John Kiriakou was a CIA counterterrorism official involved in the initial capture of Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He was not involved in Abu Zubaydah’s torture. In 2007, he came forward to disclose that the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah for “probably 30, 35 seconds” and Zubaydah “broke” afterward. Kiriakou said More…
Assume that the senior officials in the Bush administration acted in good faith from March until August of 2002, when senior officials in Washington were debating what CIA interrogators could and should do to captured al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah. Assume they wrestled with the moral and practical complications of More…
As I mentioned, Marcy has a question about something from retired FBI agent Ali Soufan’s op-ed in The New York Times. Soufan’s whole op-ed is about how a joint FBI/CIA team interrogating Abu Zubaydah from March to June 2002 yielded valuable intelligence. But Jay Bybee’s Office of More…
You know an op-ed’s going to be good when it starts out like this:
FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified.
I think I messed up in my piece last night when I wrote:
“Zubaydah will have contact only with a new interrogation specialist, whom he has not met previously, and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (”SERE”) training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began,” wrote Jay
A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.
Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of More…
After digging through the newly-disclosed Office of Legal Counsel memos, my friend Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake discovered that CIA interrogators waterboarded 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times in one month. The New York Times piece that follows up today appropriately acknowledges Marcy’s discovery. (Full disclosure: my personal blog More…
According to knowledgeable sources, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has hired John Kiriakou, the former CIA official who assisted with the 2002 capture of al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah and who said the detainee was tortured, as an investigator. Kiriakou, a CIA counterterrorism official from 1998 to 2004, will start work More…
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