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
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 More…
Does President Obama really want to make this argument for why he’s flip-flopping on the release of the torture photographs:
I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib
“Do you know a guy named… K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asks Ali Soufan, referring to a former CIA official who alleged that — at an interrogation he never portrayed himself as attending — Abu Zubaydah broke after his initial waterboarding.
“Last week he retracted that,” Ali Soufan responded.
Graham: More…
Philip Zelikow details an argument that was “deployed against me” when he opposed torture in the Bush administration: “We briefed the following members of Congress — name name name name name name name — and they didn’t have a problem with this.”
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) brought the point up 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…
Here’s Ali Soufan, from his written opening statement and his spoken summary, delivered from behind the wooden partition.
One aspect of Ali Soufan’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that’s now somewhat cleared up, according to the ex-FBI agent’s opening statement: the FBI and the CIA/SERE-contractor team were in a back-and-forth More…
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) doesn’t really like this hearing. He says he doesn’t “question the chairman’s motivation,” which is an elegant locution, and proceeds to assert what Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) calls “facts not in the record” — that torture worked, basically. Graham fears the criminalization of a policy debate More…
Live from Dirksen Senate office building 226: you’re not going to see former FBI agent Ali Soufan, one of the two stars of today’s Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture. Over by the far side of the room is a wood-paneled maroon partition — it looks like something behind which More…
I’m going to head over to the Dirksen Senate office building pretty soon to cover the Soufan/Zelikow hearings. But before I go: it looks like Khost province, in eastern Afghanistan, is the target of increasing insurgent activity.
It seems like every few days I get a press
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