Posts

12 to 16 Bottles, Not 5

/29 Comments/in /by

A number of you were discussing the report–from Lawrence Wilkerson and Robert Windrem–that we used water bottles when waterboarding.

In administering the Bush White House’s most infamous “enhanced interrogation” procedure, waterboarding, CIA questioners employed a civilized tool for a brutal task—bottled water, sometimes straight from the fridge.

[snip]

A leading Bush administration official, retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff  to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says that the numbers associated with CIA waterboarding sessions—such as 183 times for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times for al Qaeda training camp commander Abu Zubaydah—may even reflect the number of water bottles expended.

Windrem did a bit of fast math to figure out how many water bottles would have been used.

A one-pint water bottle takes about seven seconds to empty, so four or five bottles would take empty in 30 or 40 seconds, the time prescribed by the Justice Department memo approving the process. (Larger two-liter bottles might have been more efficient. Each takes a full 30 seconds to empty.)

At the risk being pedantic, I wanted to suggest this might not be the correct math. Windrem’s using the description of waterboarding included in the Bybee Two memo. But we know from the May 30, 2005 memo that waterboarding, in practice, used more water than described in the Bybee Two memo.

"[T]he waterboard technique  … was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator …  applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real–and is more poignant and convincing.") [my emphasis] 

And a document submitted by JPRA in support of the Bybee Two memo (and described in the SASC report) gave a description of waterboarding that more closely resembled waterboarding as it was eventually practiced than it did the SERE technique it purportedly described (or the description that got into the Bybee Memo). Read more →

Bush’s Approved Torture … in 2003?

/107 Comments/in /by

A number of people have pointed to a comment Bush made in MI on Thursday about his role in approving torture. Here’s how CNN described it:

Bush spoke in broad strokes about how he proceeded after the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March 2003.

"The first thing you do is ask, what’s legal?" he said. "What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I can say to myself, ‘I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.’ I can tell you that the information we got saved lives."

Here’s how Eartha Jane Meltzer from MI Messenger described it:

But the former president spoke indirectly of his administration’s authorization of the use of torture against detainees captured during the War on Terror, avoiding the words “torture” and “abuse.”

“You have to make tough decisions,” Bush said. “They’ve captured a guy who murdered 3,000 citizens … that affected me … They come in and say he may have more information …and we had an anthrax attack … and they say he may have more information. What do you do?“

Bush was firm and defended his record as president: “I will tell you that the information gained saved lives.”

And here’s how the Detroit Free Press described it:

Former President George W. Bush defended on Thursday his decision to allow harsh interrogation of the terrorist who ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, saying it was cleared by his lawyers to prevent what his advisers believed was another, imminent attack.

"I made a decision within the law to get information so I can say, I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people," he said. "I can tell you, the information gained saved lives."

Here’s how SW MI’s Herald-Palladium described it:

He defended his decision to authorize waterboarding on the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. 

Now, I’m trying to get clarification on this point, particularly since Bush used to claim frequently that Abu Zubaydah ordered up 9/11, but between CNN and H-P, they seem to be clear that Bush was referring specifically to KSM, not AZ. [See updated below.]

If his reference to KSM was explicit, I find that very odd. 

Why would Bush talk about the seminal moments in his tenure as President, and refer to approving the torture of the third guy we waterboarded, and not number one or number two? Wouldn’t the first approval of waterboarding be the most important?

Read more →

The Terrorism Intelligence and the Briefing Schedule

/34 Comments/in , , , /by

I suggested yesterday that one of the explanations for the CIA’s unreliable record of briefings on torture and terrorism in 2002 and 2003 might reflect an attempt to hide certain information.

Did CIA not reveal they were torturing detainees to dodge any question about the accuracy of claims about Iraq intelligence? 

While we don’t know the full schedule of briefings on Iraq intelligence, the schedule of intelligence documents pertaining to Iraqi ties to terrorism suggests that might be possible. Significantly, according to Bob Graham and Nancy Pelosi, they were not briefed that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured before the NIE appeared integrating his August 2002 interrogation reports. And Jane Harman was not informed he had been tortured until after the last major report on Iraqi links to terrorism came out in January 2003.

Here are the intelligence documents mentioned in the SSCI Report on Iraq, interspersed with the torture briefings.

September 21, 2001: Document written by Cofer Black (then Director of CounterTerrorism) and Near East and South Asia Directorate. Distributed only to President’s Daily Brief principals, and not revealed to Congress until June 2004. The document is described as "taking a ‘Q&A’ approach to the issue of Iraq’s possible links" to 9/11.

October 2001:  NESA document discussing Iraq’s overall ties to terrorism.CIA refused to share the document with SSCI, explaining its dissemination was limited to PDB readers.

December 18, 2001: Ibn Sheikh al-Libi captured.

February 22, 2002: First report doubting al-Libi’s claims of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.

March 28, 2002: Abu Zubaydah captured.

June 21, 2002, Iraq and al-Qaida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship: Ostensibly a joint project between CTC and NESA, the report was a subject of a CIA Ombud invsetigation into a complaint from a NESA analyst alleging that the document did not adequately reflect the views of NESA. The document was intentionally expansive, as described by Jamie Miscik: "If you were going to stretch to the maximum the evidence you had, what could you come up with?"

July 26, 2002: OLC orally authorized waterboarding.

July 31, 2002: Second report doubting al-Libi’s claims of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Summer 2002, Dougie Feith’s Propaganda: This led to a series of briefings in August 2002 apparently designed to reinsert previously discredited claims into the CIA stream of intelligence. In particular, George Tenet agreed to hold up the production of Iraqi Support for Terrorism until CIA could attend a meeting with Feith’s people; the meeting took place on August 20, 2002. Read more →

The 9/11 Commission and Torture

/51 Comments/in /by

The Daily Beast is out with a story reporting that much of the information from the 9/11 Commission Report came from detainees who had been subjected to torture. That story has been picked up by people claiming, "Much of the material cited in the 9/11 Commission’s findings was derived … during brutal CIA interrogations authorized by the Bush administration," which is not what the Daily Beast reports (though the original NBC report uses similar language, stating that the "critical information it used in [the 9/11 Report] was the product of harsh interrogations."

As someone halfway through such a study myself (and who spent much of last week combing through the 9/11 Archives), let me caution about the language used here. Much of the material cited in the 9/11 Report came from detainees–particularly KSM–after they had been tortured.  But we have no evidence that the evidence came exclusively from torture, and we have a great deal of evidence that little of the information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah came from waterboarding.

I’ve written about how little the 9/11 Commission actually used from Abu Zubaydah here (just 10 pieces of intelligence in the entire report, one of which almost certainly came before he was waterboarded), and how the Commission used just slightly more from al-Nashiri (16 pieces of intelligence, almost all of it either corroborated with other reports or–in two cases–the accuracy of which the Commission questioned). So the story for Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri is that while the 9/11 Commission may have gotten a lot of information from them (though as late as 2004, they said they hadn’t gotten much from al-Nashiri), they didn’t use it. 

The story with KSM, though, is different. Huge swaths of the report rely on interrogations of KSM. Here’s an incomplete compilation of the intelligence the 9/11 Commission got from KSM (this hasn’t been proofed).  It shows:

  • Hundreds of claims in the 9/11 Report rely on KSM’s interrogation reports
  • The most productive interrogations with KSM came several months after he was waterboarded, in sessions in July, August, and November 2003 and February 2004
  • Just five of 127 citations of KSM interrogations catalogued thus far (remember, I’m only halfway) came within the month after he was waterboarded
  • One of the early citations–asserting a year-long al Qaeda anthrax program–may have come as a result of waterboarding
  • The only KSM reference to Moussaoui thus far (there are others, I think) came from the month of the harshest torture

Read more →

Bradbury’s Bellybutton

/33 Comments/in /by

I want to highlight two paragraphs of Bradbury’s May 30 torture memo to show how self-referential his argument is. The paragraphs (on pages 6 and 7) use Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as examples of the type of people that have been–or might be–waterboarded, so Bradbury is trying to fluff up their importance and danger. My comments are interspersed with his idiocy.

We understand that Abu Zubaydah and KSM are representative of the types of detainees on whom the waterboard has been, or might be, used. Prior to his capture, Zubaydah was "one of Usama Bin Laden’s key lieutenants." CIA, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn ABU ZUBAYDAH at 1 (Jan. 7, 2002) ("Zubaydah Biography")

Remember, Bradbury is writing this in 2005, even after the 9/11 Commission report came out referring to AZ with such descriptions as "a longtime ally of Bin Ladin," "worked closely with the al Qaeda leadership," "had an agreement with Bin Ladin," "associate," and twice, "lieutenant," but not "key lieutenant" and not "member of." But to make the case that waterboarding will only be used with the worst of the worst, Bradbury reverts back to a pre-capture biography of Zubadayah that was proven wrong by facts collected during Zubaydah’s capture to make the claim Zubaydah was a key al Qaeda figure.

Indeed, Zubaydah was al Qaeda’s third or fourth highest ranking member and had been involved "in every major terrorist operation carried out by al Qaeda." Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel, Central Intelligence Agency, from Jay S. Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, Re: Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative at 7 (Aug. 1, 2002) ("Interrogation Memorandum:); Zubaydah Biography (noting Zubaydah’s involvement in the September 11 attacks). 

So once again, Bradbury cites a 2002 document that was proven to be erroneous by AZ’s own interrogation testimony. But to make things worse, Bradbury cites a passage of the Bybee Two memo.  That passage was almost certainly known to be false when Rizzo made it to Yoo in 2002. But Bradbury, as if wallowing gleefully in the fraudulent representations of that prior memo, cites it again, in 2005, when it was definitely known to be false.

Upon his capture on March 27, 2002, Zubaydah became the most senior member of al-Qaeda in United States custody. 

Seeing how Sheikh al-Libi ran the Khaldan camp for which AZ served as tour guide, even this is an arguably false claim. Read more →

Why Don’t They Claim al-Nashiri’s Waterboarding Worked?

/51 Comments/in /by

As I noted last night, Liz “MiniCheney” Cheney very pointedly avoided claiming that al-Nashiri provided important intelligence as a result of being waterboarded. In a non-sequitur response to Norah O’Donnell’s assertion that waterboarding is torture, MiniCheney offered this as rebuttal to O’Donnell’s point (at 2:15).

There were three people who were waterboarded, and two of those people are people who gave us incredibly important and useful information, information that saved American lives after they were waterboarded, both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah.

That’s pretty shocking, coming as it does from someone trying hard to claim waterboarding is effective. The implication is that Rahim al-Nashiri did not give such information after he was waterboarded.

But it turns out the 9/11 Commission actually used more information from al-Nashiri in its report than it did from Abu Zubaydah (though still not a lot), a total of 16 references–and the Commission may have included more information gathered immediately after waterboarding. There’s some confusion about when al-Nashiri was captured (the contemporaneous public announcement placed it in early November 2002, whereas the ICRC lists October 2002 without the specific date; the ICRC also reports that al-Nashiri was allegedly interrogated by Dubai agents for a month before being handed over to the Americans), and we have no reporting on precisely when al-Nashiri was waterboarded. Nevertheless, al-Nashiri gave information that was used in the 9/11 Report closer to his capture date than AZ and as close as a few of the KSM reports. And reports were generated consistently in all four months after he was captured:

November 20, 2002: One citation
November 21, 2002: Two citations (one contradicted by later reporting)
December  26, 2002: Three citations (one labeled “may not be true”)
January 14, 2003: One citation
January 27, 2003: One citation
January 28, 2003: One citation
February 10, 2003: One citation
February 20, 2003: One citation
May 21, 2003: One citation
February 21, 2004: Four (probably) citations, all presumably in response to 9/11 Commission questions

Thus, if al-Nashiri was waterboarded in any of the four months following his capture, information collected in the same month made it into the report. (Note, much more of this testimony was corroborated than AZ’s or KSM’s.)

In other words, they did get information from al-Nashiri, at least in the 9/11 Report, more than they did from Abu Zubaydah. And while we can’t be sure, it may have been collected using waterboarding. But for some reason, MiniCheney carefully stops short of claiming they got information from al-Nashiri.

Now, there are several possible reasons why MiniCheney doesn’t want to claim that waterboarding worked with al-Nashiri. Read more →

Cliff May: N_O Reading, ‘Riting, or ‘Rithmetic

/60 Comments/in /by

Some lessons on the 3 Rs for the Cliff May and the other folks at N_O, who apparently don’t know this stuff.

Reading

First, read before you write. Because when you write, 

Under a strict set of rules, every pour of water had to be counted — and the number of pours was limited.

Also: Waterboarding interrogation sessions were permitted on no more than five days within any 30-day period.

No more than two sessions were permitted in any 24-hour period.

A session could last no longer than two hours.

There could be at most six pours of water lasting ten seconds or longer — and never longer than 40 seconds — during any individual session.

Water could be poured on a subject for a combined total of no more than 12 minutes during any 24 hour period.

You might want to know that the guidelines you pretend protected Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed come from the 2005 memos, more than two years after AZ and KSM were waterboarded  So while you might regard them as strict and reasonable (I don’t), they didn’t have any bearing on what happened to AZ and KSM.

The guidelines in the 2002 memo–the ones in place when AZ and KSM were waterboarded–said, 

Finally, you would like to use a technique called the "waterboard" in this procedure, the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual’s feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers tbe mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. this causes an increase in carbon dioxide level in the individual’s blood. This increase in the carbon dioxide level stimulates increased effort to breathe. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of suffocation and incipient panic," i.e., the perception of drowning. The individual does not breathe any water into his lungs. During those 20 to 40 seconds, water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches. After this period, the cloth is lifted, and the individual is allowed to breathe unimpeded for three or four full breaths. The sensation of drowning is immediately relieved by the removal of the cloth. Read more →

Abu Zubaydah: Waterboarded 83 Times for 10 Pieces of Intelligence

/120 Comments/in /by

The torture apologists are out in force, insisting that torture produces useful information. Cheney’s even promising to release information from CIA cataloging all the useful information that came from torture.

But we don’t have to wait for Cheney to make good on his promise. We already have a way to assess how much intelligence we got directly from torturing Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: the 9/11 Report. After all, the 9/11 Report integrates a huge amount of information from interrogation reports, and cites them all meticulously. As early as June 6, 2003, the 9/11 Commission asked for, "“all TDs and other reports of intelligence information obtained from interrogations” of forty named individuals, including Abu Zubaydah and (apparently) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and they used what they got in return to write their report. So if there was useful information in those reports, they presumably got it.

Here was a bipartisan group–including many staffers and members with extensive national security backgrounds–attempting to learn everything it could about al Qaeda, poring through interrogation reports produced as a result of torture, tracking inconsistencies in the intelligence, corroborating that intelligence where possible with documents and other testimony, and ultimately selecting what it felt was useful in telling the story of al Qaeda. While certainly not a perfect assessment of what was useful (I’ll explain why below), it provides one of the best unbiased ways to measure how useful this intelligence was.

And in the case of Abu Zubaydah, such an assessment is horrifying. 

In the entire 9/11 Report, just ten pieces of information are sourced to Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation reports.

Ten.

And there are several other damning details that come from this analysis. One of the ten pieces of intelligence that appears in the 9/11 Report–regarding Abu Zubaydah’s role running terrorist training camps–came from July 10, 2002, before the CIA first received oral authorization to use torture. Thus, it either came from persuasive, rather than coercive, techniques. Or it came from treatment that had not been legally approved.

In addition, the 9/11 Report doesn’t cite interrogation reports addressing [the lack of] ties between Iraq and al Qaeda directly; it cites a 2003 memo from Doug Feith that in turn cites 2003 interrogations of AZ and KSM. It’s unclear whether AZ’s and KSM’s earlier denials of links between al Qaeda and Iraq simply don’t show up in the earlier interrogation reports, or whether such information was deemed not credible in earlier reports. But the absence of such references, when we know interrogators were pushed to ask about them, raises questions about the integrity of the interrogation reports.

Of the ten pieces of information that appear in the Report, just one comes from the month when AZ was under most intensive interrogation. As it pertains to Rahim al-Nashiri, who had not yet been captured, it might be said to have an influence on his capture. Though appears to be background on who he was rather than details about how to find him. 

Read more →

Is There a 2003 Waterboarding Memo We’re Missing?

/59 Comments/in /by

Michael Hayden said something that confused me today on Fox News. When asked whether he thought waterboarding is torture, he replied simply that DOJ had said it was not.

Question: Are you satisfied that waterboarding is not torture?

HAYDEN: I’m satisfied that the Justice Department, in a series of opinions — ‘02, ‘03, ‘05 — said that it was not. Now…

See, we know that DOJ addressed waterboarding specifically in 2002 and 2005 in the memos released last week. 

But 2003?

Yes, there is one I, at least, have forgotten. The one in which the White House signed off on waterboarding, even after they had waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month. 

6/XX/03
White House
CIA
Interrogation of prisoners

 Here’s the WaPo’s description of this 2003 memo, from last year when we were all trying to elect Barack Obama President. 

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said.

Gosh, that would be an interesting memo to see, wouldn’t it?

(Updated entirely to make sensible after I discovered I’m a bone-head.)

Debunking the Torture Apologists’ “Half the Intelligence” Claim

/123 Comments/in /by
prometheus

image courtesy of quapan

In another thread, Bob Schacht wrote,

BTW, according to CNN, Haynes and Mukasey are claiming that “half” of what we “know” about Al Qaeda came from torture sessions. Did they really write that, and if so, I’m wondering if its puffery or true.

Using the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, I think I can show where it comes from–and show why it’s a totally useless claim.

Bradbury Needed to Appeal to Efficacy to Claim These Techniques Didn’t Violate the Convention Against Torture

In the May 30, 2005 Memo, Steven Bradbury spends four pages recording the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation. He does this, at least partially, to make sure he can claim that the techniques at issue don’t "shock the conscience" and therefore don’t violate the Fifth Amendment (and therefore don’t violate CAT, which is the whole point of this memo) . In particular, Bradbury resorts to efficacy when trying to distinguish between torture condemned by the State Department and that practiced by the US. Speaking of torture practiced by other countries, Bradbury claims it simply doesn’t serve the same purpose as our torture.

There is no indication that techniques are used only as necessary to protect against grave terrorist threats or for any similarly vital government interests.

And when Bradbury is trying to distinguish enhanced interrogation from SERE, he again appeals to efficacy and necessity.

… the interrogation program we consider here furthers the paramount interest of the United States in the security of the Nation more immediately and directly than SERE training.

[snip]

It follows that use of these techniques will not shock the conscience in at least some circumstances. We believe that such circumstances exist here, where the techniques are used against unlawful combatants who deliberately and secretly attack civlians in an untraditional armed conflict in which intelligence is difficult or impossible to collect by other means and is essential to the protection of the United States and its interests, where the techniques are used only when necessary and only in the interrogations of key terrorist leaders reasonably thought to have acionable intelligence, and where every effort is made to minimize unnecessary suffering and to avoid inflicting significant or lasting harm.

It bears noting that this rant goes far beyond what Bradbury elsewhere carefully laid out as the premise of his memo. But both this claim and the one dismissing State Department concerns about torture rely on his argument that the program was necessary to protect the US. 

So to accomplish his apparent task–which was to find a way to declare the CIA interrogation program did not violate CAT (after CIA’s own IG had already concluded it did), Bradbury needed to be able to say it was effective.

Read more →