Saturday, April 11, 2009

CIA Videos Predated Bush Memo

By Jason Leopold
April 11, 2009

The CIA began videotaping interrogations of two alleged “high value” terrorist detainees in April 2002, four months before Bush administration attorneys issued a memo clearing the way for CIA interrogators to use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Justice Department disclosed in court documents.

Read on.
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Anonymous said...

Zubaydah was captured 3/28/02, tortured from moment one. He said too much, then waterboarded

Recall the account of Abu Zubaydah's capture and how he was tricked into revealing the names of several members of the Saudi Royal family and the Pakistani Air Marshal as involved with al-Qaeda? Here's Posner's now forgotten account in TIME magazine: www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,480240,00.html


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.


Why would the Bush Administration repeatedly waterboard him after he had already revealed the most important facts? Waterboarding damages memory. He simply knew too much. See,

CIA Torture, Memory Loss, and the Bush Administration's ...ABU ZUBAYDAH: WATERBOARDING AND MEMORY ERASURE .... That is the worst form of memory erasure, of the electorate. leveymg, Dec-13-07 01:21 PM, #4 ...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2462592 - 101k - Cached - Similar pages
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Daily Kos: CIA Used Banned Cold War “Brainwashing” Techniques on ...leveymg's diary :: :: CIA Psychologists Used Banned Cold War "Brainwashing" Techniques. Zubaydah was interrogated by a team overseen by James Elmer Mitchell ...
http://www.leveymg.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/18/141435/27/213/423878 - 39k - Cached - Similar pages

leveymg's Journal - THE CIA OFFICER WHO OVERSAW TORTURE: Cofer BlackAdvertise on more than 70 progressive blogs! leveymg's Journal .... Abu Zubaydah is said to have been driven mad by waterboarding and sensory driving ...
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Daily Kos: CIA Detainee Torture, Memory Loss, and the Bush ...Dec 13, 2007 ...

Sat Apr 11, 05:35:00 PM 2009

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