I’M FOR holding them accountable. Investigate and prosecute and sentence.
The 200 page Senate report on Bush-era interrogation tactics indicates officials within the Administration, the CIA and the military expressed concern about the use of torture on detainees in US custody. High level officials, including then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, were made aware of concerns, but the Administration ignored the complaints.
President Obama now says it’s up to Attorney General Holder whether to prosecute the individuals responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policies.
“Senate Report: Rice, Cheney OK’d CIA Use of Waterboarding
Common Dreams — Top Bush administration officials gave the CIA approval to use waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique, as early as 2002, a Senate intelligence report shows.
On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with “alternative interrogation methods,” including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah. The decision was contingent on the Justice Department’s determining the method’s legality.
A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the “proposed interrogation techniques were lawful,” the report said.
The same techniques also were used in the interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the first person charged in the United States in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.”
The release of the report, prepared by the attorney general’s office at the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, details and declassifies the advice given to the CIA regarding its interrogation techniques.
The techniques again gained the endorsement of the Bush administration in spring 2003 when the CIA asked for a “reaffirmation of the policies and practices in the interrogation program.”
In a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, Ashcroft, Rice and their legal counsels, “the principals reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy,” the report said.
President Obama has called waterboarding — which simulates drowning — torture and last week released a series of Bush-era memos on interrogation tactics. One memo showed that CIA interrogators used waterboarding at least 266 times on Zubaydah and Mohammed.
In a 2008 interview with ABC, Cheney defended the practice of waterboarding, now banned by the Obama administration, particularly in the case of Mohammed. “Did it produce the desired results? I think it did,” Cheney said.
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed … provided us with a wealth of information.
There was a period of time there, three or fours years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source. “So it’s been a remarkably successful effort,” he said. “I think the results speak for themselves.”
More recently, Cheney said some people are more interested in reading terrorists their rights than protecting the United States, a dig at the new administration. . . . . “They didn’t put out the memos that show the success of the effort, and there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity,” Cheney told Fox News on Monday. “They have not been declassified.”
Let’s see your “results”, Dick. We remember very clearly that some of the top “high value” prisoners who were tortured ‘confessed’ to everything under the sun, including trying to kill the Pope and Jimmy Carter. Obviously, many of these “confessions” were nonsense, things said just to stop the torture. IN FACT, torture doesn’t work. What the sadistic Cheney and Rice failed to read were all the reports that say that there are far better methods for gaining intelligence.
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. …..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.”
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, “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.” . . . .
Kherchtou is now in the federal witness-protection program. Thanks in part to his testimony, four of his onetime associates are serving life.”
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