Since my piece on the intensifying battle over “preventive detention” was published, Ken Gude from the Center for American Progress wrote to point out an important distinction that deserves more emphasis.
As I note in my story, Gude and Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security More…
Imagine what would happen if Mir Hussein Moussavi disappeared into Evin prison this afternoon and then a few days later Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged to say that Moussavi, under the kind of harsh questioning necessary to protect the Islamic Republic from outside subversion, had confessed to being a paid agent of More…
So Ari Shapiro’s NPR story yesterday placed then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — a.k.a. God‘s gift to Talking Points Memo — at the center of the decision to torture Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002. Gonzales didn’t respond to Shapiro’s request for comment. But More…
Ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan’s account of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah is roughly this: he and several other interrogators from both FBI and CIA objected to the application of torture techniques from at least April to June 2002 (after which point Soufan left the interrogation team) from a More…
The CIA has been saying it briefed the leadership of the Congressional intelligence committees in 2002 about the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on detainees like Abu Zubaydah. Its implication is that Congress tacitly or explicitly consented to the torture that interrogators inflicted on those detainees — and, implicitly, if the More…
Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who helped interrogate detained al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, told lawmakers Wednesday that he wasn’t the only interrogator who opposed torturing Abu Zubaydah at a CIA-operated facility in the spring of 2002. According to Soufan, all the members of the CIA’s interrogation team stood against More…
More on that last point, building on something Soufan just said. The top CIA interrogator at the Abu Zubaydah interrogation was “100 percent in sync with the FBI view” about how to interrogate the al-Qaeda detainee without torturing him “because he’s a professional More…
According to Ali Soufan, the battle lines in the internal debate at the CIA facility where Abu Zubaydah was to be tortured broke down this way: “FBI and CIA all had the same opinion that contradicted with the contractor.” The “contractor” is most likely James Mitchell, a former SERE psychologist. More…
So says Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser and secretary of state to President George W. Bush, in this extraordinary talk with a student at Stanford University. Annie Lowrey at Foreign Policy does the hard work of transcribing, so I can simply cut-n-paste Rice’s recollection of her More…
For a forthcoming piece, I was combing through the International Committee of the Red Cross’s formerly-confidential 2007 interviews with the 14 detainees who, until September 2006, the CIA kept at its undisclosed “black site” secret prisons. (Mark Danner disclosed the document in a recent New York Review of Books More…
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