Reply #1: Then there was this... [View All]

[JackRiddler]

A repulsive effort by ABC to play atrocity as comedy and justify torture

(pointed out by sabra when this thread ran on GD...)

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/09/how-the-cia-bro.html

How the CIA Broke the 9/11 Attacks Mastermind

September 13, 2007 4:09 PM

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was strapped down to the water-board, he felt humiliated -- not by the treatment but by the fact that a woman, a red-headed CIA supervisor, was allowed to witness the spectacle, a former intelligence officer told ABC News.

The al Qaeda mastermind, known as KSM, stubbornly held out for about two minutes -- far longer than any of the other "high-value" terror targets who were subjected to the technique, the harshest from a list of six techniques approved for use by the CIA and Bush administration lawyers, sources said.

Then KSM started talking, in idiomatic English he learned as a high school foreign exchange student and polished at a North Carolina college in the 1980s, sources said.

Supposedly the humiliation of the "redhead" as witness (why is this of all details disclosed?) broke him like nothing else.

Funny how the "KSM" in the transcripts today ain't so "polished." You can chalk that up to time and torture, of course, or perhaps to his desire to play his captors by giving them pidgin.

Among the many other choice bits:

A current CIA official says that KSM actually told interrogators the only reason he confessed was because of the water-boarding. But what if that one episode of water-boarding KSM had not occurred?

SNIP

I suppose the article gets points for being one of the few not to mention Jack Bauer in what follows!

"KSM sat in his cell in Poland, writing poetry in English, writing letters to the president and to the head of the CIA, and debating the merits of Christianity and Islam with his captor.

SNIP

And just yesterday, an intelligence source told ABC News that the dapper man behind the most successful terror plot against America was not rumpled and disheveled when he was apprehended. He was as well-kept as ever. But the CIA, conscious of the propaganda value of appearance, messed his hair and pulled his shirt from his pants, leaving us with the image of KSM we have today, and according to days of NSA intercepts, leaving his fellow al Qaeda terrorists chagrined over the changes to their esteemed colleague.