hoped, his capture was to prove an epochal event—but in ways they had not envisaged.

Four months after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, two lawyers from the Department of Justice, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, delivered their notorious memo on torture, which stated that coercive treatment that fell short of causing suffering equivalent to the pain of organ failure or death was not legally torture, an analysis that—as far as the U.S. government was concerned—sanctioned the abusive treatment of detainees at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and at Guantánamo Bay. But, as Jane Mayer writes in her recent book, The Dark Side (Doubleday), Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to coercive interrogation techniques well before that, becoming the first U.S. prisoner in the Global War on Terror to undergo waterboarding.

Here is where we start the first questions being asked. They had him in custody, long before the memos were ever written. So did the torture start then? Now we know it didn't really, we have it from the FBI interrogator who interviewed him, that all the information that was received was from normal interrogation practices not their so called enhanced interrogation or torture.

David Rose goes on to say:

Really? In researching this article, I spoke to numerous counterterrorist officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Their conclusion is unanimous: not only have coercive methods failed to generate significant and actionable intelligence, they have also caused the squandering of resources on a massive scale through false leads, chimerical plots, and unnecessary safety alerts—with Abu Zubaydah’s case one of the most glaring examples.

-snip-

far from exposing a deadly plot, all torture did was lead to more torture of his supposed accomplices while also providing some misleading “information” that boosted the administration’s argument for invading Iraq.

-snip-

“a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden.” Instead, Scheuer says, he was “the main cog in the way they organized,” a point of contact for Islamists from many parts of the globe seeking combat training in the Afghan camps. However, only a tiny percentage would ever be tapped for recruitment by al-Qaeda.

According to Scheuer, Abu Zubaydah “never swore bayat [al-Qaeda’s oath of allegiance] to bin Laden,” and the enemy he focused on was Israel, not the U.S. After Abu Zubaydah’s capture, Dan Coleman, an F.B.I. counterterrorist veteran, had the job of combing through Abu Zubaydah’s journals and other documents seized from his Faisalabad safe house. He confirms Scheuer’s assessment. “Abu Zubaydah was like a receptionist, like the guy at the front desk here,” says Coleman, gesturing toward the desk clerk in the lobby of the Virginia hotel where we have met. “He takes their papers, he sends them out. It’s an important position, but he’s not recruiting or planning.” It was also significant that he was not well versed in al-Qaeda’s tight internal-security methods: “That was why his name had been cropping up for years.”

Declassified reports of legal interviews with Abu Zubaydah at his current residence, Guantánamo Bay, suggest that he lacked the capacity to do much more. In the early 1990s, fighting in the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, he was injured so badly that he could not speak for almost two years. “I tried to become al-Qaeda,” Abu Zubaydah told his lawyer, Brent Mickum, “but they said, ‘No, you are illiterate and can’t even remember how to shoot.’” Coleman found Abu Zubaydah’s diary to be startlingly useless. “There’s nothing in there that refers to anything outside his head, not even when he saw something on the news, not about any al-Qaeda attack, not even 9/11,” he says. “All it does is reveal someone in torment. Based on what I saw of his personality, he could not be what they say he was.”

Really bad character wasn't he...we caught a good one there.. sounds like a really dangerous guy.. with brain damage and all. This next part reiterates exactly what the FBI agent stated in the NY Times and I referenced above about the information gathered from Abu Zubaydah. They say it was "within a few days", I think that may be debatable.

In May 2008, a report by Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice inspector general, stated that, as he recovered in the hospital from the bullet wounds sustained when he was captured, Abu Zubaydah began to cooperate with two F.B.I. agents. It was a promising start, but “within a few days,” wrote Fine, he was handed over to the C.I.A., whose agents soon reported that he was providing only “throw-away information” and that, according to Fine, they “needed to diminish his capacity to resist.” His new interrogators continued to question him by very different means at so-called black-site prisons in Thailand and Eastern Europe. They were determined to prove he was much more important than the innkeeper of a safe house.

Bush discussed Abu Zubaydah’s treatment in his 2006 announcement. “As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures…. The procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” Soon, Bush went on, Abu Zubaydah “began to provide information on key al-Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September 11.” Among them, Bush said, were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, and his fellow conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh. In fact, Binalshibh was not arrested for another six months and K.S.M. not for another year. In K.S.M.’s case, the lead came from an informant motivated by a $25 million reward.

Now, we know they waterboarded him 83 times to help "soften him up" so to speak. This is a man who they have already stated was brain damaged and now they waterboarded him 83 times. His brain must be nearly mush by now. I am not sure how the man is even alive or breathing. No wonder he says he pees himself.

Then we get into the famous or infamous Khalid Sheik Mahommed or KSM and his story. David Rose really got into this. This story was written and researched so throughly that I had to make it in two parts so it wouldn't be so long. If you want to read the entire article you will have to click the link.

As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists, beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he provided “many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans.” K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total f**king bulls**t.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

It is, perhaps, a little late, more than six years after detainees began to be interrogated at Guantánamo Bay and at the C.I.A.’s black-site prisons, to be asking whether torture works. Yet according to numerous C.I.A. and F.B.I. officials interviewed for this article, at the time this question really mattered, in the months after 9/11, no one seriously addressed it. Those who advocated a policy that would lead America to deploy methods it had always previously abhorred simply assumed they would be worthwhile. Non-governmental advocates of torture, such as the Harvard legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, have emphasized the “ticking bomb” scenario: the hypothetical circumstance when only torture will make the captured terrorist reveal where he—or his colleagues—has planted the timed nuclear device. Inside the C.I.A., says a retired senior officer who was privy to the agency’s internal debate, there was hardly any argument about the value of coercive methods: “Nobody in intelligence believes in the ticking bomb. It’s just a way of framing the debate for public consumption. That is not an intelligence reality.”

There is, alas, no shortage of evidence from earlier times that torture produces bad intelligence. “It is incredible what people say under the compulsion of torture,” wrote the German Jesuit Friedrich von Spee in 1631, “and how many lies they will tell about themselves and about others; in the end, whatever the torturers want to be true, is true.”

Right there states they knew they would be getting bad intelligence from KSM and others with torture, but they went right on, because Bush & Cheney ordered it. However I think again it is worth noting that it has since been discovered that MOST of the regular CIA agents would not go along with this and they had to bring in contractors to do the bidding.

The unreliability of intelligence acquired by torture was taken as a given in the early years of the C.I.A., whose 1963 kubark interrogation manual stated: “Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex ‘admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.”

A 1957 study by Albert Biderman, an Air Force sociologist, described how brainwashing had been achieved by depriving prisoners of sleep, exposing them to cold, and forcing them into agonizing “stress positions” for long periods. In July 2008, The New York Times reported that Biderman’s work formed the basis of a 2002 interrogators’ training class at Guantánamo Bay. That the methods it described had once been used to generate Communist propaganda had apparently been forgotten.

Experience derived from 1990s terrorism cases also casts doubt on torture’s value. For example, in March 1993, F.B.I. agents flew to Cairo to take charge of an Egyptian named Mahmud Abouhalima, who would be convicted for having bombed the World Trade Center a month earlier. Abouhalima had already been tortured by Egyptian intelligence agents for 10 days, and had the wounds to prove it. As U.S. investigators should have swiftly realized, his statements in Egypt were worthless, among them claims that the bombing was sponsored by Iranian businessmen, although, apparently, their sworn enemy, Iraq, had also played a part.

-snip-

A computer seized in Murad’s apartment held details of the flights he planned to attack, detonator-timer settings, and photos of some of his co-conspirators, together with their aliases, so enabling their subsequent arrest. It was this, Mike Scheuer says, not Murad’s interrogation, that provided more useful intelligence.
Equally significant was what Murad didn’t give up under torture. Bojinka was partly the brainchild of none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later alleged to be the chief planner of 9/11. He had been living in the Philippines, but apparently Murad said nothing that might have helped his interrogators find him: he was not captured until 2003.
On April 10, 2002, 13 days after Abu Zubaydah’s capture, in Faisalabad, a 23-year-old Ethiopian named Binyam Mohamed was detained at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, attempting to board a flight to London, where he had been living for seven years. Information about the case drawn up by the British security service M.I.5, and obtained by Vanity Fair, suggests that if Mohamed was a terrorist his tradecraft was unimpressive: he was stopped because he was using a passport that obviously belonged to someone else, his friend Fouad Zouaoui—the second time that Mohamed had tried to leave Pakistan on Zouaoui’s papers. He also had a heroin problem.
In any event, there is no dispute that he fled across the border into Pakistan as soon as he could after 9/11.
The first 10 days of Mohamed’s detention, at Landi prison, near Karachi, were not, on his account, comfortable, but he was not tortured or abused. But after he was moved to a Pakistani security jail, around April 20, he began to be abused. A few days later, when he was questioned for the first time by U.S. agents, his treatment worsened dramatically.
“They seemed to think I was some kind of top al-Qaeda person,” Mohamed said. “How? It was less than six months since I converted to Islam, and before that I was using drugs!” After the Americans’ visit, Mohamed said, he was hung by his wrists for hours on end, so that his feet barely touched the ground. Suspended thus, he said, he was beaten regularly by Pakistani guards. He said he was also threatened with a gun.
U.S. interest in Mohamed appears to have been triggered by an unlucky coincidence. It so happened that in the period in early April before Abu Zubaydah’s torture began, when he was starting to cooperate with the F.B.I., he gave up the name of one of those who had passed through his safe house en route to an Afghan camp—that of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member. “He probably remembered Padilla because he was a U.S. citizen, and that was rare,” says the former F.B.I. al-Qaeda specialist Dan Coleman.
Mohamed has maintained that if he had ever met Padilla it would have been a fleeting, chance encounter, perhaps when they both fled Afghanistan, and he has no memory of it. But the first time Mohamed tried to fly to London via Zurich, around April 4, Padilla was booked on the same flight. Their ultimate destinations were different: Padilla planned to spend time in Egypt before returning to Chicago. But the fact they were starting their journeys together, says an F.B.I. agent who attended official briefings about the case, convinced American agencies that they shared some joint purpose. “It was simply that—flight coincidence,” he says. “I never saw any evidence that Padilla and Mohamed met.”
By late April, Abu Zubaydah was being tortured and giving up details of a plot that sounded truly terrifying: a plan for Padilla to build and detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in America. But even at the outset, some who worked in U.S. counterterrorism were skeptical. “If there is a dirty bomb, you’d better take it seriously, because as bad as 9/11 was, a dirty bomb would be a hundred times worse,” says the former F.B.I. agent who attended the case briefings. “It was clear that Padilla had some form of training, that he was a sympathizer. But to claim he really had a plan to do a dirty bomb? That’s tough. You show me he knew how to go and get it. That he knew how to make it. They never had that.”
Convinced that the dirty-bomb plot was real, those interrogating Binyam Mohamed assumed that he must be part of it, and if he could not fill in missing details, he must have been covering up. Agents such as the F.B.I.’s Jack Cloonan, who spent years fighting al-Qaeda before his retirement in 2002, had learned that it had an impressive “quality-control system,” which meant “they looked for people with the right makeup, they did their own due diligence, and they would not pick weak guys”—not, typically, heroin addicts. But no one was listening to these agents.

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Vanity Fair article says Torture does't work, by David Rose

Tortured Reasoning

Part 2

As you can see reading this second part of this, there were concerns about the information they were getting, but it was full steam ahead. Even other agencies had concerns.

M.I.5 seems to have shared the C.I.A.’s groupthink. Sources in London say that its agents also assumed that anything Mohamed said to try to defend himself must be a lie. One admission he did make was that he had seen a Web site with instructions on how to make a hydrogen bomb, but he was apparently claiming it was a joke. The intelligence agencies believed this was a smoking gun, notwithstanding Mohamed’s bizarre statement that the instructions included mixing bleach with uranium-238 in a bucket and rotating it around one’s head for 45 minutes. Neither the British nor the Americans thought Mohamed’s claim that the Web site was a joke was credible: his “confession” to reading instructions about building nuclear weapons on the Internet was cited in Mohamed’s Guantánamo charge sheet. Yet it was a joke: such a Web site, with instructions about how to refine bomb-grade uranium with bleach and a bucket, has been doing the rounds on the World Wide Web since at least 1994. In 2005, the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin cited it in her blog as evidence of al-Qaeda’s deadly intentions. She was swiftly disabused by readers, who, unlike the C.I.A. and M.I.5, immediately recognized it as satire.
But even M.I.5 couldn’t help but notice “glaring inconsistencies” among the different accounts of the plot being given by those getting interrogated. And instead of asking whether the plot was real, the investigators seem to have assumed that the different accounts of those being interrogated were merely an attempt to protect al-Qaeda operations.

Clive Stafford Smith believes that the weakness of the dirty-bomb charge against Padilla may well explain what happened to Binyam Mohamed: “Maybe what they were trying to do was turn him into a prosecution witness.” After all, he had already confessed in Pakistan, under torture that had been, in comparison with what was to come, relatively mild. But on July 21, 2002, as the plane’s flight log later confirmed, he was flown aboard a Gulfstream V jet chartered by the C.I.A. to Rabat, in Morocco. There he was to spend the next 18 months.

With the help of Stafford Smith, he later assembled a diary describing his treatment there. Amid numerous beatings in Rabat, Mohamed wrote, “They’d ask me a question. I’d say one thing. They’d say it was a lie. I’d say another. They’d say it was a lie. I could not work out what they wanted to hear.” He also said the Moroccans repeatedly cut his chest and genitals with a razor. Finally he was subjected to further harsh treatment in the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, Afghanistan, after being spirited away on another C.I.A. flight in January 2004.

After another nine months, he was brought to Guantánamo, where he remains. He filed a habeas corpus lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia, a claim that there was no credible reason for his continued detention, and in its attempt to defend this, the administration in October 2008 dropped all mention of the dirty-bomb plot. In Guantánamo’s parallel quasi-legal world of military commissions, where the rules make it much harder to exclude evidence derived from torture, the Pentagon in May 2008 issued a charge sheet against Mohamed. It said that having trained in various al-Qaeda camps and taken instruction from bin Laden, Mohamed “reviewed technical information concerning the construction of an improvised radioactive bomb” with K.S.M. and decided with Padilla to detonate one in America.

In October, the charges were withdrawn, after the prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, resigned. Later he told the BBC he had concerns at the repeated suppression of evidence that could prove prisoners’ innocence. Meanwhile, as of December 2008, Mohamed’s lawyers were fighting separate court cases to force the U.S. government in Washington and the British government in London to disclose all the information they have about Mohamed’s treatment. (Coincidentally, my sister, Dinah Rose, Q.C., is representing Mohamed in the London case.) Stafford Smith is bound by Draconian restrictions that prevent him from offering any but the blandest comments about the evidence in his client’s case. He says, “I know of no evidence against him other than his own confessions, all of which are the bitter fruit of his abuse.”

This is one of the cases the ACLU has been fighting I believe. This is a sad case. It needs to just go away. This poor man was just made a target for nothing it sounds like. All because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Note the first line I put in bold in this next section.

“There was no dirty-bomb plot. I’m sure it was just Abu Zubaydah trying to get them excited,” says the F.B.I.’s Dan Coleman. “There’s never been any corroboration except the confessions of Binyam Mohamed under torture. No one was willing to take their time.” But, in the words of the former C.I.A. official Mike Scheuer, “That dirty-bomb business put the fear of God into these people in the administration.” As a result, he says, “they may well have sent Binyam Mohamed somewhere where the authorities would do things we wouldn’t—or couldn’t.”

That is my bold...note the date.. that is before the dates of the memo which authorizes torture. June 10, 2002.

On June 10, 2002, then attorney general John Ashcroft interrupted a visit to Moscow to speak to reporters: “I am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism. We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.” He meant Jose Padilla, who had been arrested as he flew into Chicago on May 8. The president, Ashcroft said, had designated Padilla an “enemy combatant,” and he had been removed from civilian custody to a navy brig. In due course, Ashcroft said, he would be tried by a military commission.
“Let me be clear: we know from multiple independent and corroborating sources that Abdullah Al Mujahir [Padilla’s nom de guerre] was closely associated with al-Qaeda and that … he was involved in planning future terrorist attacks on innocent American civilians in the United States,” Ashcroft said. Had his dirty bomb gone off, it could have caused “mass death and injury.”
The shakiness of Ashcroft’s “multiple independent and corroborating sources” claim was demonstrated by an affidavit from an F.B.I. agent, Joe Ennis, in support of Padilla’s detention. Referring to Binyam Mohamed as “Subject-1,” it said that his “wife” had told law-enforcement authorities that he “would often become emotional and cry when he discussed his willingness to die for his God.” Strangely enough, Mohamed was and remains unmarried.
Mohamed, the affidavit said, “has not been completely candid about his association with Al Qaeda, and his own terrorist activities,” and was trying to “mislead or confuse U.S. law enforcement.” But it was clear that after weeks of abuse he had started to crack. According to Ennis, he had already told his interrogators that he and Padilla had “researched the construction of a uranium-enhanced explosive device”; that Padilla had been to meetings with al-Qaeda officials; and that he believed Padilla had been ordered to return to America.

Well why would Padilla be any different than anyone else. Just because he was an American citizen living in Chicago.

In the brig, Padilla’s attorneys claimed, he too was tortured. He was deprived of all contact with the outside world for two and a half years, and, according to one court filing, “He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making the cell extremely cold for long stretches of time.” Chained in agonizing “stress positions” repeatedly, he was also allegedly “threatened with imminent execution.… Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and otherwise assault [him].”
The government did not deny these assertions, only the claim that they amounted to torture. Donna Newman, Padilla’s attorney before he was taken to the brig, says that afterward “he was not the same person. Beforehand, he was engaged in his case; he asked pertinent questions. When I saw him again, he hardly said a word. He had no interest in what was happening, even though his case was nearing the Supreme Court.”
Under this pressure, Padilla produced ever more elaborate confessions. Former deputy attorney general James Comey said in June 2004 that Padilla spoke of discussing the dirty bomb with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, of an instruction from K.S.M. to blow up apartments by filling them with gas and igniting it, and of a dinner party with Binyam Mohamed, K.S.M., and al-Qaeda bigwigs the night before he left Pakistan.
Very senior officials had a lot invested in Padilla. But in November 2005, three days before the Justice Department was to file a brief before the Supreme Court in response to his lawyers’ claim that his treatment was unconstitutional, the administration returned him to civilian custody. With all mention of the dirty-bomb plot deleted, he stood trial in Florida on far less serious charges of conspiracy to murder, maim, and kidnap, and providing material support to terrorist organizations, and in January 2008 he was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison. “The dirty-bomb plot was simply not credible,” Jack Cloonan says. “The government would never have given up that case if there was any hint of credibility to it. Padilla didn’t stand trial for it, because there was no evidence to support it.”

Here is a statement from Zubaydah himself. Even with the broken English it really makes little sense. You can really tell he is suffering from some kind of brain damage. You cannot convince me he isn't.

On March 27, 2007,at a “Combatant Status-Review Tribunal” at Guantánamo—a military hearing convened to determine whether he should continue to be detained. Everything he said about the details of his treatment was redacted from the unclassified record. But a few relevant remarks remain: “I was nearly before half die plus [because] what they do [to] torture me. There I was not afraid from die because I do believe I will be shahid [martyr], but as God make me as a human and I weak, so they say yes, I say okay, I do I do, but leave me. They say no, we don’t want to. You to admit you do this, we want you to give us more information … they want what’s after more information about more operations, so I can’t. They keep torturing me.”

The tribunal president, a colonel whose name is redacted, asked him: “So I understand that during this treatment, you said things to make them stop and then those statements were actually untrue, is that correct?” Abu Zubaydah replied: “Yes.”
Some of those statements, say two senior intelligence analysts who worked on them at the time, concerned the issue that in the spring of 2002 interested the Bush administration more than almost any other—the supposed operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Given his true position in the jihadist hierarchy, Abu Zubaydah “would not have known that if it was true,” says Coleman. “But you can lead people down a course and make them say anything.”
Some of what he did say was leaked by the administration: for example, the claim that bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were working directly with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. There was much more, says the analyst who worked at the Pentagon: “I first saw the reports soon after Abu Zubaydah’s capture. There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”
Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was “an important chapter,” the second analyst says: overall, his interrogation “product” was deemed to be more significant than the claims made by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, another al-Qaeda captive, who in early 2002 was tortured in Egypt at the C.I.A.’s behest. After all, Abu Zubaydah was being interviewed by Americans. Like the former Pentagon official, this official had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured.

This is when the fallout started. People began to realize what had happened and were starting to cover their butts.

One result of Abu Zubaydah’s torture was that the F.B.I.’s assistant director for counterterrorism, Pasquale D’Amuro, persuaded Director Robert Mueller that the bureau should play no part in future C.I.A. interrogations that used extreme techniques forbidden by the F.B.I. The Justice Department’s Glenn Fine indicated in a statement before the U.S. Senate that the main reason was that the agency’s techniques would “not be effective in obtaining accurate information.”

If torture doesn’t work, what does? The evidence suggests that when the Bush administration decided to ignore many of America’s most experienced counterterrorist agents and go for torture in 2001 and 2002, it shut down rich sources of intelligence. In the biggest terrorist case of the 1990s, the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed more than 220 people, the F.B.I.’s Cloonan and his colleagues were able to persuade three of the main conspirators not only to talk to them but also to give prosecution testimony in court. Here Morocco, the U.S. ally where Binyam Mohamed was sent to be tortured in 2002, provided assistance of a very different order. Eighteen months after the attacks, Cloonan traced L’Houssaine Kherchtou, also known as Joe the Moroccan, an al-Qaeda operative who had played a key role, to his hiding place, in Sudan. The Moroccans concocted a story to lure him home, and when he arrived in Rabat he was arrested.

After reports of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller agreed that the bureau should play no part in future C.I.A. interrogations that use extreme techniques. Cloonan says, “We all went to a beautiful safe house outside of town, with gazelles bouncing around in the grounds and three solid meals fit for a king each day. We all sat on sofas in a big room—me, Ali Soufan [an F.B.I. colleague], Pat Fitzgerald [the U.S. attorney then in charge of a special counterterrorist section in New York], a C.I.A. guy, and two Moroccan colonels. The Moroccans said he’d never talk. He never shut up for 10 days.” Cloonan had done his homework: “His wife needed money for medical treatment in Khartoum, and al-Qaeda had failed to provide it.” That gave Cloonan his “in.”
The intelligence Kherchtou provided, at a time when U.S. knowledge about al-Qaeda was still perfunctory, was invaluable. “He told us about a lot of things,” says Cloonan. “We learned how they recruited people, their front organizations, how they used NGOs, false passports, what they thought about kidnapping, how they developed targets, did their surveillance, a day in the life of Osama bin Laden, what weapons they used, what vehicles they drove, who was the principal liaison with the Sudanese government, that there was a relationship between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, how they did their training exercises, their finances, and their membership.”
Finally Fitzgerald offered Kherchtou a deal: if he came to New York, pleaded guilty, and testified against the bombers, Fitzgerald would ask the judge to treat him leniently. At first, it looked as if he was going to turn it down. Then, Cloonan says, “I said, ‘Joe, you understand English, so I’d like you to go out and pray on this with your two Moroccan brothers.’ I thought Fitzy was going to give birth. Joe went out and prayed and came back and said yes.” Kherchtou is now in the federal witness-protection program. Thanks in part to his testimony, four of his onetime associates are serving life.

This next section, David Rose makes a statement which is being now proven wrong, I believe. We are now in the beginnings of the final calculus.

To reach a final calculus of the Bush administration’s use of torture will take years. It will require access to a large body of material that for now remains classified, and the weighing not just of information gained against false or missed leads but of the wider consequences: of the damage done to America’s influence with its friends, and of the encouragement provided to its enemies. Even harder to quantify is the damage done to institutions and their morale, especially the C.I.A.
“We were done a tremendous disservice by the administration,” one official says. “We had no background in this; it’s not something we do. They stuck us with a totally unwelcome job and left us hanging out to dry. I’m worried that the next administration is going to prosecute the guys who got involved, and there won’t be any presidential pardons at the end of it. It would be O.K. if it were John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales. But it won’t be. It’ll be some poor G.S.-13 who was just trying to do his job.”

Here the FBI really bemoans the work they had to do running down the false leads the torture produced. While they were doing that, instead of being safer, we were probably less safe. Because their eyes were really off the ball so to speak. Maybe that's why the Anthrax got through, and all the other things, like the D.C. Sniper.. of course, Bush doesn't consider that when he says he kept us safe all those years.

At the F.B.I., says a seasoned counterterrorist agent, following false leads generated through torture has caused waste and exhaustion. “At least 30 percent of the F.B.I.’s time, maybe 50 percent, in counterterrorism has been spent chasing leads that were bullshit. There are ‘lead squads’ in every office trying to filter them. But that’s ineffective, because there’s always that ‘What if?’ syndrome. I remember a claim that there was a plot to poison candy bought in bulk from Costco. You follow it because someone wants to cover himself. It has a chilling effect. You get burned out, you get jaded. And you think, Why am I chasing all this stuff that isn’t true? That leads to a greater problem—that you’ll miss the one that is true. The job is 24-7 anyway. It’s not like a bank job. But torture has made it harder.”

Several of those I interviewed point out the dearth of specific claims the administration has proffered. “The proponents of torture say, ‘Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.’ But if K.S.M. and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details,” says Cloonan. “What we got was pabulum.” A former C.I.A. officer adds: “Why can’t they say what the good stuff from Abu Zubaydah or K.S.M. is? It’s not as if this is sensitive material from a secret, vulnerable source. You’re not blowing your source but validating your program. They say they can’t do this, even though five or six years have passed, because it’s a ‘continuing operation.’ But has it really taken so long to check it all out?”

Officials who analyzed Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation reports say that the reports were afforded the highest value within the Bush administration not because of the many American lives they were going to save but because they could be cited repeatedly against those who doubted the wisdom of ousting Saddam by force.

“We didn’t know he’d been waterboarded and tortured when we did that analysis, and the reports were marked as credible as they could be,” the former Pentagon analyst tells me. “The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence.” To draw conclusions about the importance of what Abu Zubaydah said without knowing this crucial piece of the background nullified the value of his work. “It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective. I cannot believe that the president and vice president did not know who was being waterboarded, and what was being given up.”

One of the most specific claims Bush made in 2006 was that secret black-site C.I.A. interrogations “helped foil a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow [airport] and London’s Canary Wharf.” Could that be true?

One man who knows is Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-terrorist Branch from the spring of 2002 until May 2008, and as such the U.K.’s chief counterterrorist official, who succeeded in stopping several jihadist attacks that were in advanced stages of planning. Clarke, who has not publicly discussed this issue before, says it is possible that al-Qaeda had considered some project along the lines suggested by Bush, but if so it was nowhere near fruition. “It wasn’t at an advanced stage in the sense that there were people here in the U.K. doing it. If they had been, I’d have arrested them.”

Perhaps the most dangerous of the plots disrupted on Clarke’s watch was through Operation Crevice, the 2004 bust of a gang of seven who had 1.3 tons of homemade explosive material, with which they had intended to blow up targets including a nightclub and a shopping mall. But the lead that led to Crevice came not from torture, Clarke says, but an electronic intercept. He says he can think of only one arrest made by his team that could be said to have been partly the result of C.I.A. interrogations—that of Dhiren Barot, sentenced to life, in 2006, for conspiracy to murder stemming from his plan to attack a range of British targets. But even here, the original lead, reportedly given up by K.S.M., was vague. “All we had was a nom de guerre, Esa al-Hindi, and the claim that he was a serious player and a Brit,” Clarke says. “We had no idea who he was. It took weeks and months of painstaking work to identify and find him.”

In an interview in London in April 2008, I remind F.B.I. director Robert Mueller of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents have disrupted: for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers and synagogues in and around Torrance, California. These and other homegrown conspiracies were foiled by regular police work. The F.B.I. learned of the Fort Dix plot from an informant at a local mosque, while the Torrance cell was rounded up when cops probed the backgrounds of two of its members after they allegedly robbed a local gas station.

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

So there you have it.. Finally Robert Mueller says, Even he does't believe there were any threats disrupted. But then we knew that didn't we?

Cheney was key in clearing CIA interrogation tactics

Repost from an earlier date:

Cheney was key in clearing CIA interrogation tactics

From the LA Times

The vice president says that the use of waterboarding was appropriate and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should stay open until 'the end of the war on terror.'

By Greg Miller

December 16, 2008

Reporting from Washington -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely.

Cheney's remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Cheney's comments also mark the first time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning method known as waterboarding.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared," Cheney said in an interview with ABC News.

Asked whether he still believes it was appropriate to use the waterboarding method on terrorism suspects, Cheney said: "I do."

His comments come on the heels of disclosures by a Senate committee showing that high-level officials in the Bush administration were intimately involved in reviewing and approving interrogation methods that have since been explicitly outlawed and that have been condemned internationally as torture.

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney said, the CIA "in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

Waterboarding involves strapping a prisoner to a tilted surface, covering his face with a towel and dousing it to simulate the sensation of drowning.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has said that the agency used the technique on three Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. But the practice was discontinued when lawyers from the Department of Justice and other agencies began backing away from their opinions endorsing its legality.

Cheney has long defended the technique. But he has not previously disclosed his role in pushing to give the CIA such authority.

Cheney's office is regarded as the most hawkish presence in the Bush administration, pushing the White House toward aggressive stances on the invasion of Iraq and the wiretapping of U.S. citizens.

Asked when the Guantanamo Bay prison would be shut down, Cheney said, "I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror." He went on to say that "nobody can specify" when that might occur, and likened the use of the detention facility to the imprisonment of Germans during World War II.

"We've always exercised the right to capture the enemy and hold them till the end of the conflict," Cheney said.

The administration's legal case for holding detainees indefinitely has been eroded by a series of court rulings. Obama has pledged to close the facility, which still holds 250 prisoners.

Cheney's remarks are the latest in a series of interviews granted by Bush and senior officials defending their decisions as they prepare to leave office. Bush recently said his main regret was that U.S. spy agencies had been so mistaken about Iraq's alleged weapons programs. Cheney and the Bush administration have been accused of "cherry-picking" intelligence to support going to war with Iraq.

Cheney said that those mistakes didn't matter, and that the U.S. invasion was justified by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's ability to reestablish destructive weapons programs. The vice president brushed off a series of findings questioning that view, including a 2006 Senate report concluding that Hussein lacked a "coherent effort" to develop nuclear weapons and had only a "limited capability" for chemical weapons.

"This was a bad actor and the country's better off, the world's better off, with Saddam gone, and I think we made the right decision in spite of the fact that the original [intelligence] was off in some of its major judgments," he said.

Cheney is ready to talk... now is the time to for the subpoena

According to a story on Politico this morning Darth is ready to talk and spill his guts about everything. So I think now would be the right time for a subpoena for him. Since Rove has decided to talk, maybe we can just start a revolving door.

Hey Rep. Conyers, want to issue one for Darth next??

His comments made unmistakable that Cheney—likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews—-is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.

See, he says he is ready to chat...he is willing and even eager..how about it.. get it on the record now. Then we can move forward with prosecution, strike while the iron is hot...all that..

“If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth—then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”

He pulls no punches.. he makes no apologies, he is an unrepentant terrorist. He is threatening us with future attacks even. Come on.. we have to get this guy.

Of one alternative—moving prisoners to the U.S. prisons—Cheney said he has heard from few members of Congress eager for Guantanamo transfers to their home-state prisons, and asked: “Is that really a good idea to take hardened al Qaeda terrorists who’ve already killed thousands of Americans and put ’em in San Quentin or some other prison facility where they can spread their venom even more widely than it already is?”

So these people have developed magic powers while they were in Guantanamo, and are able to do things no one ever in the history have been able to do before. And all the ones that are already in the prisons here in the US, what about them, are they going to rise up soon and take over and murder us in our sleep soon?? Should we be worried about that or is that just supposed to be forgotten??

You know it just amazes me that these people throw this garbage out there, yet they never think about that. We have several of the terrorists already in prisons here in the states.

I just hope someone, either our new AG or Rep. Conyers will take advantage of this and go after this slimy jerk. Not only does he sit in judgement of the President and his policies which we support, but he is stating that the policies that he and shrub did, which were illegal, immoral and just wrong for us all were in his opinion right and kept us safe. Oh, yes, the famous, WE KEPT YOU SAFE lie... Do we need to revisit that one???

Darth dozes while Shrub spins

Did you notice Darth Cheney during Shrub's farewell the other night?? Darth was really interested in it. I thought it was pretty bad, he had to bus in people from all over the country, pipe in a laugh and applause track and then someone had to poke Cheney every once in a while. My goodness, the speech was only 13 minutes. What would have happened if it had been 30 or more. He would have been snoring. Watch:

Repost of The Citizens Petition

The Citizens Petition: Special Prosecutor for Bush War Crimes
[Please go to Democrats.com and sign the petition!]

With the recent admissions by Vice President Cheney and the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on detainee treatment, what we have known in the blogosphere for years has now....finally....made it into the mainstream. The Bush Administration planned, developed and carried out an organized torture program stretching from Gitmo to Iraq, Afghanistan and secret prisons around the world.

Despite their protestations and attempts to cover themselves with highly questionable legal opinions, this was and is a War Crime. Their politicization and corruption of the Department of Justice has stymied any investigation and left all efforts at accountability and justice to the new Obama Administrations DOJ, and specifically to AG Designate Holder.

Now, even the New York Times is....again, finally...calling for a Special Prosecutor to investigate these crimes.

However, as we also know well in the Blogosphere, this is far more than an issue of crime, punishment and justice as it should be. It is a political issue. A 'hot potato' political issue considering that any and all attempts at investigation and prosecution will undoubtedly (and erroneously) be described by the Republicans, the Right Wing press and pundits, and even some (complicit?) Democrats as a 'partisan witch hunt' and as 'criminalizing politics.' in other words, there are huge political costs at stake here. It would be much, much easier to 'move on' or 'not play the blame game' or point fingers to the past.'

The Obama Administration will face incredible pressure to sweep these War Crimes under the rug of history. We in the Blogosphere need to provide the counter-pressure. We do that by making our voices heard, and one way to do that is by each and everyone of us, the thousands if not millions of blog readers, adding our names to a petition. The petition will ultimately be submitted to AG Holder, as well as to Change.gov. However it can make a great impact on the 'public conversation' just by being everywhere in the Blogosphere as well.


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To that end, Docudharma and Democrats.com have teamed up to create, host, and distribute the following petition. The petition calls for Attorney General Designate Holder to, immediately upon being confirmed, appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all officials of the Bush Administration for Torture and War Crimes.

The petition:

Dear Attorney General Designate Holder,


We the undersigned citizens of the United States hereby formally petition you to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes.

These crimes are being euphemistically referred to as "abusive interrogation techniques" by such respected figures as Senator John McCain. These are euphemisms for torture. Torture is a War Crime. Waterboarding is a War Crime. The CIA has admitted waterboarding detainees. Recently, Vice President Cheney has brazenly admitted authorizing the program that lead to waterboarding, other forms of torture too numerous to list, and ultimately, the deaths by homicide of detainees.

As Major General Antonio Taguba, the Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison has stated:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

The Washington Post recently summarized the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on detainee treatment thusly:

A bipartisan panel of senators has concluded that former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for the harsh treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and that their decisions led to more serious abuses in Iraq and elsewhere.

We the undersigned citizens demand a full and thorough investigation immediately upon your taking office. This investigation should be pursued no matter where it may lead and no matter what the political implications may be. To this end, we remind you that you work not on behalf of or for the President or the Congress, but for the People of the United States of America and for Justice itself.

The United States is a representative democracy. The actions of our government officials are done in the name of its citizens. War Crimes have been committed in our name. Torture has been done in our name. The only way to clear our name of War Crimes is to repudiate them through the aggressive prosecution of each and every person involved to the full extent of the law through the appointment of a Special Prosecutor.

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We are urging everyone in the Blogosphere and beyond to get involved in this project...not just to sign the petition, but also to write diaries and blog posts in support of the effort. And also to display the linked badge (created by Edger) in your posts or on your sites. The easy to embed code for posting the badge can be found here.


Please feel free to contact us at admin@docudharma.com for more information or any technical assistance you may need.

If you wish to post this essay, or just the petition, on any site or your own blog, please mail us at admin@docudharma.com and we will send you the entire essay, complete with HTML code, to post wherever you wish. Please feel free to edit, within the parameters of keeping the original spirit and intent. We enthusiastically give full permission for such use!

[And of course......Please go to Democrats.com and sign the petition!]

Regulations Regarding Torture

I know I have been posting a lot about torture and the Bush Administration's culpability in it, but this is something I feel strongly about. I have somethings now that show the legalities of behind why we shouldn't torture.
Also, there has been discussion as to whether water boarding is torture or not but it has been known as torture since the Spanish Inquisition. It was just when the Bush Administration decided to change how the USA recognized the Geneva Convention that water boarding became not torture as far as they were concerned. However, they then changed their mind after the pictures of Abu Ghraib became public and say they have stopped doing it. So, if it isn't illegal, if it isn't torture, why did they stop?
Here are the rulings and laws that spell out the reasons and reasoning behind us not allowing torture and why they should be held accountable. Also, why are they, the ones who ordered torture to be done, by his own admission, VP Cheney did so, any less guilty than the ones who were punished earlier? Remember Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick,Pfc. Lynndie England, Spc. Sabrina Harman,Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr.,Spc. Jeremy Sivits, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, Spc. Armin J. Cruz Jr., and Spc. Roman Krol?

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
advisory declaration adopted by
the United Nations General Assembly (December 10, 1948)
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.
Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
[emphasis added]
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was presented after World [W]ar II. Its provisions made their way into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and as such, were ratified as norms of international law by the majority of civilized states in the world.
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
- in force September 8, 1992
Article 4. 1 . In time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and the existence of which is officially proclaimed, the States Parties to the present Covenant may take measures derogating from their obligations under the present Covenant to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation, provided that such measures are not inconsistent with their other obligations under international law and do not involve discrimination solely on the ground of race, colour, sex, language, religion or social origin.
2. No derogation from articles 6, 7, 8 (paragraphs I and 2), 11, 15, 16 and 18 may be made under this provision. 3. Any State Party to the present Covenant availing itself of the right of derogation shall immediately inform the other States Parties to the present Covenant, through the intermediary of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, of the provisions from which it has derogated and of the reasons by which it was actuated. A further communication shall be made, through the same intermediary, on the date on which it terminates such derogation.
Article 7. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.
Article 16. Everyone shall have the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
[emphasis added]
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment - in force November 20, 1994
Article 3 . 1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture. 2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.
Article 4. 1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture. 2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
Article 16. 1. Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article I, when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. In particular, the obligations contained in articles 10, 11, 12 and 13 shall apply with the substitution for references to torture of references to other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
2. The provisions of this Convention are without prejudice to the provisions of any other international instrument or national law which prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or which relates to extradition or expulsion.
[emphasis added]
The United States signed and ratified both the Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
- entered into force internationally on January 27, 1980
Article 53. Treaties conflicting with a peremptory norm of general international law (jus cogens). A treaty is void if, at the time of its conclusion, it conflicts with a peremptory norm of general international law. For the purposes of the present Convention, a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character. [emphasis added]
The United States has not ratified nor signed this treaty, supposedly because its contents were already accepted norms of international law.
In the Aftermath of World War II the United States was a participant in the Nüremberg Tribunal
Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950.
Principle I
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.
Principle III
The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible Government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.
Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
Principle VII
Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

6 Questions for Matthew Alexander...author of How to Break a Terrorist

On Dec. 1, 2008 I posted this:

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
By Matthew Alexander
Sunday, November 30, 2008;
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

Here is more from Matthew Alexander, and please remember this is not his real name. He has had to hide his identity. This is cross posted from Harper's Magazine and was written by Scott Horton. He interviewed Matthew and asked him these 6 questions.

“The American Public has a Right to Know That They Do Not Have to Choose Between Torture and Terror”: Six questions for Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist


At 5:15 p.m. on June 7, 2006, two American F-16 fighters dropped 500-pound bombs on a farmhouse about five miles north of the Iraqi town of Baqubah. Within an hour, the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug who had risen to become the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was confirmed. This resulted from one of the most important intelligence breakthroughs of the Iraq War. Matthew Alexander is the pseudonym for an American Air Force major who, through a series of skillful interrogations, secured the information that allowed the military to pinpoint al Zarqawi’s whereabouts and kill him. His book How to Break a Terrorist is a compelling account of the American military’s turn from highly coercive interrogation techniques, which proved consistently unproductive, to confidence-building approaches honed over decades in the American law-enforcement community, which achieved steady success.


Major Matthew Alexander 1. In the last weeks of the Bush Administration, they’re waging a campaign to convince the public that President-elect Obama’s plans to close Guantánamo, ban torture, and stop extraordinary renditions will make America less safe. Here’s how one of the administration’s apologists recently put things in an op-ed in the New York Times: “if we’d gotten our hands on a senior member of Al Qaeda before 9/11, and knew that an attack likely to kill thousands of Americans was imminent, wouldn’t waterboarding, or taking advantage of the skills of our Jordanian friends, have been the sensible, moral thing to do with a holy warrior who didn’t fear death but might have feared pain?” You actually did have “holy warriors” in your custody who were plotting to kill American soldiers and innocent civilians, and got the results that enabled U.S. fighter bombers to take out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. What do you think of these claims?

In Iraq, we lived the “ticking time bomb” scenario every day. Numerous Al Qaeda members that we captured and interrogated were directly involved in coordinating suicide bombing attacks. I remember one distinct case of a Sunni imam who was caught just after having blessed suicide bombers to go on a mission. Had we gotten there just an hour earlier, we could have saved lives. Still, we knew that if we resorted to torture the short term gains would be outweighed by the long term losses. I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantánamo Bay. My team of interrogators knew that we would become Al Qaeda’s best recruiters if we resorted to torture. Torture is counterproductive to keeping America safe and it doesn’t matter if we do it or if we pass it off to another government. The result is the same. And morally, I believe, there is an even stronger argument. Torture is simply incompatible with American principles. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both forbade their troops from torturing prisoners of war. They realized, as the recent bipartisan Senate report echoes, that this is about who we are. We cannot become our enemy in trying to defeat him.

2. One of the most controversial tactics that the Bush Administration adopted in the war on terror involves abusing a prisoner’s religious feelings to degrade or humiliate. Enforced nudity, the use of military dogs, sexually suggestive conduct, and forms of ritual defilement have all been documented as authorized techniques in Iraq and at Guantánamo, even though these techniques are probably illegal. Do you believe that an interrogator can make headway by trashing his subject’s religion or by using religion to degrade? Did you make use of religion in a different way?

First, there’s no doubt in my mind that these tactics are illegal. Geneva Conventions Common Article 3 specifically bans “humiliating and degrading treatment.” Trashing or degrading a detainee’s religion does not help convince a detainee to cooperate. It does just the opposite, reinforcing the reasons why the detainee decided to pick up arms against us.


During training, we were told that religion was a taboo subject because of the types of illegal activities that had occurred at Guantánamo Bay. I disagreed and I often discussed religion with my detainees. I frequently brought my own copy of the Quran into the interrogation booth and asked religious questions, always treating Islam with respect. I’ve read the Quran even though I’m not Muslim. I found my detainees, even high level imams, to be very open to my inquiries. In this way I showed them that I respected their religion and their beliefs and it changed their attitudes towards me and helped me to win their trust. One of our great strengths as Americans is our religious tolerance, a founding principle of our country, and we should use that strength in the interrogation booth to help build rapport with detainees and foster cooperation. As I told my team in Iraq, the things that make you a good American are the same things that will make you a good interrogator.

3. In your book you detail “new approaches” which seem very familiar to me—they are techniques that the FBI has used in interrogation for several decades, focusing on confidence-building. Is that correct? Why did it take so long for tested and proven approaches from the law enforcement world to be used in a military intelligence operation?

You are correct that relationship- (or confidence-) building approaches are not new and have been known to law enforcement for decades. Even World War II interrogators used relationship-building approaches to great success, but we can build on that. Interrogation is an art and a science and, like every discipline, can be improved upon. My group began to integrate relationship-building with other criminal investigative techniques, always tailoring it to the culture at hand. This is what made our techniques new. I watched day in and day out as my group of interrogators used American ingenuity in adapting these approaches for each individual detainee and they were highly effective. Interrogation is about being smarter, not harsher.

Why these techniques have not yet been integrated into intelligence interrogation is a mystery to me. I made a list of criminal investigation techniques that would be effective in interrogations and included it in my “after-action” report. The next administration needs to institutionalize this approach by contracting a cadre of experienced law enforcement officers to help train our intelligence interrogators. This same relationship already exists between civilian and military criminal investigators.

4. You describe members of your team saying that Al Qaeda members did not care about their families, that they were committed ideologues. This was taken as a justification for the use of coercion (usually fear) as the key tool for interrogation. But most counterterrorism experts agree that recruits to radical Islamist groups may be brought in by many factors other than ideology—clan-based affiliations, family, a motive of revenge–even a desire to make some money. It would obviously be vital for an interrogator to get a fix on motivation in forming an approach to getting a prisoner to talk. Does that suggest that American interrogators are being hindered by a politically shaped and unnecessarily crude understanding of the adversary?

Yes. We do ourselves a great disservice by stereotyping our enemies. Al Qaeda is comprised of a variety of individuals each with their own unique motivations for having joined. I can only remember one true ideologue in all the interrogations I conducted or supervised (more than 1,300) and even he started to come around at the end because we treated him with respect. The overwhelming majority of Sunni Iraqis who joined Al Qaeda did so out of need, not want. For some the reason was economic, for others tribal obligations, and for a large number it was for protection from the Shiite militias–the militias that we allowed, after the removal of Saddam, to conduct reprisal killings. When my group of interrogators reached out to these Sunnis and offered them an alternative to fighting against us –fighting with us–they were easily convinced to cooperate and rejected Al Qaeda. Sometimes all it took was an apology from an American for the mistakes we made at the beginning of the war. General David Petraeus proved this point by facilitating the Anbar Awakening. Interrogations are best conducted in the spirit of cooperation and negotiation, not domination and retribution. This is a metaphor for how we should use all of our instruments of power in fighting this war.

5. You note that the Bush Administration insisted on 93 redactions from the text and you had to take them to court, winning only after the book had gone to press. Most of the redactions do not appear to be motivated by legitimate concerns about security; they seem instead to be an effort to derail publication of your book. What do you think this was about? How does your publisher plan to make the redacted texts available to the public?

I believe this was an attempt at censorship and, perhaps, retaliation. On appeal I won 80 of the 93 redactions, so only 13 remain in the book. The Department of Defense redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material, including the entire scene where I convinced the man who led us to Zarqawi to cooperate after only six hours of interrogation using a relationship-building approach. The old methods of interrogation had failed for twenty days to convince this man to cooperate. The American public has a right to know that they do not have to choose between torture and terror. There is a better way to conduct interrogations that works more efficiently, keeps Americans safe, and doesn’t sacrifice our integrity. Our greatest victory to date in this war, the death of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi (which saved thousands of lives and helped pave the way to the Sunni Awakening), was achieved using interrogation methods that had nothing to do with torture. The American people deserve to know that. In future printings or the paperback version of How to Break a Terrorist we will include the material that we have won on appeal. I am still appealing several remaining redactions of obvious unclassified material.

6. You write that the Bush Administration’s torture policy is responsible for the death of more Americans than perished on 9/11. Explain what you mean by this.

The number-one reason foreign fighters gave for coming to Iraq to fight is the torture and abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. The majority of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters who volunteered and came to Iraq with this motivation. Consequently it is clear that at least hundreds but more likely thousands of American lives (not to count Iraqi civilian deaths) are linked directly to the policy decision to introduce the torture and abuse of prisoners as accepted tactics. Americans have died from terrorist attacks since 9/11; those Americans just happen to be American soldiers. This is not simply my view–it is widely held among senior officers in the U.S. military today. Alberto Mora, who served as General Counsel of the Navy under Donald Rumsfeld, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2008 that “U.S. flag-rank officers maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq–as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat–are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” We owe it to our troops to protect them from terrorist attacks by not conducting torture and we owe it to our forefathers to uphold the American principles that they passed down to us.

“My friend,” I say. “Let me ask you this. What can I do for you?”

“Sir?”

“You’re helping me so I want to know how can I help you?”

“I have one favor to ask.”

“Of course. What can I do for you?” He seems embarrassed.

“I do not like showering naked in front of the guards.”

I nod and tell him, “I wouldn’t like that either.” That relaxes him a little.

“Would it be possible for me to wear boxer shorts in the shower?” He could have asked for a lot more than that.

“That won’t be a problem. I will let the guards know.”



—A passage the Bush Administration attempted to censor from How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq

Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Free Press. Copyright (c) 2008 Matthew Alexander

I see the world in terms of tolerance. Ignorance versus knowledge. Fear versus understanding. These two videos [of beheadings] are displays of hatred so fierce that it drives men to depravity. It is the hatred that I hate…

Pure hate. Pure malice. Torture and cruelty are their tools. To fight them, should I resort to hate? To bitterness and jaded contempt? Is that what it means to be a veteran ‘gator around here?



—From How to Break a Terrorist by Matthew Alexander

In addition to this I want to add another quote that Scott Horton had. He also talked to someone else and asked about a story that has been tossed around the last few days by the Bush administration. Here is the results of that question. I am not going to say anything...just add what he said in the magazine.

FBI Director Calls Cheney on Torture Lies
By Scott Horton

The Bush Administration’s swan song consists of a series of increasingly absurd claims designed to cover its crimes and failings. The most persistent of these is the claim that torture was necessary to save lives, and that attacks were in fact averted through the use of torture techniques. Vice President Cheney continued his crusade for torture yesterday insisting that torture is the “moral” thing to do (helping to explain the origins of Cheney’s Washington nickname, “vice”). Vanity Fair’s David Rose takes a look at the administration’s case for torture, and specifically its claims that torture averted attacks or at least produced actionable intelligence of some sort. He walks us through all the claims, one by one, and finds that they are all contradicted by the facts. Some of the sources did produce useful intelligence, but in no case was the application of torture the reason why, nor did it even contribute to the result. In the final lines of his article, he has this exchange with FBI director Robert Mueller:

I ask Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been

disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”?

“I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.”

Mueller is “reluctant to answer” because he knows that Cheney and other administration spokespersons have repeatedly made that claim. And he knows that it is a lie which has been advanced for a specific reason: to cloak their criminal conduct.

Description of Waterboarding...graphic

I am going to post something that a lot of people are not going to like to read. It is something they may deny, it is something they want to pretend didn't happen. It is something I wish never happened, but it did. Our President and Vice-President ordered it, condoned it, and made sure it was done at several different levels in different places around the world. It was done in Guantanamo Bay, it was done in Abu Ghraib, it was done in many others we don't know of.

I can't imagine the pain, the horror of it, how it must feel to the person going through it. But this is a description of what is known as "Water Boarding". This is what VP Cheney admitted to saying he approved and pushed to have done by the CIA and our military. This is what Donald Rumsfeld said was OK to do to prisoners. This is what has been done on behalf of the USA to try to get information. It has been shown this doesn't work. That any information garnered is suspect at best, because you will do or say anything to make this stop. Think about it. What would you do if this was happening to you?

Your feet are shackled, and so are your wrists. When you were lead into the room you saw that it did not have the usual table, this room had a board, and a drain in the floor. You are blindfolded by the guards and roughly forced to lie on the wet wooden board. Even though you are shackled they tie you down to the board with three ropes, one across your chest, one across your waist and one across your legs. You are now completely unable to move, your head is below the level of your feet making the blood rush to your head.

You can hear them moving around and hear a hose running, filling a bucket of water. Your heart begins to race as your mouth is forced open and a wet rag is stuffed inside. There is enough clothe that it fills your mouth, and prevents your teeth from meeting, even at the back of your mouth. You feel a person sitting next you on the board, and they put their hands on your stomach, just above your diaphragm and push down, keeping you from taking a deep breath through your nose. You sense someone else standing above your head, and then the water starts to pour over your face. Not a little, but a torrent of water, it is running up your nose, and you can not breath! Your gag reflex kicks in, but the rag in your mouth does not let you gag.

Your body begins to convulse, convinced in the most primitive of reflexes to try to do anything to get more air! You thrash but the ropes and shackles have you completely immobilized. You feel the water hitting your face, as the person on the bench presses down on your diaphragm, forcing what little air you have out, not in. You are now sure that you are going to die, that you are going to drown, not an abstract, but for real, and right now. Your chest burns with the need for more air, your eyes tear under the blindfold as you struggle to get one more breath.

You are no longer a rational human, you are now just a survival machine, ready to beg anyone, do anything to make the pain stop and get just one more breath. The water stops falling on you. You suck air in through your nose and try to suck it in through you mouth. Both bring more water along with the small amount of air you can get. You hear the hose running again and know that this is not over, it is just starting. Your heart is going like a trip hammer, and you are in a state of terror, like nothing you have ever experienced or thought of. You know if and when they ask you something, you will do or say anything, anything to prevent them from doing it again. Then the hands push on your stomach, and the water starts falling again.

You struggle, trying to hold your breath, but the gag reflex kicks in again, and again you become more animal than man as you struggle for breath your body wracked with pain and convulsively struggling to get free to breath.

What are your thoughts now?? How do you feel?? Can you imagine what they are going through? Can you feel the pain? This is just one of the forms of torture that was used. There were others. What do you think of this?? I really would like to know.

We are a nation we once condemed

How have we as a people let ourselves become a nation that once we condemned? In WWII, and in Vietnam we condemned the torture of prisoners. John McCain, as one of the most well known POW's has spoken out against his treatment by his captors as terrible. Some of the worst pain anyone could endure. Withholding medical treatment, inflicting pain in various ways, even the water boarding we hear so much about. All of these are forms of torture.

During WWII the German's did this in the POW camps, they used the Jewish people as test subjects in the camps before they put them to death. Sometimes death was a blessing, harsh as that sounds. The Japanese, were terrible in the treatment of prisoners. Even though this isn't really discussed. Some books on the war do talk about it.

But, now, we are guilty of these same types of things. At first, when the word of Abu Ghraib came out, it was said that it was just a few of the lower ranks who were involved in it. You remember, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick,Pfc. Lynndie England, Spc. Sabrina Harman,Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr.,Spc. Jeremy Sivits, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, Spc. Armin J. Cruz Jr., and Spc. Roman Krol. These are the ones who were court-martialed and convicted of crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison. As of today the only one still in prison is Charles Graner, Jr. He is in solitary at Leavenworth Prison, Kansas.

All the others have either served the time they were given or had their time commuted. No officers were ever convicted of a crime or ever even tried for any crimes. The doctrine of command responsibility, according to Paragraph 501 of Army Field Manual 27-10, holds that a commander is legally responsible not only for orders handed down but "if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge ... that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war or to punish violators thereof."

While no officers have been court-martialed, the Army says it has taken nonjudicial action against some officers for crimes at Abu Ghraib. Beyond the nine convictions detailed below, Army public affairs officer Maj. Wayne Marotto told Salon by e-mail that three soldiers and one officer received nonjudicial punishments, and four soldiers and eight officers received official reprimands. In addition, "a number of officers were suspended or relieved of their duties," according to Marotto. He declined to provide further details about these personnel, citing the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits the Army from "publicly releasing certain items of information" about individuals regarding nonjudicial actions taken against them.

There are two publicly known cases of military leaders from Abu Ghraib receiving nonjudicial punishment. According to a May 5, 2005, Army press release, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, was relieved of command, was demoted to colonel and received a letter of reprimand. And on May 13, 2005, the Department of Defense announced that Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, was relieved of command, received a letter of reprimand and was fined $8,000. (One day earlier, the Washington Post reported the reprimand of Pappas, citing an unnamed Army official.)

While all of this is telling, even more so is the fact that above the military orders were the orders that the military were following. Those orders came from somewhere. At the same time they were doing the "interrogations" at Abu Ghraib others were being done by "OGU" or as they have now been identified CIA were doing their own interrogations and using some of the same if not worse tactics as seen by the photos which were released when we were introduced to "Lynndie and Charles" the couple who took the pictures of the naked prisoners. The orders for all these interrogations came from the same person. From the top. Of course there is speculation there as to who is the top. Is it Bush or is it Cheney?? But that is where it starts, then Rumsfeld, down from there. So, why aren't they answering for these crimes? Will they have to answer for them? That's the question that remains to be answered some day.