CIA says waterboarding was helpful

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
CIA says waterboarding was helpful
47
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 5:15pm

Do we waterboard a terrorist prisoner, or let thousands of innocent people die from terrorism?

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=46949

CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) -- including the use of waterboarding -- caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack -- which KSM called the “Second Wave”-- planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”

KSM was the mastermind of the first “hijacked-airliner” attacks on the United States, which struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia on Sept. 11, 2001.

After KSM was captured by the United States, he was not initially cooperative with CIA interrogators. Nor was another top al Qaeda leader named Zubaydah. KSM, Zubaydah, and a third terrorist named Nashiri were the only three persons ever subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. (Additional terrorist detainees were subjected to other “enhanced techniques” that included slapping, sleep deprivation, dietary limitations, and temporary confinement to small spaces -- but not to water-boarding.)

This was because the CIA imposed very tight restrictions on the use of waterboarding. “The ‘waterboard,’ which is the most intense of the CIA interrogation techniques, is subject to additional limits,” explained the May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo. “It may be used on a High Value Detainee only if the CIA has ‘credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent’; ‘substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack’; and ‘ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack.’”

The quotations in this part of the Justice memo were taken from an Aug. 2, 2004 letter that CIA Acting General Counsel John A. Rizzo sent to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Before they were subjected to “enhanced techniques” of interrogation that included waterboarding, KSM and Zubaydah were not only uncooperative but also appeared contemptuous of the will of the American people to defend themselves.

“In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including KSM and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques,” says the Justice Department memo. “Both KSM and Zubaydah had ‘expressed their belief that the general US population was ‘weak,’ lacked resilience, and would be unable to ‘do what was necessary’ to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.’ Indeed, before the CIA used enhanced techniques in its interrogation of KSM, KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, ‘Soon you will know.’”

After he was subjected to the “waterboard” technique, KSM became cooperative, providing intelligence that led to the capture of key al Qaeda allies and, eventually, the closing down of an East Asian terrorist cell that had been tasked with carrying out the 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles.

The May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that details what happened in this regard was written by then-Principal Deputy Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury to John A. Rizzo, the senior deputy general counsel for the CIA.

“You have informed us that the interrogation of KSM—once enhanced techniques were employed—led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles,” says the memo.

“You have informed us that information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discover of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemaah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave,’” reads the memo. “More specifically, we understand that KSM admitted that he had large sum of money to an al Qaeda associate … Khan subsequently identified the associate (Zubair), who was then captured. Zubair, in turn, provided information that led to the arrest of Hambali. The information acquired from these captures allowed CIA interrogators to pose more specific questions to KSM, which led the CIA to Hambali’s brother, al Hadi. Using information obtained from multiple sources, al-Hadi was captured, and he subsequently identified the Garuba cell. With the aid of this additional information, interrogations of Hambali confirmed much of what was learned from KSM.”

A CIA spokesman confirmed to CNSNews.com today that the CIA stands by the factual assertions made here.

In the memo itself, the Justice Department’s Bradbury told the CIA’s Rossi: “Your office has informed us that the CIA believes that ‘the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qa’ida has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.”

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iVillage Member
Registered: 12-25-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 5:44pm

LOL!

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:05pm

I don't know. Other related reports indicate 50% of our understanding about Al-Qaeda came from aggressive interrogation techniques. Which techniques and how many times they must be used to get this information that saved many lives, I don't know.

The current regime seems to be trying to undercut the legacy of the prior regime, which kept us safe from terrorism.

That aggressive techniques were very successful isn't something the Obama regime seems eager to talk about. :)

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-25-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:22pm

Meaning that there is no independent confirmation on the claims in that report or that harsh interrogation techniques are really effective to begin with.

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 12-25-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:37pm

Can CNS, you, or anyone else prove that it's an either/or equation?

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:44pm
I don't know. Would we feel virtuous if we didn't use waterboarding on KSM and thousands died in LA?
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:51pm

In response to your question, there is this - http://www.drudgereport.com/flashcm.htm

Cheney Calls For More CIA Reports To Be Declassified
Mon Apr 20 2009 16:20:53 ET

In a two part interview airing tonight and tomorrow night on FOX News Channel’s Hannity (9-10PM ET), former Vice President Dick Cheney shared his thoughts on the CIA memos that were recently declassified and also revealed his request to the CIA to declassify additional memos that confirm the success of the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics:

CHENEY:

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”

“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven't announced this up until now, 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.”

“And 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, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”

Developing...

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-11-2009
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:52pm

Different take on the same claims:

<<<<<<<<<<http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/looking-backward/the-unsupportable-defense-of-t.html

(snip)

Thiessen writes that he was told that a major al-Qaeda figure named Abu Zubaydah, under torture, "provided information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh — one of the key plotters of the 9/11 attacks and a close associated of KSM ." According to Thiessen, Zubaydah and bin al Shibh then provided information that led to KSM's capture. KSM, under torture, then provided information that led to the capture of a Southeast Asian terrorist named Zubair. Zubair then provided information that led to the arrest of his fellow terrorist Hambali. KSM then provided information that led to the arrest of Hambali's brother. And Hambali's brother then provided information "that led us to a cell of 17 operatives that were going to carry out the West Coast plot."

Little of this is new; Thiessen included most of it in the speech Bush delivered in September 2006 (in the heat of the mid-term elections), and much of it can also be found in a statement released at the same time by the director of national intelligence.

And guess what? It doesn't appear to be remotely true.

Yes, it may be what Thiessen was told -- by people trying to defend the horrible things they had done, and who were trying to tell the White House what it wanted to hear.

But investigative journalists have found that this story -- like all the other ones attempting to justify torture -- falls apart at almost every turn. In this case, the most authoritative reporting has been done by Ron Suskind and is laid out in his book The One Percent Doctrine.

For starters, Zubaydah was not a major player. According to Suskind, he was a mentally ill travel booker who under CIA torture sent investigators chasing after false leads about al-Qaeda plots on American nuclear plants, water systems, shopping malls, banks and supermarkets.

Zubaydah did not, as Bush maintained, identify bin al Shibh. As Spencer Ackerman blogged for the New Republic in 2002: "A Nexis search for 'Ramzi Binalshibh' between September 11, 2001 and March 1, 2002 -- the U.S. captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002 -- turns up 26 hits for The Washington Post alone. Everyone involved in counterterrorism knew who bin Al Shibh was."

Zubaydah did not, as Thiessen asserts, provide information that led to bin al Shibh's capture. Bin al Shibh was captured almost half a year after Zubayda was, and Suskind reported that the key information about his location came not from Zubaydah but from an al-Jazeera reporter who had interviewed bin al Shibh and KSM at their safehouse apartment in Karachi. The reporter passed the information to his superiors, who passed the information to al-Jazeera's owner, the Emir of Qatar -- a friend of the CIA -- who then passed it to Langley.

Zubaydah did not, as Thiessen asserts, provide information that led to KSM's capture. Suskind reported that a tipster -- a "walk in" -- led the CIA directly to KSM and subsequently collected a $25 million reward.

And skipping ahead to the end of Thiessen's tale, the West Coast plot has been debunked repeatedly. It's never been clear that the alleged plot to fly an airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast was ever more than a pipe dream. After Bush first mentioned the plot in February 2006, Peter Baker and Dan Eggen wrote in The Washington Post that "several U.S. intelligence officials played down the relative importance of the alleged plot and attributed the timing of Bush's speech to politics. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly criticize the White House, said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the... scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk."

The Bush White House never provided any independently verifiable information to support its claims that extreme measures helped keep Americans safe. Indeed, in this particular case, at least one key bit of evidence was made to vanish. Zubaydah's entire interrogation was captured on CIA videotapes -- that the CIA destroyed in 2005.

Why should anyone care about this particular deceit? After all, even if torture did work, it's still morally indefensible. Well, the reason I keep calling attention to the misleading and fabricated assertions of the now-former Bush administration is that it's important to remember that they didn't tell us the truth, that we still don't really know what they did in our name, and that, if some people have their way, we never will.

Here's what Suskind had to say in an e-mail to me yesterday: "Almost all the valuable information offered by Zubaydah -- and there was some -- was obtained with traditional debriefing, especially certain artful uses of the Koran and Zubaydah's believe in predestination. The point, made again and again by the leading interrogation experts in the U.S. government: torture doesn't work. It is misleading to frame this debate in terms of doing whatever's necessary to get the information we desperately needed. CIA and some DOD interrogators -- legally unleashed and encouraged to improvise by a go-with-your-gut, expert-phobic White House -- forfeited some of America's most cherished principles for virtually nothing. They got very little with their 'enhanced methods.' And what they did obtain could have just as easily been yielded by traditional methods. What was lost, in terms of America's most precious asset -- its moral authority? Where does one begin? This is the hard truth that responsible public servants -- past and present -- should, at this point, acknowledge. Instead, some dead enders are relying on the fact that files remain classified and videotapes have been destroyed to confuse this issue at a time when the country is crying out for clarity. Right now, America's position should be: we tortured some people in these troubled years since 9/11, it didn't work, we shouldn't have done it, we've learned from our mistakes and we commit to never doing it again. That's what a mature nation does. It evolves."

Jane Mayer, in her book The Dark Side, substantiates many of Suskind's findings, and concludes that "whatever their motives, it appears the President and the Director of Central Intelligence gave the public misleadingly exaggerated accounts of the effectiveness of the abuse they authorized. Some might impute dishonest motives to them. But it seems more likely that they fooled not just the public, but also themselves.">>>>>>>>>>

Full article at the link above.

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-25-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:56pm
You're once again trying to make this a binary solution set when there's no evidence to substantiate such a theory.

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 04-11-2009
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:57pm

That would be the best way to verify Cheney's claims. Since this is all behind us now, those transcripts should be released.

<<<<<http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/torture/call-cheneys-bluff.html?wprss=white-house-watch

Call Cheney's Bluff

Former vice president Dick Cheney, widely suspected to have been the prime mover behind the Bush administration's adoption of torture as an interrogation technique, last night dared President Obama to release more memos, these ostensibly chronicling the "success of the effort."

Obama last week released four deeply disturbing documents, in which government lawyers attempted to justify, in chilling detail, flatly unconscionable and illegal acts such as waterboarding, slamming detainees against a wall, and stuffing a prisoner with a fear of insects into a small box with a bug.

"There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified," Cheney shot back last night in an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity. "I formally asked that they be declassified now....If we're going to have this debate, you know, let's have an honest debate."

Please, Mr. President, call Cheney's bluff. But don't stop there. Also urge people involved in or knowledgeable about the interrogations to speak publicly about what happened. And encourage the Senate Intelligence Committee to hold its planned hearings on the subject promptly and in public.

Because, while Cheney is not entirely bluffing -- the fact is that there are inevitably a host of cover-your-ass memos that went up and down the chain of command, attempting to justify the unjustifiable -- the Bush administration has already made its best argument that torture made America safer. They've already given it their best shot, declassifying plenty of information to do so. And their claims fall apart under even modest scrutiny.

For Cheney to portray himself as the victim of secrecy is more than laughable. His signature modus operandi was for Bush aides to selectively leak or declassify secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would discredit them.

So time and time again, when it was politically necessary, the Bush White House declassified material ostensibly related to terrorist plots thwarted by heroic means.>>>>>>

Full article at the link above.

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-25-2008
Tue, 04-21-2009 - 6:58pm
In order for Cheney's remarks and this CIA report to carry even a little objective weight, we're going to need more than Cheney's or the CIA's word on the subject.

 


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