According to current and former government officials, the CIA's secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington.For more details:
Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates.
...
Former U.S. officials say the two men were essentially the architects of the CIA's 10-step interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding.
Associates say the two made good money doing it, boasting of being paid a $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques on top al Qaeda suspects at CIA secret sites.
"The whole intense interrogation concept that we hear about, is essentially their concepts," according to Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator.
...
But it turns out neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them.
"They went to two individuals who had no interrogation experience," said Col. Kleinman. "They are not interrogators."
The new documents show the CIA later came to learn that the two psychologists' waterboarding "expertise" was probably "misrepresented" and thus, there was no reason to believe it was "medically safe" or effective. The waterboarding used on al Qaeda detainees was far more intense than the brief sessions used on U.S. military personnel in the training classes.
"The use of these tactics tends to increase resistance on the part of the detainee to cooperating with us. So they have the exact opposite effect of what you want," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich).
The new memos also show waterboarding was used "with far greater frequency than initially indicated" to even those in the CIA.
Abu Zubaydah was water boarded at least 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed at least 183 times.
That contradicts what former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who led the Zubaydah capture team, told ABC News in 2007 when he first revealed publicly that waterboarding had been used.
He said then, based on top secret reports he had access to, that Zubaydah had only been water boarded once and then freely talked.
Kiriakou now says he too was stunned to learn how often Zubaydah was waterboarded, in what Kiriakou says was clearly torture.
"When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded on one occasion," said Kiriakou. "It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."
A federal judge in New York is currently considering whether or not to make public the written logs of the interrogation sessions.
The tapes were destroyed by the CIA, but the written logs still exist, although the CIA is fighting their release.
- Click here for a Democracy Now video which interviews journalists who worked on articles about this story. This video is well worth your time. Here's the video:
- Click here to read Katherine Eban's article "Rorschach and Awe" in Vanity Fair.
- Click here to read Mark Benjamin's article "The CIA's Torture Teachers" at Salon.
- Click here to read Karen Dorn Steel's article "Senate probe focuses on Spokane men" in the SpokesmanReview.com.
Obama promised change and transparency. The American people should demand that this fraud, torture, and cover-up be investigated. Those who perpetrated these crimes should be brought to justice to ensure it never happens again (OK, that is unrealistic, but at least to discourage future wacko Presidents from going down the same path so easily).
The sad fact is that the American public has the attention span of a gnat. So all these crimes are quickly being forgotten. Nothing was learned from history:
- the excesses of the McCarthy era
- HUAC browbeating people in the 1960s
- J. Edgar Hoover (yeah, the guy who loved to wear dresses and dance with his second in command) from running CoIntelProto destroy leftists organizations in the late 1960s/early 1970s and using illegal bugging material to scare Presidents and Congress from doing any oversight into his rogue FBI
- Reagan destroying the unions
- Capped with Bush running up huge deficits to break government, creating wars "of choice" to punish demons (his father's assassination attempt and the Gog/Magag biblical nonsense), and an emerging philosophy of dictatorship under his unitary executive theory.
Note to self: The ironies of history are heart stopping. If you follow the reports on Michell Jessen, you discover that the FBI did proper interrogations. It was the CIA that was rogue. Funny, in the 1950s to 1970s, it was the FBI that was a rogue organization. Life is stranger than fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment