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Banned
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Originally Posted by roachboy
....i think it would matter, and matter quite alot, if the infotainment the commission used for the report was in part or as a whole extracted under torture, wouldn't you?
it seems to me that this is the direction indicated by the information here and elsewhere about the linkage of the cia tape destruction and the 9/11 report.
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Never as simple as it seems....the 2003 Time piece can be interwoven with the comments in Kean and Hamilton's current op-ed:
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...Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information on these broad topics that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 118 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two senior Qaeda operatives, portions of whose interrogations were apparently recorded and then destroyed.
The C.I.A. gave us many reports summarizing information gained in the interrogations. But the reports raised almost as many questions as they answered. Agency officials assured us that, if we posed specific questions, they would do all they could to answer them.
So, in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.’s general counsel. One set posed dozens of specific questions about the reports, including those about Abu Zubaydah. A second set, even more important in our view, asked for details about the translation process in the interrogations; the background of the interrogators; the way the interrogators handled inconsistencies in the detainees’ stories; the particular questions that had been asked to elicit reported information; the way interrogators had followed up on certain lines of questioning; the context of the interrogations so we could assess the credibility and demeanor of the detainees when they made the reported statements; and the views or assessments of the interrogators themselves.
The general counsel responded in writing with non-specific replies. The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded or that it had held any further relevant information, in any form. Not satisfied with this response, we decided that we needed to question the detainees directly, including Abu Zubaydah and a few other key captives.
In a lunch meeting on Dec. 23, 2003, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, told us point blank that we would have no such access. During the meeting, we emphasized to him that the C.I.A. should provide any documents responsive to our requests, even if the commission had not specifically asked for them. Mr. Tenet replied by alluding to several documents he thought would be helpful to us, but neither he, nor anyone else in the meeting, mentioned videotapes.
A meeting on Jan. 21, 2004, with Mr. Tenet, the White House counsel, the secretary of defense and a representative from the Justice Department also resulted in the denial of commission access to the detainees. Once again, videotapes were not mentioned.
As a result of this January meeting, the C.I.A. agreed to pose some of our questions to detainees and report back to us. The commission concluded this was all the administration could give us. But the commission never felt that its earlier questions had been satisfactorily answered. So the public would be aware of our concerns, we highlighted our caveats on page 146 in the commission report....
From Page 146- http://www.faqs.org/docs/911/911Report-163.html
Detainee Interrogation Reports
Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al
Qaeda members. A number of these "detainees" have firsthand knowl-
edge of the 9/11 plot.
Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses--sworn enemies
of the United States--is challenging. Our access to them has been
limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications
received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place.
We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no con-
trol over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would
be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we
could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambigui-
ties in the reporting.We were told that our requests might disrupt the
sensitive interrogation process.
We have nonetheless decided to include information from captured
9/11 conspirators and al Qaeda members in our report.We have evalu-
ated their statements carefully and have attempted to corroborate them
with documents and statements of others. In this report, we indicate
where such statements provide the foundation for our narrative.We have
been authorized to identify by name only ten detainees whose custody
has been confirmed officially by the U.S. government.
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Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...480240,00.html
NEW BOOK SAYS ABU ZUBAYDAH HAS MADE STARTLING REVELATIONS ABOUT SECRET CONNECTIONS LINKING SAUDI ARABIA, PAKISTAN AND OSAMA BIN LADEN
Sunday, Aug. 31, 2003
....Posner elaborates in startling detail how U.S. interrogators used drugs - an unnamed "quick-on, quick-off" painkiller and Sodium Pentothal, the old movie truth serum - in a chemical version of reward and punishment to make Zubaydah talk. When questioning stalled, according to Posner, CIA men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions.
Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do."The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd and a publisher better known as a racehorse owner. His horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby in 2002). To the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-Osama triangle, according to the book.
Zubaydah, writes Posner, said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom�s longtime intelligence chief. Zubaydah said bin Laden "personally" told him of a 1991 meeting at which Turki agreed to let bin Laden leave Saudi Arabia and to provide him with secret funds as long as al-Qaeda refrained from promoting jihad in the kingdom. The Pakistani contact, high - ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali Mir, entered the equation, Zubaydah said, at a 1996 meeting in Pakistan also attended by Zubaydah. Bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then in the military but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan�s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to get protection, arms and supplies for al-Qaeda. Zubaydah told interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was "blessed by the Saudis," according to Posner.
Zubaydah said he attended a third meeting in Kandahar in 1998 with Turki, senior ISI agents and Taliban officials. There Turki promised, writes Posner, that "more Saudi aid would flow to the Taliban, and the Saudis would never ask for bin Laden�s extradition, so long as al-Qaeda kept its long-standing promise to direct fundamentalism away from the kingdom." In Posner�s stark judgment, the Saudis "effectively had (bin Laden) on their payroll since the start of the decade." Abu Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named, according to the book.
The last eight paragraphs of the book set up a final startling development, McGeary writes. Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one another. On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed was felled by a heart attack at age 43. One day later Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, was killed in what was called a high-speed car accident. The last member of the trio, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, officially "died of thirst" while traveling east of Riyadh one week later. And seven months after that, Mushaf Ali Mir, by then Pakistan�s Air Marshal, perished in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly North-West Frontier Province, along with his wife and closest confidants, Posner writes.
Without charging any skulduggery (Posner told TIME they "may in fact be coincidences"), the author notes that these deaths occurred after CIA officials passed along Zubaydah�s accusations to Riyadh and Islamabad. Washington, reports Posner, was shocked when Zubaydah claimed that �9/11 changed nothing� about the clandestine marriage of terrorism and Saudi and Pakistani interests, "because both Prince Ahmed and Mir knew that an attack was scheduled for American soil on that day." They couldn�t stop it or warn the U.S. in advance, Zubaydah said, because they didn�t know what or where the attack would be. And they couldn�t turn on bin Laden afterward because he could expose their prior knowledge. Both capitals swiftly assured Washington that "they had thoroughly investigated the claims and they were false and malicious." The Bush Administration, writes Posner, decided that "creating an international incident and straining relations with those regional allies when they were critical to the war in Afghanistan and the buildup for possible war with Iraq, was out of the question."
The book seems certain to kick up a political and diplomatic firestorm, McGeary writes. The first question everyone will ask is, Is it true? And many will wonder if these matters were addressed in the 28 pages censored from Washington�s official report on 9/11. It has long been suggested that Saudi Arabia probably had some kind of secret arrangement to stave off fundamentalists within the kingdom. But, McGeary writes, this appears to be the first description of a repeated, explicit quid pro quo between bin Laden and a Saudi official. Posner told TIME he got the details of Zubaydah�s interrogation and revelations from a U.S. official outside the CIA at a "very senior Executive Branch level" whose name we would probably know if he told it to us, McGeary writes. He did not. The second source, Posner said, was from the CIA, and he gave what Posner viewed as general confirmation of the story but did not repeat the details. There are top Bush Administration officials who have long taken a hostile view of Saudi behavior regarding terrorism and might want to leak Zubaydah�s claims. Prince Turki, now Saudi Arabia�s ambassador to Britain, did not respond to Posner�s letters and faxes.
Finally, the details of Zubaydah�s drug-induced confessions might bring on charges that the U.S. is using torture on terror suspects. According to Posner, the Administration decided shortly after 9/11 to permit the use of Sodium Pentothal on prisoners. The Administration, he writes, "privately believes that the Supreme Court has implicitly approved using such drugs in matters where public safety is at risk," citing a 1963 opinion.
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My ambition is only to find a consensus among our members on what is reasonable to think in reaction to six years of official "spin". |