interrogation

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 from the start that he did [...]

Via Greg Sargent, a Gallup poll finds 51 percent of the public wants an “investigation into the use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration” and a distressing 55 percent of the public thinks the use of such techniques was justified. Greg remarks:
That suggests, I think, that voters are capable of [...]

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 CIA from 1997 to 2004, [...]

In the interest of obsessive Kremlinology, something else worth noting from the Washington Post’s timeline of Obama’s decision to declassify last week’s torture memos. Notice that two of the officials arguing against disclosure are White House senior counterrorism adviser John Brennan, a CIA veteran, and CIA Deputy Director Steve Kappes. Those guys are pretty well [...]

In the guts of this Washington Post tick-tock about President Obama’s decision to release the torture memos comes an account of a meeting at CIA headquarters in December between Obama emissaries and top outgoing CIA officials. The agency officials, including still-Deputy Director Steve Kappes, made a case for Obama to retain torture techniques not including [...]

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 what they were considering doing to [...]

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. But the release last week of four [...]

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, after consultation with Attorney General Eric Holder, just issued a declassified narrative of how the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel came to approve the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. You can read the report at the committee’s Website, but I want to focus on one brief aspect of it:
In [...]

After Philip Zelikow, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice, disclosed yesterday that he wrote a memo in 2005 dissenting from the Office of Legal Counsel’s embrace of the CIA’s abusive interrogation techniques, I called the State Department to get a copy of Zelikow’s dissent. I traded calls for the past 24 hours with the press [...]

So it appears from the Senate Armed Services Committee report that in 2002, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was rather interested in “aggressive” interrogations at Guanantamo Bay. Wolfowitz — often described, as he is in this NPR piece in 2007, as “an intellectual heavyweight who believes passionately in democracy and human rights” — apparently [...]