<monkey_cartman1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:4029379f-f74c-4174-b34a-d28fcbdc1bc7@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ("Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not
> judge this kindly.")
> ------
> http://www.abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4583256&page=1
>
>
> Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
>
> Detailed Discussions Were Held About Techniques to Use on al Qaeda
> Suspects
> By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
> April 9, 2008
>
> In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the
> most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved
> specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be
> interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC
> News.
>
> The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also
> approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using
> different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one
> method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to
> break, sources said.
>
> Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how
> the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would
> be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated
> drowning, called waterboarding.
>
> The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation
> techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the
> interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number
> of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
>
> The advisers were members of the National Security Council's
> Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met
> frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security
> policy.
>
> At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney,
> former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary
> Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA
> Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
>
>
> he discussions and meetings occurred in an atmosphere of great concern
> that another terror attack on the nation was imminent. Sources said
> the extraordinary involvement of the senior advisers in the grim
> details of exactly how individual interrogations would be conducted
> showed how seriously officials took the al Qaeda threat.
>
> It started after the CIA captured top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah
> in spring 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. When his safe house was raided
> by Pakistani security forces along with FBI and CIA agents, Zubaydah
> was shot three times during the gun battle.
>
> At a time when virtually all counterterrorist professionals viewed
> another attack as imminent -- and with information on al Qaeda scarce
> -- the detention of Zubaydah was seen as a potentially critical
> breakthrough.
>
> Zubaydah was taken to the local hospital, where CIA agent John
> Kiriakou, who helped coordinate Zubaydah's capture, was ordered to
> remain at the wounded captive's side at all times. "I ripped up a
> sheet and tied him to the bed," Kiriakou said.
>
> But after Zubaydah recovered from his wounds at a secret CIA prison in
> Thailand, he was uncooperative.
>
> "I told him I had heard he was being a jerk," Kiriakou recalled. "I
> said, 'These guys can make it easy on you or they can make it hard.'
> It was after that he became defiant."
>
> The CIA wanted to use more aggressive -- and physical -- methods to
> get information.
>
> The agency briefed high-level officials in the National Security
> Council's Principals Committee, led by then-National Security Advisor
> Rice and including then-Attorney General Ashcroft, which then signed
> off on the plan, sources said. It is unclear whether anyone on the
> committee objected to the CIA's plans for Zubaydah.
>
> The CIA has confirmed Zubaydah was one of three al Qaeda suspects
> subjected to waterboarding.
>
> After he was waterboarded, officials say Zubaydah gave up valuable
> information that led to the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik
> Mohammad and fellow 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-****bh.
>
> Mohammad was also subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. At a hearing
> before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay on March 10, 2007, KSM,
> as he is known, said he broke under the harsh interrogation.
>
> -----------
> COURT: Were any statements you made as the result of any of the
> treatment that you received during that time frame from 2003 to 2006?
> Did you make those statements because of the treatment you receive
> from these people?
>
> KSM: Statement for whom?
>
> COURT: To any of these interrogators.
>
> KSM: CIA peoples. Yes. At the beginning, when they transferred me...
>
> -----------
>
> Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which
> was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to
> government interrogators to use the "enhanced" questioning tactics on
> suspected terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then
> head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the
> so-called "Golden ****eld" for CIA agents, who worried they would be
> held liable if the harsh interrogations became public.
>
> Old hands in the intelligence community remembered vividly how past
> covert operations, from the Vietnam War-era "Phoenix Program" of
> assassinations of Viet Cong to the Iran-Contra arms sales of the 1980s
> were painted as the work of a "rogue agency" out of control.
>
> But even after the "Golden ****eld" was in place, briefings and
> meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations
> continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents,
> regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific
> interrogation plans were legal.
>
> According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA
> headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking
> for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about
> overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly
> complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources
> said.
>
> Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later ****ter Goss
> along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney,
> Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.
>
> "It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,"
> said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd
> say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'"
>
> Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present
> approved.
>
> "These discussions weren't adding value," a source said. "Once you
> make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude
> it's legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it."
>
> Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He
> agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics
> and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that
> senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details
> of interrogations, sources said.
>
>
> According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting:
> "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not
> judge this kindly."
>
> The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different
> methods, pu****ng the limits of international law and even the Justice
> Department's own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC
> News.
>
> At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Vice President
> Cheney, among others -- Tenet made an elaborate presentation for
> approval to combine several different techniques during
> interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a
> highly placed administration source.
>
> A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi
> prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave
> formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the
> top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in
> the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the
> Golden ****eld -- that authorized the program.
>
> But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said
> CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for
> approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation
> techniques."
>
> Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive.
> Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the
> program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say
> she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."
It's not torture.
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