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CIA Won't Be Made Scapegoat in Torture-Gate

Various | 24.12.2007 16:04 | Anti-militarism | World

This scandal seems designed to give the impression that 'al Qaeda' is real. But nonetheless, it probes the brutality of the Extremists behind the 'War Of terror'.

CIA chief to drag White House into torture cover-up storm
Sarah Baxter

THE CIA chief who ordered the destruction of secret videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of two top "Al-Qaeda suspects" has indicated he may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee.

Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, is determined not to become the fall guy in the controversy over the CIA’s use of torture, according to intelligence sources.

It has emerged that at least four White House staff were approached for advice about the tapes, including David Addington, a senior aide to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, but none has admitted to recommending their destruction.

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, said it was impossible for Rodriguez to have acted on his own: “If everybody was against the decision, why in the world would Jose Rodriguez – one of the most cautious men I have ever met – have gone ahead and destroyed them?”

The tapes recorded the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two suspected Al-Qaeda leaders, over hundreds of hours while they were held in secret “ghost” (illegal) prisons. According to testimony from a former CIA officer, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding, a form of torture that simulates drowning, and “broke” after 35 seconds. He is believed to have been interrogated in Thailand. The tapes were destroyed in 2005. Both men are now held in Guantanamo Bay.

The House intelligence committee has subpoenaed Rodriguez to appear for a hearing on January 16. Last week the CIA began opening its files to congressional investigators. Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat who is chairing the committee, has said he was “not looking for scapegoats” – a hint to Rodriguez that he would like him to talk.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer, believes the scandal could reach deep into the White House. “The CIA and Jose Rodriguez look bad, but he’s probably the least culpable person in the process. He didn’t wake up one day and decide, ‘I’m going to destroy these tapes.’ He checked with a lot of people and eventually he is going to get his say.”

Johnson says Rodriguez got his fingers burnt during the Iran-contra scandal while working for the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s. Even then he sought authorisation from senior officials. But when summoned to the FBI for questioning, he was told Iran-contra was “political – get your own lawyer”.

He learnt his lesson and recently appointed Robert Bennett, one of Washington’s most skilled lawyers, to handle the case of the destroyed interrogation tapes. “He has been starting to get his story out and was smart to get Bennett,” said Johnson.

The Justice Department has launched its own inquiry into the destruction of the tapes. It emerged yesterday that the CIA had misled members of the 9-11 Commission by not disclosing the existence of the tapes, in potential violation of the law. President George W Bush said last week he could not recall learning about the tapes before being briefed about them on December 6 by Michael Hayden, the CIA director.

“It looks increasingly as though the decision was made by the White House,” said Johnson. He believes it is “highly likely” that Bush saw one of the videos, as he was interested in Zubaydah’s case and received frequent updates on his interrogation from George Tenet, the CIA director at the time.

It has emerged that the CIA did preserve two videotapes and an audiotape of detainee interrogations conducted by a foreign government, which may have been relevant to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 'Al-Qaeda' conspirator.

The CIA told a federal judge in 2003 that no such recordings existed but has now retracted that testimony. One of the tapes could show the interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, a(n alleged) September 11 conspirator, who was allegedly handed to Jordan for questioning.

 http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3087293.ece

The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminalAndrew Sullivan

Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.

There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.

And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy – someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man allegedly deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.

President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.

Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.

Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.

A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good – though not unique – information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.

The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions.

They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.

(The Nazis referred to Torture as 'sharpened interrogation techniques'.)

And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.

And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.

See what I mean by Hollywood? We know about the destruction because someone in the government told The New York Times.

We also know the 9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah’s interrogation and was not told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the tapes - including David Addington, Cheney’s right-hand man and the chief legal architect of the administration’s detention and interrogation policies.

At a press conference last Thursday the president gave an equivocal response to what he knew about the tapes and when he knew it: “The first recollection is when CIA director Mike Hayden briefed me.” That briefing was earlier this month. The president is saying he cannot recall something - not that it didn’t happen. That’s the formulation all lawyers tell their clients to use when they need to avoid an exposable lie.

This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the administration’s interrogation policies. You can fill a book with the sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.

The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West’s intelligence on jihadist terrorism.

But this case is more ominous for the administration because it presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the vice-president and their closest aides.

Because several courts had pending cases in which testimony from Zubaydah’s interrogation was salient, the destruction of such evidence triggers a legal process that is hard for the executive branch to stymie or stall - and its first attempt was flatly rebuffed by a judge last week.

Its key argument is a weakly technical one: that the interrogation took place outside US territory - and therefore the courts do not have jurisdiction over it. It’s the same rationale for imprisoning hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - a legal no man’s land. But Congress can get involved - especially if it believes that what we have here is a cover-up.

What are the odds that a legal effective interrogation of a key Al-Qaeda operative would have led many highly respected professionals in the US intelligence community to risk their careers by leaking top-secret details to the press?

What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?

What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.

Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.

Congresswoman Jane Harman, the respected top Democrat on the House intelligence committee in 2003-06, put it as simply as she could: “I am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up.”

It’s a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It’s a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office.

Yes, it is Hollywood time. And the ending of this movie is as yet unwritten.

 http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3086937.ece

Al-Qaeda the Database Unbound

In a lengthy excerpt posted on Wayne Madsen’s site, Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence, explains the origins of the word “al-Qaeda.” As previously noted by British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, “al-Qaeda” has nothing to do with a terrorist organization, as the neocons and the corporate media tell us over and over, ad infinitum, but is in fact a database.

“In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements,” Bunel explains. “It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.” Files associated to the database were called “Q eidat il-Maaloomaat” and “Q eidat i-Taaleemaat” in Arabic. “Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database.

But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for ‘base.’”

Because of the presence of ‘rogue states,’ it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the ‘rogue states’ used to fight. And the ‘rogue states’ included Saudi Arabia.

When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages…. Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property.

In short, “al-Qaeda” was in essence an email designation and had nothing to do with the “American agent in Afghanistan,” Osama bin Laden. In fact, “al-Qaeda,” the terrorist organization, is a creation of the United States government and the corporate media.

Pierre-Henry Bunel concludes:

The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism.

The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.

Bunel, according to Madsen, was punished for his heresy. In December, 2001, the former French military intelligence agent was “convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998…. Bunel’s character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system ‘got him’ for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group.”

It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of “Al Qaeda.” We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

Riggs Bank was used for “the dubious financial machinations of Saudi diplomats and despots from Africa and South America, including Chile’s former maximum leader, Gen. Augusto Pinochet,” according to Jack Shafer, writing for Slate, and citing Glenn R. Simpson of the War Street Journal. Moreover, the Riggs Bank “enjoyed a ‘relationship’ with the CIA for some time.” As noted by Madsen, Riggs Bank hosted the Bosnian Defense Fund and this financial assistance was tapped by “al-Qaeda” in Bosnia.

On October 3, Madsen wrote:

The Muslim operation in the Balkans was largely supported by official (CIA, DIA, and Special Operations) U.S. assistance but also by unofficial help. This was mainly carried out by private military contractors like MPRI and financial support networks like the Bosnia Defense Fund, established in the mid-1990s at a Riggs Bank account in Washington, DC.

The principal movers behind the Bosnian Defense Fund were Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. In fact, Feith’s law firm, Feith and Zell (FANZ) set up the Bosnia Defense Fund.

According to a former Riggs legal adviser, when objections were raised about the hundreds of millions of dollars collected from such countries as Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Malaysia, the UAE, Iran, Jordan, and Egypt that were being detected by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) being sent from Washington to Sarajevo, Bosnia, and reports that there was “spillage” of these funds into the hands of Al Qaeda units in the country, Perle’s response at one contentious meeting was, “just make it fu*king happen.”

Indeed, Perle and the Straussian neocons just made it f-ing happen on September 11, 2001, although the money trail is studiously avoided and swept under the rug by the corporate media.

It is no secret Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Bander bin Sultan, had accounts at Riggs Bank and money from these accounts allegedly found its way to two of the nine eleven hijackers. Of course, the Bush nine eleven whitewash commission denied this ever happened and thus this suspicious bit of information found its way to the memory hole (see Dr. David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie). It should be noted here that the Bush-ites redacted 28 pages from the Congressional Joint Inquiry Report on 9-11 and those pages are assumed to have contained information on the role of Saudi Arabia and another unnamed country (more than likely Pakistan, or Israel, perhaps?) in financing Osama.

Interestingly, however, a reference to a relationship between the supposed hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi and the FBI was allowed to remain in the report (the report states that the putative hijackers “had numerous contacts with a long time FBI counterterrorism informant in California and that a third future hijacker, Hani Hanjour, apparently had more limited contact with the same informant,” see Allan P. Duncan, Bush Should Cry Uncle and Release Saudi Info).

In summary, “al-Qaeda” never existed in the form now claimed by the Bush-ites and the corporate media, “al-Qaeda” was in fact a database of CIA recruited and trained mujahideen and an email connected to that database, Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with that database and thus all references in the corporate media claiming he is the leader of “al-Qaeda” the fantastical terrorist organization are false (if not deliberately contrived lies), terrorists falsely attributed to “al-Qaeda” were organized by the U.S. military and NATO and financed by a CIA front bank in Washington (connected to two principal Straussian neocon criminals) and unleashed in Bosnia (assisting the drug-running KLA mafia), and the CIA front bank later shared a connection with prominent Saudi Arabians who are suspected of financing the nine eleven hijackers (since the hijackers did not actually exist, this money was probably used elsewhere in the nine eleven operation).

All of this information was predictably discarded by the nine eleven whitewash commission. Or perhaps never came to their attention, as they now say the CIA obstructed their investigations, and kept vital information and documents from them.

Of course, none of this arcane information means squat to the American people, many whom believe Osama teamed up with Saddam to pull of nine eleven and “al-Qaeda” is a real terrorist organization run by the elusive “devils” (in Bush’s Manichean parlance) Bin Laden and his murderous cohort, al-Zarqawi.

In fact, the official Conspiracy Theory is so embedded in the American psyche, thanks to the relentless efforts of the corporate media, it may never be possible for the truth to emerge.

Sooner or later, the neocons and their cardboard cut-out of a half-witted president will chime their Pavlovian bells—bells associated with the explosion of a “radiological device” or a series of black op suicide bombings in the American heartland—and our Emmanuel Goldstein du jour will be blamed and the process will start anew, with shock and awe in Syria or Iran.

- I wonder how much of the Pentagon's trillions that 'went missing' under Dov Zakheim can be found in accounts at Riggs Bank.

Various

Comments

Display the following 4 comments

  1. Myth — Growler
  2. Perpetuating a Myth, Perhaps? — "Al Qaeda" = PNAC, CIA, Mossad
  3. Evidence you say? — Growler
  4. Take a Hike, Plant — Al Qaeda=PNAC, CIA, Mossad

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