ali soufan

One more thing about the four anti-Muslim bigots in Congress using a birther-published book as fodder for their un-American crusade. Adam Serwer at The American Prospect writes:
One of the advantages America has in the war on terror is that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies can potentially draw on the talents and experiences of [...]

Marcy Wheeler has a typically excellent post going through a remarkable annex to the 2004 CIA inspector general’s torture report: the psychological profile prepared (probably by former SERE psychologist James Mitchell) of Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee to be subjected to what would become the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. (As Marcy was the first to [...]

A few months ago I pointed to declassified references in the 2005 Office of Legal Counsel torture opinions to guidelines issued by former CIA Director George Tenet in January 2003 for the application of torture techniques. It turns out, according to the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report, that Tenet issued guidelines for both the “enhanced [...]

For those, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who want to argue that CIA torture “worked,” a footnote on page six of the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture provides a blueprint for muddying the waters. Rarely if ever, according to the report, did torture occur by itself. The CIA also used the rapport-building [...]

Joby Warrick and Peter Finn’s Washington Post account of the 2002 torture of Abu Zubaydah is the most detailed and nuanced journalistic report to date of how two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were experienced in the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape program, ended up decisively influencing the interrogation of the highest-value al-Qaeda [...]

This is my favorite rejection under the Freedom of Information Act ever.
In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the [...]

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 the CIA. Then imagine Ahmadinejad [...]

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 former SERE psychologist and CIA contractor named [...]

Interesting piece from Walter Pincus reflecting anxiety within CIA that the nation will lose intelligence now that the Obama administration is requiring the CIA to use the Army Field Manual on Interrogations as a template for questioning detainees. There’s this bit of pushback to the concept of ending torture:
Another intelligence official, who also asked not [...]

It’s a rhetorical gambit predicated on a mostly false hypothetical that pretty much assumes its conclusion: There’s a bomb set to go off but you don’t know where. You’ve got a detainee in custody who knows where it is. He won’t talk. You’re running out of time. When are you going to torture him, already? [...]