Month: April 2009

And Where The Whole Thing Becomes A Movie …

RUMSFELDJimWatson:AFP:Getty

… is when you can link the torture to the obsession with finding a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. McClatchy's story is the most eye-popping of the last week in my view, certainly a twist I didn't fully foresee:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

The first reason to use torture is to prevent a ticking time bomb that could kill millions; the second reason is as a routine part of intelligence gathering; the third is to produce false confessions to justify a war already planned. Torture is a powerful weapon, isn't it? Look how many it corrupted so completely and so fast. 

(Photo: Jim Watson/Getty.)

Before They Ordered Up The “Legal” Memos

They readied the torture techniques they intended to use. Jane Mayer analyzes the Levin report:

On April 16, 2002—a couple weeks after Zubaydah’s capture, and three and a half months before the Bybee memo—a military psychologist named Dr. Bruce Jessen was already circulating a blueprint for cruelly coercive interrogations based on torture methods used by Chinese Communist forces during the Korean War. The report describes Jessen’s blueprint as a “draft exploitation plan” for U.S.-held captives. (I wrote about Dr. Jessen’s partner, James Mitchel, in the July 11, 2005, issue of The New Yorker.)

By June 2002—again, months before the Department of Justice gave the legal green light for interrogations—an F.B.I. special agent on the scene of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah refused to participate in what he called “borderline torture,” according to a D.O.J. investigation cited in the Levin report. Soon after, F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller commanded his personnel to stay away from the C.I.A.’s coercive interrogations.

What did the F.B.I. see in the spring of 2002?

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes:

You recently posted a recession view about the line of 60+ people on Ventura Blvd in Los Angeles. I was in that line, waiting for two hours to be interviewed on the sidewalk by a group of 22 year olds running a burger joint. I’m a 47 year old man, single without health insurance, trying to cobble together enough money each month to pay my rent and food, working to get my way back to where I was ten years ago. Ten years ago, I was a sales manager for a furniture manufacturing company, making $10,000 a week, travelling around the US, succeeding wildly. The company I built during the 90s is now gone, a casualty of cheap Chinese furniture imports.

I’m working to save enough money to get out of California. Retail business is very close to zero. For lease signs on commercial buildings are more prevalent than operating businesses, and every single one of my friends is going through traumatic economic changes, none for the better. The reaction by the California legislature is “Hike up the taxes. We need more revenue.”

People are leaving the state in droves, seeking out low-tax, low-regulation places to live. There are exurban neighborhoods which were seriously overbuilt during the past twenty years that are depopulating now. The people who moved to these places moved to purchase lower-priced homes. They were the most economically strained and the first to lose their homes. It could take decades for many parts of California (and overbuilt Florida) to recover.
 
My political views have been aligned with yours for many years, though I can not be a supporter of Obama. I fear the spending and bailouts are digging us much deeper into a hole, throwing good money after bad, exactly the same as the Bush administration did with overspending. I am gay, HIV positive, Libertarian in theory but registered Republican. My disenchantment with the Republican party came within the first few months of the Bush administration, when it was co-opted by Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld. All the sensible moderates – Whitman, Thompson, Voinovich, etc – were excised from power, replaced by those who made decisions based upon religious dogma.

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You say that the $100 million in budget cuts is a “good sign” that Obama understands the complaints about the deficit and about spending.  I disagree.  I’m a staunch Obama supporter and a lifelong Democrat, but I can’t for the life of me see this as anything other than a bit of a stunt.

A brutally effective stunt, but a stunt nonetheless. 

This is nothing but a lean scrap of meat thrown out for the cable nets to fight over — it’s just that in fighting over it, it knocks the tea parties out of the news cycle and replaces “budget hawks protest Obama” as the last bit of news with “Obama the budget cutter.”  At the same time, it goes a long way towards neutralizing the pork canard — by pointing out that he cut roughly as much in federal spending as is spent on pork over a short period of time, he mutes the pork hunting crowd.

Obama may or may not be serious about cutting the budget.  But this $100 million is nothing but a cheap and yet highly effective trick.

Thiessen’s LA Tower Canard

We will not know for sure how much garbage or non-garbage the CIA gleaned from torturing captives until a Truth Commission sorts it all out, but we do have a great deal of evidence that torturing KSM was, pace Thiessen, not responsible for foiling the LA Tower plot. As Tim Noah notes, there is a matter of chronology:

In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.