Late in 2008, Mike McConnell, then the director of national intelligence, issued a directive instructing CIA officials at overseas outposts directly responsible to him. It was the first time in the brief history of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that the director had waded a toe into More…
One last thing from today’s Zelikow/Soufan hearing. Phil Zelikow was an aide to Condoleezza Rice when she served as secretary of state during George W. Bush’s second term. In his testimony, perhaps unsurprisingly, he portrayed Rice as pushing to restrict the Bush administration’s torture policies. “As Secretary of State, Dr. More…
Hidden in plain sight in the Office of Legal Counsel memos on the CIA interrogation is a mystery: How did the “enhanced interrogation” technique of sleep deprivation come to depend on stress positions?
Somehow, between 2002 and 2005, CIA interrogators began using what the International Committee of the Red Cross More…
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…
Forgive me if I’m going over ground other people have covered, but as I was going through the 2005 Office of Legal Counsel torture memos for something else, I came across a mention of something I didn’t think I’d seen put out there. Namely: George Tenet, the director of the 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…
We’ve long known that the CIA waterboarded at least three Al Qaeda detainees.
We’ve also long known that the Justice Dept., at the behest of a Central Intelligence Agency deeply fearful about its legal vulnerabilities, endorsed the torture techniques that CIA leadership desired. And we’ve recently learned that George W. More…
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