Posted on 11/06/2011 5:32:48 AM PST by Servant of the Cross
Binyam Mohamed is back in the news. You may remember him as the al-Qaeda operative who was slated to help would-be “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla conduct a second wave of post-9/11 attacks, targeting American cities. You also may not remember him. After all, the Obama administration quietly released him without charges.
Well, there’s a new chapter in this sordid tale. Mohamed is living large — taxpayer-funded large — in Great Britain. For that, we can thank the Lawyer Left’s stubborn insistence that enemy war criminals are really run-of-the-mill defendants. Actually, make that run-of-the-mill plaintiffs.
Unlike Padilla, who actually got into the United States, only to be apprehended in Chicago, Mohamed was captured in Karachi and turned over to the CIA. (Marc Thiessen provides more details about the case here.) Mohamed was interrogated by American and British intelligence.
The U.S. Defense Department wanted to try Mohamed by military commission. Alas, Britain’s Labour government was deathly afraid of the potential for a trial to expose its complicity in “enhanced interrogation” tactics, which an international propaganda campaign had equated with “torture” — and how about a round of applause for Sen. John McCain and Attorney General Eric Holder for sharpening that arrow in every defense lawyer’s quiver? Like virtually all captured terrorists now do, Mohamed claimed to have been tortured with Saddam-style cruelty. And as is virtually always the case, to call the allegation overblown is not to do it justice. Based on disclosures in various court cases, it is now clear that Mohamed was subjected to stress — essentially, sleep deprivation. Compared to actual torture, that is trivial.
Yet, goaded by its base (the leftist and pro-Islamist contingents that now make up the Occupy London crowd), the Blair-Brown government pleaded with the Obama administration to transfer Mohamed from Gitmo to England.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
In sum FBI interrogators had pretty well uncovered a lot about the inner workings of Al Qaeda (they were involved because of the original WTC bombing and because of the Cole and had identified a lot of potential suspects. Under EIT under the CIA high value targets would confess to anything, rather than provide actionable intelligence and low level operators would confess to being high level operators because the CIA did not know any better.
It is a sad story, one that serves Cheney, Tenet, and Rumsfeld poorly, another example of folks who thought they knew better than anyone else following political motives rather than taking advice from professionals.
One terrorist whom Soufan was interviewing at Gitmo promised to cooperate fully in exchange for a phone call with his wife (some Arabs actually love their wives), but this went all the way to the top and Wolfowitz denied permission. How many people died because of that stupid decision we can only speculate.
And to put it bluntly Soufan had no problem jailing or killing terrorists, but is view is that these quasi-legal tactics were downright harmful.
So, don't blame the Brits for this guy going. Blame folks like Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Tennet. They called the shots that undermined these amateurish quasi-investigative techniques.
Marc Theissen has written several times debunking this fallacy. The EITs were not to extract information but to break the suspect's will to resist. The questions they were asked under duress were ones to which the interrogators already knew the answer. Once the terrorists will was broken, information was extracted using conventional techniques.
Now there is a credible independent expert on the subject for you. /I hope I don't have to point out the sarcasm in this statement/
The guy is a speachwriter and republican political operative with no experience in national security, intelligence, or investigative techniques.
And why real conservatives would choose to defend the bigotted ignorant actions of know-it-all better-than-anyone-else neocons is absolutely beyond me. Remember, these guys bankrupted the US.
Padilla will be up for parole in 9 years.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said:
So the point I would make to folks who say, "I don't want you doing this, and it doesn't work anyway," I would point out, "Whoa. Stop. The front half of that sentence, you can say; that's yours, you own that, 'I don't want you doing it.' The back half of that sentence is not yours. That's mine. And the fact is it did work. So here is the sentence you have to give. 'Even though it may have worked, I still don't want you doing it.' That requires courage. That requires you going out to the American people and saying, 'We're looking at a tradeoff here folks, and I want you to understand the tradeoff.'" I can live with that tradeoff. I can live with the person who makes that tradeoff. Either way. That's an honorable position. But I felt duty-bound to be true to the facts.[89]
Former CIA operative John Kiriakou in 2007 told CNN's "American Morning" that the torture of Al Qaeda's Abu Zubayda indirectly lead to the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:[87]
The former agent, who said he participated in the Abu Zubayda interrogation but not his waterboarding, said the CIA decided to waterboard the al Qaeda operative only after he was "wholly uncooperative" for weeks and refused to answer questions. All that changed -- and Zubayda reportedly had a divine revelation -- after 30 to 35 seconds of waterboarding, Kiriakou said he learned from the CIA agents who performed the technique. The terror suspect, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reportedly gave up information that indirectly led to the 2003 raid in Pakistan yielding the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged planner of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Kiriakou said. The CIA was unaware of Mohammed's stature before the Abu Zubayda interrogation, the former agent said.[88]
A lot of people are resorting to half-truths to deny the program's usefulness in finding Bin Laden. They say the information was obtained using standard interrogation techniques. That's true; Once a terrorist's will was broken via EIT, the information was obtained using normal methods.
Another half-truth is that "It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier." That misses the point. When one key terrorist denied knowing Bin Laden's courier, the interrogators already knew that he was aware. His denial showed them that this particular courier was important, i.e. worth denying.
Remember, these interrogations were not actually conducted by CIA agents, but by contractors who had a vested interest (financial gain) in claiming that they could do what government investigators could not.
Abu Zubayda is already well discussed in the references I provided you, and you should go and read them to correct your personal ignorance on the issue.
And just remember, your fellow neo-cons are just as responsible for bankrupting this country as is Obama. Indeed, they showed him the way.
PPS the Kuwaiti courier who led us to Obama was known to the FBI, long before the CIA water boarded him. The long delays were because the CIA refused to listen to the FBI.
That you choose to side with the intellectually lazy slobs who think you beat the truth out of people tells lots about you, Dilbert, if your screen name did not already.
And Ali Soufan is not covering his ass?
And Ali Soufan is not covering his ass?
And he is not the recipient of a book deal in which he received payment for saying the “right things” as so many others have?
Just wondering.
Is that the internal IG audit conducted around the time the disgraced CIA employee Mary McCarthy- one of classified document thief Sandy Berger’s pals- was working with the CIA internal inspector? She, the gal who took it upon herself to leak classified information?
She was apparently working in conjuction with that stupid ambassador to Gabon Joe Wilson’s bunch, the Ellsberg leak squad known as VIPS.
Which side are you on? You think the CIA, the same CIA that botched the fall of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Shah, 9/11 (even though all the leads were there, but the CIA refused to follow them while preventing the FBI from doing so.) And by the way EITs were not the CIA anyway, but a bunch of black-ops contractors. So what is it you think you are defending?
Oh yes, a bunch of neo-cons, who are not even really our RINOs, but retred Democrats anyway.
E.g. "...[t]he Bush administration regularly argued that the main purpose of the techniques was to extract information that could be used to foil imminent terror plots. But the inspector general said his investigation failed to "uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent."
"Gen. David H. Petraeus, sent a letter to troops this month warning that ''expedient methods'' using force violated American values." [Now are you calling Petraeus a traitor and soft on terrorism?"] "some of the experts involved in the interrogation review, called ''Educing Information,'' say that during World War II, German and Japanese prisoners were effectively questioned without coercion. ''It far outclassed what we've done,'' said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., ''had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,'' and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report. Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003, called the post-Sept. 11 efforts ''amateurish'' by comparison to the World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners' culture. "
"A. B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the C.I.A., the No. 3 post at the agency, from 2001 to 2004, agreed with that assessment [defending EITs] but acknowledged that the agency had to create an interrogation program from scratch in 2002 [IOWs the CIA did not have interrogation capabilities prior to 2002 and made it all up]"
Source: Advisers Fault Harsh Methods In Interrogation
This is not a group of crackpot amateurs and liberal hacks, but an advisory board appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the President
Our glorious FBI turned loose a WTC bomber and let him set up house in Baghdad. Then it got involved in smuggling guns into Mexico.
Then assorted government agencies squabbled over the USS Cole like a bunch of girls fighting over jacks inn the schoolyard.
How do you feel about Petreaus, now Andy? He’s accused of letting his girlfriend take home classified documents. I think he was set up, but the old boy evidently fell for the trap hook, line and sinker. Hope everyone is wrong and the charges are false, but that’s what it looks like. Of course he’s got a book deal again.
Then we have a bunch of Generals smoozing with Lebanese chicks all around McDill, pretending to be ambassadors.
We have unaccounted for military brass. A dead ambassador killed by terrorists the bleedinghearts had released,a dead station chief in Afghanistan, and Iran is now in charge of Yemen while AQ under various names is rampaging all over the world and none of them are shaking in the boots over any fear of being captured because they know they’ll be handled with kid gloves and then cut loose or get set up in a nice cozy life somewhere where they can keep doing what they do.
The secret service has been behaving like frat boys.
Our entire government and especially our so-called justice system is a farce.
You mean the same Petreaus who got caught up in a honey trap?
How’s that crack FBI doing with interrogating those Democrat operatives in the non gov emails case, by the way?
At least the CIA doesn’t extend immunity everyone and their dog in exchange for nothing...
Bfl
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