Ali Soufan Calls Bullshit On Dick Cheney And The Rest Of The Torture Advocates

Former FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan, is back with another op ed in the New York Times. This time he takes apart Dick Cheney's assertion that the CIA IG report vindicated his position that torture "worked". Spencer Ackerman has a really good post up about it and I suggest reading that in addition to the op ed but I wanted to highlight a particular part of the op ed which should be repeated over and over like an echo whenever Dick Cheney or his wingnut daughter Liz appears on any cable news shows again.

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

The Mr. Mohammed Soufan is referring to is Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Now this is the central point that I feel like liberals and progressives are loathe to explore because whether torture worked or not, it was illegal and should have never been pursued. I get the sense that many of us on the left also are hesitant to press the case because we think there is a chance that torture did yield useful information. Now on the one hand I am sure that torturing normal people is prone to making them tell more than they would without it. But members of Al Qaeda are not regular people anymore than our soldiers are regular people. And above and beyond that no matter how much information was given up, there still is the question of if it was credible. We have a culture whereby we have been conditioned to believe that because torture works in movies or on popular Tee Vee shows then it works in real life. But the truth, as counterintiutive as it might be to some of us, is that it doesn't.

As Ali Soufan points out, if torture was so effective then why the hell haven't we caught the Al Qaeda leadership, all of whom were know to KSM? Why didn't he tell us where they were and what they were up to? Why don't we have bin Ladin's head on a platter right now when instead, 8 years after 9/11 the guy is still putting out propaganda tapes? Can anybody answer that one? Can one single torture advocate answer that question?

Traditional interrogation was never tried on KSM, and that's the dirty little secret that nobody, including the mainstream media, ever wants to talk about. Soufan points out in the op ed all the information extracted from other HVDs who were tortured because the FBI was still allowed to use traditional interrogations either before or after the torture. When they were able to use traditional interrogtions prior to the torture they were able to extract information just fine and the torture wasn't even necessary and only ended up making the detainee shut down to the point where the FBI had to be called back in time and time again just to get them to start back talking. In the cases where traditional interrogation was used after the detainees were tortured the interrogators had to work their asses off to undue the harm the torture had done just to get the detainees to talk. In short, torture made it harder and less likely to get information out of the detainees in just about every single instance. This isn't some DFH saying it, its a hardened FBI interrogator who actually was in the room and got good information from several members of Al Qaeda and helped prosecute them both here and abroad.

Now I realize that torture advocates will never admit that torture didn't work and actually harmed our efforts to head off more attacks, but its time for everyone else to start calling bullshit on them too. Its not enough just to stick to the legality of the situation when the other side is appealing to people's primal instinct for revenge. People need to know that our ability to extract revenge was actually hurt by people like Dick Cheney ordering torture. As Soufan infers with his rhetorical question the very reason we don't have Al Qaeda's leadership dead or in custody now is precisely because Cheney ordered the torture of the men who could have led us right to them.

At some point we have to say that and keep repeating it until it sinks in to the public's consciousness. Otherwise we leave open the possibility that Dick Cheney gets to revise history to his benefit. And I don't think any of us wants that to happen.

Using Cheney Logic

Dick Cheney was his usually morally repugnant self yesterday on FoxNews Sunday, shamelessly advocating torture. And there is a lot in the interview for people to take apart but I want to focus on something he said early on. Its one of the best recent example of Orwellian double speak that I could possibly even imagine. First lets look at the question and answer in its entirety and then we can take it apart a little.

WALLACE: This is your first interview since Attorney General Holder named a prosecutor to investigate possible CIA abuses of terror detainees.

What do you think of that decision?

CHENEY: I think it's a terrible decision. President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel. And the effort now is based upon the inspector general's report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past.

They made decisions about whether or not there was any prosecutable offense there. They found one. It did not involve CIA personnel, it involved contract personnel. That individual was sentenced and is doing time. The matter's been dealt with the way you would expect it to be dealt with by professionals.

Now we've got a political appointee coming back, and supposedly without the approval of the president, going to do a complete review, or another complete investigation, possible prosecution of CIA personnel. We could talk the whole program about the negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political.

They may find themselves dragged up before a grand jury, have to hire attorneys on their own because the Justice Department won't provide them with counsel.

It's a terrible, terrible precedent.

Ok lets work backwards here. Dick Cheney is worried about a special prosecutor looking into whether or not any CIA personnel broke the law by going outside the guidance of the OLC memos. He says the fallout from such a probe woudl be:

We could talk the whole program about the negative consequences of that, about the terrible precedent it sets, to have agents involved, CIA personnel involved, in a difficult program that's approved by the Justice Department, approved by the National Security Council, and the Bush administration, and then when a new administration comes in, it becomes political.

They may find themselves dragged up before a grand jury, have to hire attorneys on their own because the Justice Department won't provide them with counsel.

It's a terrible, terrible precedent

So he says that it will set a "terrible precedent" and that the decision to look into the program is "political" He then goes further shortly after in another answer to describe what he thinks will be the impact of this investigation.

CHENEY: Well, you think, for example, in the intelligence arena. We ask those people to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the -- in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody's going to sign up for those kinds of missions.

It's a very, very devastating, I think, effect that it has on morale inside the intelligence community. If they assume that they're going to have to be dealing with the political consequences -- and it's clearly a political move. I mean, there's no other rationale for why they're doing this -- then they'll be very reluctant in the future to do that.

So this investigation is going to lead to nobody wanting to "sign up for those kinds of missions" and its going to have a "very, very devastating...effect...on morale inside the intelligence community".

Well my goodness who knew that just investigating to see if any wrongdoing occured should have such adverse effects on the intelligence community? But wait, there is one thing that isn't really adding up to me here. If investigating the CIA for wrong doing creates so many problems, why did the Bush administration do just that?

Lets go back to the Cheney's answer again.

And the effort now is based upon the inspector general's report that was sent to the Justice Department five years ago, was completely reviewed by the Justice Department in years past.

They made decisions about whether or not there was any prosecutable offense there. They found one. It did not involve CIA personnel, it involved contract personnel. That individual was sentenced and is doing time. The matter's been dealt with the way you would expect it to be dealt with by professionals.

So wait, Dick Cheney himself admits that the Justice Department while he was still Vice President did in fact investigate and prosecute at least one bad actor in this whole situation. He makes the distinction that it was a CIA contractor but the truth is the two men who actually orchestrated the torture program were ALSO CIA contractors too so its a distinction but not much of one. Now using his own logic shouldn't this have devastated the CIA?! Shouldn't they have all been pulling out their fainting couches and refusing to protect the nation after that prosecution? Shouldn't we have been attacked by bin Ladin many times over due to the fact that DOJ even looked into the allegations put forth by the CIA's Inspector general? And wasn't Alberto Gonzales who led that inquiry ALSO a political appointee?

Oh wait, I keep forgetting, Its Okay If You're A Republican.

What would be great would be if some journalist points out this contradiction in the man's logic, but I won't hold my breath.

President McCain

Imagine my fellow Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives, that the unthinkable happened and John McCain won the election last year. At this point he is putting together plans to bomb Iran, making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and taxing our health care. In the middle of all this he gives this explanation for why he will never allow anyone to look into torture committed by contractors and sanctioned by the Bush Administration over the previous 8 years.



Now, would you accept President McCain telling you that we have to look forward and not back lest we "damage" the CIA? Would you hold your tongue when he says he won't investigate because its distracting from his policy agenda?

Then why are you accepting those same arguments from President Obama?

Food for thought.

Greg Sargent Keeps PWNING Sock Puppet Stephen Hayes

Please for the love of God and all that is sacred in blogging, somebody throw in the towel for Stephen Hayes. He didn't really want it with Hov Greg!

A The Torture Technique That Only David Vitter Could Love

Prolonged diapering!

Seriously.

Attackerman Ethers Dick Cheney

Thanks to Spencer Ackerman's fine work on the two torture documents that Dick Cheney sought to release, ostensibly to prove that torture worked, we now have it confirmed that Cheney is a lying sack of shit!

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

The first document, issued by the CIA in July 2004 is about the interrogation of 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and whom, the newly released CIA Inspector General report on torture details, had his children’s lives threatened by an interrogator. None of that abuse is referred to in the publicly released version of the July 2004 document. Instead, we learn from the July 2004 document that not only did the man known as “KSM” largely provide intelligence about “historical plots” pulled off from al-Qaeda, a fair amount of the knowledge he imparted to his interrogators came from his “rolodex” — that is, what intelligence experts call “pocket litter,” or the telling documentation found on someone’s person when captured. As well, traditional intelligence work appears to have done wonders — including a fair amount of blundering on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s part:

In response to questions about [al-Qaeda's] efforts to acquire [weapons of mass destruction], [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that he had met three individuals involved in [al-Qaeda's] program to produce anthrax. He appears to have calculated, incorrectly, that we had this information already, given that one of the three — Yazid Sufaat — had been in foreign custody for several months.

This is a far cry from torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into revealing such information. It would be tendentious to believe that the torture didn’t have any impact on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — he himself said that he lied to interrogators in order to get the torture to stop — but the document itself doesn’t attempt to present a case that the “enhanced interrogation” program was a factor, let alone the determinant factor, in the intelligence bounty the document says he provided.

The second newly released document — a June 2005 overview of information extracted from detainees — is, if anything, more caveated. In making a case that “detainee reporting” was “pivotal for the war against [al-Qaeda],” it says that “detainee reporting is often incomplete or too general to lead directly to arrests; instead, detainees provide critical pieces to the puzzle, which, when combined with other reporting, have helped direct an investigation’s focus and led to the capture of terrorists.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the prime example here.

The document also discusses unraveling the network of Indonesian al-Qaeda affiliate Hambali after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s capture. There are repeated references to the value of “debriefings,” which the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report says are distinct from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” but can be used after they occur. For instance, “Debriefings of mid-level [al-Qaeda] operatives also have reported on specific plots against U.S. interests.” Indeed, in a section titled “Aiding Our Understanding [al-Qaeda],” a listed example is:

Abu Zubaydah’s identification early in his detention of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of 11 September and [al-Qaeda's] premier terrorist planner and of ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri as another key [al-Qaeda] operational planner corroborated information [REDACTED].

Those revelations, as former Abu Zubaydah interrogator Ali Soufan has testified, came before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.

snip

Again, perhaps the blacked-out lines of the memos specifically claim and document that torture and only torture yielded this information. But what’s released within them does not remotely make that case. Cheney’s public account of these documents have conflated the difference between information acquired from detainees, which the documents present, and information acquired from detainees through the enhanced interrogation program, which they don’t.

I had to exerpt heavily because everything in the piece was tied together and notable but again this is all Spencer Ackerman who put the pieces of he puzzle together and he deserves all the credit. Hopefully there will be some Democrats on the Hill with balls big enough and spines strong enough to use his analysis to beat back the whinefest that we all know is now coming from the GOP.

Someone Had To Intercede

Check out this allegation included in the CIA IG report on torture.

Al-Nashiri was required to kneel on the floor and lean back. On at least one occasion an Agency officer reportedly pushed Al-Nahshiri backward while he was in this stress position. On another occasion [redacted] said he had to intercede after [redacted] expressed concern that Al Nashiri's arms might be dislocated from his shoulders. [redacted] explained that, at the time, interrogators were attempting to put Al-Nashiri in a standing stress position. Al-Nashiri was reportedly liftted off the floor by his arms while his arms were bound behind his back with a belt.

I wonder if Joe Scarborough will continue to try to claim that the stress positions were no big deal.

You Don't Have To Believe Me, Unless You Want To Believe Me, But Its Real....So Real

When I got a chance to look at the CIA's IG report for the first time today at the Washington Independent's website I almost immediately noticed two things, one of which may not be a big deal, the other one is almost certainly a big deal.

Here was the first thing I noticed.

Several months earlier, in late 2001, CIA had tasked an independent contractor psychologist who had [redacted] experience in the U.S. Air Force's Survival, Evastion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training program, to research and write a paper on Al-Qa'ida resistence to interrogation techniques.

Now honestly I might just be uninformed about this issue but I, personally, didn't know until now that the CIA had set out to try to figure out ways to overcome Al Qa'ida's resistance to interrogation techniques torture so early on in the game. I mean basically at best if we captured Al Qa'ida operatives right after 9-11 and this edict came down at the end of 2001 then that means in the intervening 3 months basically the CIA found that these operatives were impervious to normal and accepted means of interrogation and were already looking to up the ante.

The problem, of course, is that even on the face of it this doesn't add up. It goes to a point I made a few months back and that is that the whole justification for supposed "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" was that they were supposed to be used when traditional methods of interrogation failed. But that clearly couldn't have been the case with Khalid Sheik Muhammed because he was waterboarded 183 times in the first month of us having him in custody. It didn't appear to be the case with Abu Zubaydah either who was supposedly the first high value target to be waterboarded. And in this passage in the IG report it would seem that the third man who was waterboarded, Al Nashiri,also wasn't given the opportunity to cooperate before EITs or torture take your pick, were employed.

The interrogation of Al-Nashiri proceeded after [redacted] the necessary Headquarters authorization [redacted] psychologist/interrogators began Al-Nashiri's interrogation using EITs immediately upon his arrival.

Now everyone knows that there is something seriously fishy that is connected to Al-Nahsiri because you hardly ever hear the current administration or the previous administration even mention this guy as one of the people who were waterboarded. Instead they just focus on Abu Zubaydah and KSM. Hopefully one day we will get to the bottom of what actually happened to him. I suspect that he might not have been who they thought was which would be terribly embarrassing if it got out that they waterboarded an innocent man.

The second thing I found was this passage about waterboarding and why the interrogators were not going strictly by the OLC memo guidelines as to how it would be administered. (thanks for the transcription Attackerman)

OIG’s [Office of the Inspector General's] review of the videotapes revealed that the waterboard technique employed at [REDACTED] was different from the technique as described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE School and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contest, the Agency interrogator [REDACTED] continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency’s technique is different because it is “for real” and is more poignant and convincing.

Now this is vital information for two different reasons.

The first reason its important is a legal one. When asked about the difference between what the OLC and DOJ memos outlined as being acceptable as waterboarding and what the psychologists and interrogators were doing in practice, at least one of those psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that not only was there a difference, but that it was also entirely intentional. Im no legal scholar but that sounds pretty much like an admission of guilty to a layman. Especially when this unnamed person invoked the words "for real" to describe the difference. I don't see a way that someone can explain away these psychologists/interrogators disregarding the already flawed OLC memos in order to intentionally treat the detainees in an even more harsh manner than was laid out for them. So it would appear that the Special Prosecutor whom Attorney General Eric Holder just chose to investigate torture will have some pretty nice targets right off the bat.

The second reason this is important is purely political and I make no apologies for that. For months torture apologists like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Liz Cheney, just to name a few, hid behind our troops to try to make a bogus argument that waterboarding was not torture. Their meme which got repeated time and time again on FoxNews and in the wingnut blogosphere is that "it couldn't be torture because we do it to our own members of the military". Many of them took it further and tried to paint anyone who rightly labeled waterboarding as torture, as it has been prosecuted as such for decades, to be claiming that we also tortured our men and women in the military. Even for the GOP this was a particularly disgusting attack in their attempt to excuse the rancid bullshit that was perpetrated by the Bush administration, supposedly in the name of national security.

Well no longer can they make such a claim when it comes to what we did with these detainees. Not only did the CIA Inspector General observe for himself that they were not following the guidelines to waterboard a detainee as was proscribed in the OLC memos which were cribbed from SERE school teachings, at least one of the persons participating in the waterboarding acknowledged that it wasn't the same thing because with the detainees it was "for real".

Now the next step is that when liberals or progressives of Democratic members of Congress go on any cable news shows or Sunday talk shows to talk about demanding accountability for torture, they need to familiarize themselves with the information in this document. No longer should they allow Republicans and Conservatives to try to frame this issue as being not a big deal. I understand that we have our plates full with health care reform but if there was ever a time to demand accountability from the Bush administration I think its now. We have to try to strike when the iron is hot in my honest opinion. And we have to be armed with the facts not as we see them but as they are spelled out in this CIA IG report.

I will be posting more on the report as I comb through it.

More Than A Trial Balloon

Its beginning to look like Attorney General Eric Holder may just be moving towards some prosecutions.

From the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.

The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.’s inspector general but have never been released.

When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.

With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.

The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder’s hand.
The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.

The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.

Mr. Holder was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials.

In examples that have just come to light, the C.I.A. report describes how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a prisoner with imminent death.

Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry.

I'm not going to get too worked up about this until we actually see whether Holder is going to move on this or not for sure, but I have to say that it sounds like an investigation is a lot closer to being a reality than not.

The Release Of The Holy Grail Is At Hand

It looks like the CIA IG's Report on torture from 2004 is set to be released on Monday. Rachel Maddow had Michael Isikoff on to discuss what his sources have already told him about the revelations in the report. Definitely explosive stuff.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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I am positive that mock executions is a violation of the Conventions Against Torture. How the people who committed these acts will get away with it after all of this talk of no man being above the law is totally beyond me and disgusting on its face.