How a Detainee Became an Assett

1. According to The Washington Post, Sunday, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, mastermind of 9-11, went from "reticent" witness before waterboarding to conducting "terrorist tutorials" after

2. So eager to cooperate was the hairy backed butcher, he asked for a blackboard and admonished agents to pay closer attention, the stuff he was teaching was important

3. Indeed, KSM became America's "preeminent source" on Al Qaeda after undergoing sleep deprivation, mock drowning and other unpleasant experiences at the hands of our heroic secret service agents

4. According to The Post, KSM's "spirit was broken" in the month after his arrest on March 1, 2003

5. Incidentally, KSM was only captured after colleague Abu Zebaydah gave up crucial where's and when's after his enhanced interrogation

6. After his month of misery, once he started cooperating, KSM was never harshly dealt with again

7. "What do you think changed KSM's mind?" one former senior intelligence official asked rhetorically, "of course it began with that"

8. Now KSM, it is true, later told reps from the Red Cross that he lied a little to his questioners to get them to quit being so hard on him, but his "false leads" are chased down, his misinformation is subject to correction by the legwork of agents on the ground

9. Inspector General Helgerson remains noncommittal on the politically charged question of the effectiveness of EIT's, he does not say they worked, he does not say they didn't

10. But even Attorney General Holder's chief apologist has trouble denying the obvious: "Certain of the techniques seemed to have little effect, whereas waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information," [Helgerson] said in an interview. "But we didn't have the time or resources to do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out"

11. Still, according to The Post: "Detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals -- many of whom we had never heard of before -- that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations," according to the CIA summary

12. Mohammed described plans to strike targets in Saudi Arabia, East Asia and the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, including using a network of Pakistanis "to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York"

13. CIA agents present at the time got the impression, they said, that KSM, like other detainees, felt that it was ok to stop resisting after he had endured a certain amount of pressure

14. "Once the harsher techniques were used on [detainees], they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more of them," said the former official, who requested anonymity because the events are still classified. "After that point, they became compliant."

15. Mohammed was an unparalleled source in deciphering al-Qaeda's strategic doctrine, key operatives and likely targets, the summary said, including describing in "considerable detail the traits and profiles" that al-Qaeda sought in Western operatives and how the terrorist organization might conduct surveillance in the United States

16. The source used by The Post to discover these dramatic developments are the very documents released by Attorney General Holder on Monday

17. Stunningly stupid politics, Mr President

washingtonpost.com

After enduring the CIA's harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency's secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called "terrorist tutorials."

These scenes provide previously unpublicized details about the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.

"KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete," according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA's then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general's report and other documents released this week indicate.

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The Prof

And yet we have expert interrogators from the FBI saying that traditional interrogation methods are much more effective then torture (stop the "Enhanced Interrogation" bull, the US called it torture when it was done to our troops).

Ex-FBI Interrogator: Torture "Ineffective" - CBS News

A former FBI man who interrogated an al Qaeda leader said Wednesday extreme techniques used by the Bush administration were "ineffective, slow and unreliable" and caused the prisoner to stop talking.

Ali Soufan, testifying to a Senate panel behind a screen to hide his identity, said that his interrogation team obtained a "treasure trove" of information from Abu Zubaydah using a non-threatening approach that outwitted the detainee - even getting him to talk by using his childhood nickname.

Soufan said his team had to step aside when CIA contractors took over, using simulated drowning, sleep deprivation and other harsh methods. He said those techniques caused the prisoner to "shut down."

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that's nice

enhanced interrogation turns khalid sheikh muhammad into "terrorist tutor," as headlined by the washington post, is DEVASTATING politics

and yet it's right there in the midst of the very documents ag holder himself released

LOLOLOL!

for one thing, ksm is so FAMOUS

and speaking of headlines---waterboarding is, well, it's so PASSE

ie, DONE to DEATH

the latest RAGE is all for---THREATS directed against kiddie relatives, MOCK executions, POWER DRILLS, 2nd hand SMOKE...

LOLOLOL!

most normal non-partisans don't really consider EMPTY THREATS torture

hey, if you and your fbi ACADEMIC do, why, i think that's just GREAT!

unfortunately, the post's banner blares one unbelievably dumb obama

oh well

it really has nothing to do with you or me

it's just SUICIDE politics, that's all it is

the BIG STORY of THIS week

so sorry

So let me get this straight they tortured KSM for a month and he then started talking about the operational structure of Al-Qaida. Tell me again how does torture justify the outcome? We have been able to get this information through normal interrogation and there's nothing to say we couldn't have gotten this otherwise. So now the whole ticking time bomb scenario apologists like to use doesn't exist as he did not stop any plots from his torture. Again torture is not effective. Again though we have anonymous sources revealing this information.
From the IG Report:

The effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be so easily measured, however.

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In other words there's no proof that the information couldn't have been gotten without torture.

Also lets talk about the rest of the article since you conveniently skip whatever doesn't make your points

After enduring the CIA's harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency's secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called "terrorist tutorials."

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This doesn't sound like what you described about him breaking within a month of being captured. Instead he was there over a year.

"But we didn't have the time or resources to do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out."

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They could not confirm the actual quality of the information. During interrogation KSM gave up a lot of false leads which wasted manhours for the government.

Again you're cherry picking from the article to try to support your conclusion.

Glenn Greenwald thoroughly debunked this Washington Post article.

He took it apart piece by piece.

He even predicted the wing nuts would spread this misinformation like wildfire.

Observe how a journalist with integrity and principles can see right through it.

The Washington Post's Cheney-ite defense of torture - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

1. Notice the source of the article.

"Two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified"; "one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding"; "one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said"; "One former agency official." It's unclear how much overlap there is in that orgy of pro-Cheney anonymity, but there is not a single on-the-record source to corroborate the Torture-Saved-Us-From-Mass-Death narrative, nor is there even a shred of information about the motives or views of these "officials."

2. The Washington Post has already told us the Inspector Generals' report provides no evidence torture helped.

GG What makes the Post's breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims -- the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report -- provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves. Ironically, nobody has done a better job this week of demonstrating how true that is than the Post's own Greg Sargent -- who, in post after post this week -- dissected the IG Report to demonstrate that it provides no evidence for Cheney's claims that torture helped obtain valuable intelligence.

3. Three of four other papers of record covered the same Inspectors report and concluded clearly it did not say that torture helped at all.

That the released documents provide no support for Cheney's claims was so patently clear that many news articles contained unusually definitive statements reporting that to be so. The New York Times reported that the documents Cheney claimed proved his case "do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness." ABC News noted that "the visible portions of the heavily redacted reports do not indicate whether such information was obtained as a result of controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding." TPM's Zachary Roth documented that "nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture," while The Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman detailed that, if anything, the documents prove "that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations." As Sargent reported, even Bush's loyal Terrorism adviser, Frances Fargos Townsend, admitted that the IG Report provides no basis for what the Post today is ludicrously implying:

4. Quoting Bush's own terrorism advisor at the time, Francis Townsend has said the IG report does not say tortue helped.

""It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.""

5. Quoting actual journalist Jane Meyers who read the report.

Well, the documents that I've seen, and maybe I'm missing something, but so far, I am amazed at how little support there is for the things that Vice President Cheney has been saying. There is nothing but a mass of claims that they got information from this individual and that individual, many from KSM, who apparently has been the greatest fount of information for them, but there's absolutely nothing saying that they had to beat them to get this information. In fact, as anybody knows who knows anything about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he was dying to tell the world, when he was interviewed by Al Jazeera before he was in US custody, about everything he knew and everything he did. He was proud of his role as the mastermind of 9/11. He loves to talk about it. So there's no evidence that I see in this that these things were necessary. I spoke to someone at the CIA who was an adviser to them who conceded to me that "We could have gotten the same information from tea and crumpets."

those are very nice arguments, fellas, but the fact you have to make em kinda proves CARVILLE's point

devastating politics for the white house

america doesn't have time to read your rationalizations

america doesn't care to

america never heard of glen greenblatt

america knows The Post

the fact that you gotta attack its breathless corruption (LOL!) kinda tells once more

and ksm is FAMOUS

the story's out---ksm turned into a TUTOR

it's spelled P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S

obama/holder CHOSE the issue

70 ops were discovered

argue on, angels and pins

with every legalistic, perfectly spelled word of yours, the president shrinks

The Prof said:

those are very nice arguments, fellas, but the fact you have to make em kinda proves CARVILLE's point

devastating politics for the white house

america doesn't have time to read your rationalizations

america doesn't care to

america never heard of glen greenblatt

america knows The Post

the fact that you gotta attack its breathless corruption (LOL!) kinda tells once more

and ksm is FAMOUS

the story's out---ksm turned into a TUTOR

it's spelled P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S

obama/holder CHOSE the issue

70 ops were discovered

argue on, angels and pins

with every legalistic, perfectly spelled word of yours, the president shrinks

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What grade are you in?

nice comeback, dragondad

the post story about ksm flipping after eit's is a huge political loser for the white house

on the biggest issue of the week

selected specifically by the admin itself

pretty stupid

sorry

The Prof said:

nice comeback, dragondad

the post story about ksm flipping after eit's is a huge political loser for the white house

on the biggest issue of the week

selected specifically by the admin itself

pretty stupid

sorry

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The post is entirely inconsistent. It's own writer Greg Sargent has been writing about this all week. The post apparently doesn't read their own stuff.

1. The fact is this is something that has to be investigated.

2. You're taking a very liberal position telling everyone to look the other way

3. Even Abu Gonzales agrees with Holder and thinks this should be investigated

4. Interrogators went beyond the guidelines provided by justice

5. You're speaking of rationalizations, you're the one trying to rationalize away the use of torture.

6. Chronology does not mean causation. There is no proof that if we used normal means that we wouldn't have gotten the same operational information.

7. The FBI distanced themselves from this method once it was used.

8. Many people within the CIA were worried about going down this road because it was illegal and against CIA practices

9. In the case of Zubaydah he revealed information before he was tortured and then clamped up afterwards.

So now which plots were stopped because of the torture?

Thursday, August 27, 2009
Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters disagree with the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the treatment and possible torture of terrorists during the Bush administration, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Thirty-six percent (36%) agree with Attorney General Eric Holder’s naming of a veteran prosecutor to probe the CIA’s handling of terrorists under the previous administration. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.

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49% Oppose Justice Department Probe of Bush-era CIA - Rasmussen Reports

Political suicide....



Obama Approval Index Month-by-Month - Rasmussen Reports

1. You're taking a very liberal position telling everyone to look the other way

I'd love to here how liberals in general advocate for something other than the fair application of the law?.

Crunch said:

49% Oppose Justice Department Probe of Bush-era CIA - Rasmussen Reports

Political suicide....

Obama Approval Index Month-by-Month - Rasmussen Reports

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Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

.

TOJ said:

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

.

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Post hoc ergo propter hoc correlation does not mean causation. That's a lot of undecideds there

PogueMoran said:

Post hoc ergo propter hoc correlation does not mean causation. That's a lot of undecideds there

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Not at all... a large majority of the people in this country don't like what Barry is doing, live with it. :mrgreen:

dragondad said:

Glenn Greenwald thoroughly debunked this Washington Post article.

He took it apart piece by piece.

He even predicted the wing nuts would spread this misinformation like wildfire.

Observe how a journalist with integrity and principles can see right through it.

The Washington Post's Cheney-ite defense of torture - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

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And the article is 4 days old. Why does prof think he doesn't have to follow the BN rules?

Crunch said:

Not at all... a large majority of the people in this country don't like what Barry is doing, live with it. :mrgreen:

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Yeah a lot of people think he has no backbone and isn't following through. He's losing the democrats. The republicans are no more popular and haven't gained on their approval ratings

TOJ said:

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

.

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It's almost 9/11, I wonder what his rating will be by the end of next week.

Crunch said:

Not at all... a large majority of the people in this country don't like what Barry is doing, live with it. :mrgreen:

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Gallup Daily: Obama Job Approval

According to Gallup, Obama's approval rating is on the rise.

apparently the president doesn't share your confidence

if he did he wouldn't have surrendered his precious public option, now, would he?

he wouldn't have relegated cap and trade to whatever this NEW wall street worry of his is gonna be

he wouldn't be ANNOUNCING all his NEW changed strategies

would he?

look around

he's losing on every front

afghanistan?

LOL!

sorry

So far all I've heard is AIDES working on a "New Strategy", something they probably do twice a day, most of these strategies probably never get used.

that's absurd

axelrod is a lot more than an aid

the white house is clearly sending SIGNALS, it's how the game is played

your naivety is astonishing

why would the white house send out AXELROD to say these things if they weren't seriously being planned?

to look wishy washy and desperately clueless for no reason?

and if they don't CHANGE STRATEGY, what the heck are they gonna do?

STAY THE COURSE?

for goodness sake, man, THINK!

LOL!