At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10detain.html?ex=1158465600&en=369eb339e6e971be&ei=5043&partner=EXCITE

At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics

By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: September 10, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier when he had been captured.

The events that unfolded at the safe house over the next few weeks proved to be fateful for the Bush administration. Within days, Mr. Zubaydah was being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques — he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly loud music — the genesis of practices later adopted by some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.

President Bush pointedly cited the capture and interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah in his speech last Wednesday announcing the transfer of Mr. Zubaydah and 13 others to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And he used it to call for ratification of the tough techniques employed in the questioning.

But rather than the smooth process depicted by Mr. Bush, interviews with nearly a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials briefed on the process show, the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah was fraught with sharp disputes, debates about the legality and utility of harsh interrogation methods, and a rupture between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. that has yet to heal.

FULL story at link above.

[grytpype]

1. An unbelievable indictment of the administration's tactics.

Every time I think I can't be shocked anymore, something shocks me.

Must read, kick, rec.

[midnight]

2. Bush says he is a man of God. All the christians in this country

that support George Bush and this abuse have little awareness beyond their selfish,greedy,world, and very little in common with the woman/man I call God.

[daleo]

3. A few more details:

"At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue. At other times, the interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers."

I wonder how the Red Hot Chili Peppers feel about their music being used for torture.

I have a hunch the article held back a lot of details.

[bleever]

4. This looks like the start of a hemorrhage of information.

Read the article; it's a piece of history.

[Miss Chybil]

5. They won't be able to convict him anywhere but in a military kangaroo

court.

I wish I could go back to believing we're the guys in the white hats...

[WhiteTara]

7. if we send the criminals to the Hague

there is a possiblity that we can call ourselves "good" again.

[The Stranger]

6. Get the names of those interrogators.

There should be an indictment bearing their names.

[eridani]

8. Zubaydah's name has come up before

Seems that no one has yet made the connection, though. He was thoroughly discussed in Posner's House of Bush, House of Saud.


http://www.911citizenswatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=121&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Immediately after 9/11, dozens of Saudi royals and members of the bin Laden family fled the U.S. in a secret airlift authorized by the Bush White House. One passenger was an alleged al-Qaida go-between, who may have known about the terror attacks in advance.

<snip>

The name Zubaydah gave came as a complete surprise to the CIA. It was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of so many legendary racehorses and one of the most westernized members of the royal family.

Zubaydah spoke to his faux Saudi interrogators as if they, not he, were the ones in trouble. He said that several years earlier the royal family had made a deal with al-Qaida in which the House of Saud would aid the Taliban so long as al-Qaida kept terrorism out of Saudi Arabia. Zubaydah added that as part of this arrangement, he dealt with Prince Ahmed and two other members of the House of Saud as intermediaries, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd's, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a 25-year-old distant relative of the king's. Again, he furnished phone numbers from memory.

According to Posner, the interrogators responded by telling Zubaydah that 9/11 changed everything. The House of Saud certainly would not stand behind him after that. It was then that Zubaydah dropped his real bombshell. "Zubaydah said that 9/11 changed nothing because Ahmed ... knew beforehand that an attack was scheduled for American soil that day," Posner writes. "They just didn't know what it would be, nor did they want to know more than that. The information had been passed to them, said Zubaydah, because bin Laden knew they could not stop it without knowing the specifics, but later they would be hard-pressed to turn on him if he could disclose their foreknowledge."

As for Prince Ahmed, on July 22, 2002, he died mysteriously of a heart attack at the age of 43, so he was never interviewed about his connections to al-Qaida and his alleged foreknowledge of the events of 9/11. Not that the FBI didn't have its chance at him. On Sept. 16, 2001, after the Bush administration had approved the Saudi evacuation, Prince Ahmed had boarded that 727 in Lexington, Ky. He had been identified by FBI officials, but not seriously interrogated.