A few years ago, a pal of mine named Malcolm Nance testified to a congressional panel about how he was waterboarded. Nance used to instruct Naval Special Forces in how to resist torture, and part of their instruction was, inevitably, to undergo it themselves. Since the CIA’s contract psychologists essentially More…
Marcy Wheeler conducts an invaluable close reading of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report, released on Friday, and finds that the SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen whom CIA contracted in 2001 to advise them on how to interrogate al-Qaeda detainees recommended a horrific technique:
The
Among the many revelations in the CIA inspector general’s report released last week is this curious fact: the CIA did not have a coherent or consistent policy about the use and legality of sleep deprivation as an interrogation tactic. And it was More…
In order to learn more about the mysterious “prolonged diapering” technique formerly employed by the CIA — possibly the technique nebulously referred to in the 2004 inspector general report as an eleventh and previously unacknowledged interrogation method — I turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
“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…
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