CIA agents forced to torture

by | Apr 23, 2009 | North America

The FBI’s Ali Soufan has an explosive op-ed in today’s New York Times. 

“For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding, ” he writes. “I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.”

Soufan attacks the claim – propogated strenuously by the Bush administation – that it tortured in order to save American lives. Indeed, he suggests that these claims are based on deliberate and systematic fabrication:

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

Perhaps his most explosive insight is into the contrasting policies within the FBI and CIA. FBI agents were allowed to recuse themselves from torture. CIA agents were ordered to continue torturing even after they protested:

Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came through from Pat D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that “we don’t do that,” and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general).

My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were instructed to continue. 

Surely it is only a matter of time before very senior figures from the Bush adminstration face prosecution. A Truth Commission now seems like the very minimum that should be expected…

Another rendition for Mohamed

by | Feb 24, 2009 | Conflict and security

Disgraceful comments today from Con Couglin, the Daily Telegraph’s ‘executive foreign editor’, on the release of Binyam Mohammed.

Coughlin thinks Mohammed should be sent to Pakistan – the country where he was tortured – “so he can learn what the Taliban was really like” and bring himself “up to date on the Taliban’s latest governmental practices, such as stoning adulterers to death and cutting off the limbs of those accused of theft.”

This is red meat for the Telegraph’s commenters. “The further costs of keeping this scum alive and here far outweighs any other consideration,” one writes. 

Coughlin has good sources in US intelligence, sources who have assured him that Mohamed was a highly placed Al Qaeda operative, one who confessed to his US interrogators that “he met Osama bin Laden on several occasions.” That this confession was extracted under torture doesn’t seemto bother Coughlin at all.

Most galling of all is the fact that Coughlin isn’t able even to get the details of Mohamed’s arrest right, claiming he was “he was arrested wandering around Afghanistan.” Perhaps he should read his own paper, which accurately reports that Mohamed was arrested in April 2002 in Karachi airport, as he tried to board a plane back to the UK.

(It would not surprise me at all if Mohamed is/was a low level Al Qaeda operative by the way. If he was, torture has made it impossible to prosecute him.)