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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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May 13th,
2009 - Ex-FBI Agent Testifies to CIA Contractor Push for Harsh Interrogation |
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Former FBI
Agent Testifies to CIA Contractor Push for Harsh Interrogation By Spencer Ackerman Washington Independent May 13, 2009 Ali Soufan, the former FBI
agent who helped interrogate detained al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, told
lawmakers Wednesday that he wasn’t the only interrogator who opposed
torturing Abu Zubaydah at a CIA-operated facility in the spring of 2002.
According to Soufan, all the members of the CIA’s interrogation team stood
against a single CIA “contractor” who advocated such techniques as placing
the detainee in a “confinement box.” Testifying before a Senate Judiciary
subcommittee, Soufan - whose face was dramatically concealed behind a wooden
partition in order to protect his identity - gave an account of the fateful
interrogation that went further than what he wrote in a New York Times op-ed
on April 22. In that op-ed, Soufan wrote that he opposed using harsh
interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah, especially after non-physical
techniques resulted in valuable intelligence, such as a positive
identification of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He wrote that
unnamed CIA colleagues also “balked at the techniques” but were “instructed
to continue” with using them. Soufan added that “it was contractors, not CIA
officers, who requested the use of these techniques.” In his testimony, though,
Soufan said that “FBI and CIA all had the same opinion that contradicted with
the contractor.” The contractor in question has been identified by Jane Mayer
of The New Yorker as James Mitchell, a former psychologist with the
military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. According
to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s recently declassified report on
torture, the SERE program became the basis for much of the brutal
interrogations by the military; and former Justice Department Office of Legal
Counsel chief Steven Bradbury testified in 2008 that versions of SERE
techniques were the basis for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. An
August 1, 2002 memorandum written by Jay Bybee, one of Bradbury’s
predecessors at OLC about the legality of a proposed interrogation regimen
for Abu Zubaydah refers to a “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (’SERE’)
training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since
they began.” TWI pointed to some apparent
discrepancies between Soufan’s account of his opposition to torture and the
findings of the Justice Department inspector general in a 2008 report, but
Soufan said little to address those questions at the hearing, giving instead
a forceful rejection of the morality and efficacy of torture. He said torture
had no place in interrogations, calling it “harmful, shameful, slower,
unreliable, ineffective and play[s] directly into the enemy’s handbook.” Soufan wrote in a prepared
statement that “a top CIA interrogator” protested the contractor’s “untested
theory” when the contractor attempted “loud noise and then temperature
manipulation.” A different member of the interrogation team, whom Soufan
identified as an “operational psychologist for the CIA,” allegedly “left the
location” after objecting to the attempts to torture Abu Zubaydah. All of
these attempts occurred weeks before the OLC gave legal approval for the
regimen of interrogation techniques based on the SERE program on August 1,
2002. If Soufan’s presentation is
correct and the FBI and CIA interrogators raised objections to the harsher
methods proposed by the SERE psychologist working as a CIA contractor, it
raises the question of how CIA interrogators in the field could have been
overruled by higher headquarters in favor of a contract employee. According
to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s narrative of the legal
development of torture during the Bush administration, by mid-May 2002, “the
CIA believed that Abu Zubaydah was withholding imminent threat information
during the initial interrogation sessions,” leading senior CIA attorneys to
confer with their Justice Department and White House counterparts to discuss
the legality of using brutal interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah. By
July 2002, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told then-CIA
Director George Tenet that “the CIA could proceed with its proposed
interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.” Since Soufan had left the
interrogation by June 2002 - though a Justice Department inspector general
report last year put his departure at some time in May - that would mean
senior CIA officials discussed torturing Abu Zubaydah weeks after CIA
officials who were part of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation team objected to
such treatment. CIA officials signaled
opposition to Soufan’s characterization of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation.
“Today we heard one account of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah,” said CIA
spokesman George Little in an email message. “There are others.” He did not
elaborate. Chris Anders, senior
legislative counsel of the ACLU, said Soufan’s account raised questions about
whether senior CIA officials should have pushed for the abusive techniques
ultimately approved by the OLC. If CIA interrogators “are raising concerns
about ‘borderline torture,’ [and asking] is this legal, those kinds of
things, that certainly would go to whether there should’ve been good-faith
reliance on later legal opinions,” Anders said. “It certainly goes to people
at the CIA and top levels of the administration - whether they should have
been just relying on the Bybee opinions because they were getting conflicting
advice.” Air Force Reserve Col. Steve
Kleinman, a former military interrogator who worked with both Mitchell and
Mitchell’s SERE collegue and business partner Bruce Jessen - whom the Senate
report identified as a major advocate for using SERE techniques on detainees
in U.S. custody - submitted a statement to the Judiciary subcommittee opposing
torture. Even so, he said that placing blame exclusively on Mitchell and
Jessen - whom he said played major roles improving the SERE program so that
U.S. troops were better trained to withstand torture - would be a mistake. “As much as I find absolutely
disgusting the things they did - it never should’ve happened and the should
take responsibility for what they did - they never should’ve been allowed to
be where there were” in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, Kleinman said.
“They didn’t go to CIA six guns a-blazing. They were brought in with eyes
wide open, to run an interrogation program. While I disagree with their
methods profoundly, there were people in the chain of command above them who
set them up for failure.” External link: http://tinyurl.com/ququvy |