I am writing this diary mainly to send to my friends ..because I don't think John-Q public has been paying attention and I need a mothership of sorts...
This includes summaries of information gathered from great diaries here on KOS such as
teacherken's diary
emptywheel's diary
Meteor Blades' Diary
mcjoan's diary
I believe that this fight will be the civil war of our lifetime and people need to know what's going on. The president and DOJ are going to need our support and I hope that this primer will get people to open their eyes!
"What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight ... is how we behave. In
everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we
treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are
warriors, we are also all human beings. "
-- General David Petraeus
May 10,2007
The NYTimesdoes a decent job of documenting this, but I wanted to break it down a bit further as it is really getting quite confusing.
First we know about torture in the CIA - here is one take of hundres NY Times
In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail — llike keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.
The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.
But have you looked at these memos?? Have a look
Here is the one by Judge Bybee that is a justification (such as it is)
And one detailing the techniquesemployed
Page 7 of this memo begins to describe techniques such as walling, stress positions,
Then we found out that one of the prisoners Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) was waterboarded183 times in ONE MONTH
The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.
WOW! What would we be doing if N. Korea did something like this to the two American journalists they are currently holding.
Then we get the recently released Armed Services Committee Report on action in military prisons - everything to this point has been on the CIA. This document is particularly troubling for numerous reasons..
- It indicates the program was developed LONG before the approval memos were issued.
- The program was based on SERE techniques which basically means they used a program designed to help US soldiers deal with propaganda torture and made that into an interrogation technique. Here is some of what Senator Levin said in an Op-ed published on a blog.
In SERE training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. Until recently, the Navy SERE school also used waterboarding. The purpose of the SERE program is to provide U.S. troops who might be captured a taste of the treatment they might face so that they might have a better chance of surviving captivity and resisting abusive and coercive interrogations.
SERE training techniques were never intended to be used in the interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody. The Committee's report, however, reveals troubling new details of how SERE techniques came to be used in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.
3) The purpose of the program was to find ties between Sadaam and Al-Queida
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."
We also have top Bush administration officials stating that they wrote memos stating that there was no legal justification for this - including Rice's Counsel Zelikow -in an interviewwith Rachel Maddow earlier this week
MADDOW: So you first saw these Office of Legal Counsel memos in 2005. What was your reaction to the legal reasoning in those memos?
ZELIKOW: Many years earlier when I had been a law student and had been a practicing lawyer, I had worked, actually, on issues of treatment of prisoners and that whole body of constitutional law. So when I saw the memoranda, I was struck by the fact that, even aside from the policy problems, the legal reasoning seemed deeply unsound to me, and I wasn't sure that the president and his advisers understood just how potentially questionable and unreasonable many lawyers and judges would find this reasoning. And so, I thought it was important to just say, hey, there is another view here of this law, and a lot of people would regard the views in these memos as, to say the least, outliers.
The latest in this tale - FBI agents saying that KSM was useful and helpful BEFORE any torture program was enacted
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.
Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came through from Pat D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that "we don’t do that," and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general).
There is so much happening on this - and much more..please read these articles and think about what this means for our country, who we are are and the legacy we leave for our children.