TORTURE TAPES WEREN'T THE ONLY THINGS ERASED BY THE WHITE HOUSE

leveymg

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Wed Dec-12-07 11:51 AM
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TORTURE TAPES WEREN'T THE ONLY THINGS ERASED BY THE WHITE HOUSE

Edited on Wed Dec-12-07 12:49 PM by leveymg

Newsweek reports today that the White House pressured the CIA to erase the tapes recording the interrogations of two key al-Qaeda figures, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahom al-Nashiri. Harriet Miers, President Bush�s personal lawyer, was the principal White House negotiator with the CIA on how to manage emerging public awareness of torture during these interrogations.

What the American people aren't being told, yet, is that waterboarding effectively erased the memories of an al-Qaeda leader -- and possibly several other major figures involve in planning the 9/11 attack -- who knew the details of what the CIA had learned in advance about al-Qaeda training and planning for 9/11.

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While initial media accounts reported Miers advised against destructions several hundred hours of videotape records, a Newsweek article now indicates that the tapes destruction was a �political issue� decided outside the Agency by someone "directly representing" Bush. This resulted in nearly two years of drawn-out negotiations with the White House, finally carried out after the departure of CIA Director George Tenet under Bush�s CIA appointee, Porter Goss: http://www.newsweek.com/id/76574/output/print

a senior CIA lawyer, John Rizzo, now the agency's acting general counsel, was also conducting discussions on what to do with the tapes with White House lawyer Harriet Miers. Two sources said that Rizzo also discussed the issue with officials at the Justice Department, which had issued classified guidelines outlining how the CIA's interrogation program should operate.

The reason CIA officials involved the White House and Justice Department in discussions about the disposition of the tapes was that CIA officials viewed the CIA's terrorist interrogation and detention program�including the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques�as having been imposed on the agency by the White House. "It was a political issue," said the former official, and therefore CIA officials believed that the decision as to what to do with the tapes should be made at a political level, by Miers�a former personal lawyer to President Bush and later White House staff secretary and counsel�or someone else directly representing the president.

The current and former officials said that discussions between Clandestine Service officials and their superiors and between the CIA and White House unfolded in what one source described as "fits and starts" between 2003, when the matter first arose, and late 2005, when Jose Rodriguez Jr., then head of the Clandestine Service and still a CIA officer today, made the final decision that the tapes should be destroyed. People who are familiar with the views of both former CIA chiefs Tenet and Goss (and who spoke to NEWSWEEK anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue) have said that at the time the question of the tapes' destruction was under discussion, both CIA directors indicated that they believed it would be unwise to destroy the tapes. The tapes' destruction actually occurred when Goss headed the agency.

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Both Zubaydah and al-Nashiri played instrumental roles in the 9/11 attacks. Zubaydah knew all about the CIA�s role in training the 9/11 hijackers, and the U.S. was well aware of the details of the planned attack. See, TORTURE VIDEO: WHAT THE CIA DOESN�T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT ABU ZUBAYDAH, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/133754/60/799/420257

Abu Zubaydah ran training camps in Afghanistan, where he trained six of the 9/11 hijackers, including Flight 77 squad leader Nawaf al-Hazmi. The 9/11 attackers were passed to him by a second al-Qaeda logistics expert, Luai Sakka, with whom he also worked organizing the so-called Millenium attacks. Researcher Paul Thompson has identified Sakka as a likely double-agent, working for U.S. and Syrian intelligence. Sakka is now in Turkish custody.

It has been reported tha Zubaydah has been driven insane. This is a common outcome among those who have been subjected to long periods of torture. Water boarding results in particularly serious neurological and psychological damage. Zubaydah�s memories may have been effectively erased by oxygen deprivation during repeated water boarding. Without killing him, that insured that he wouldn�t be able to provide credible testimony, later. The missing tapes would document that process of erasing or rearranging his memories. As to whether that was the primary purpose of waterboarding this particular detainee, we may never know.

Like most torture measures used by CIA, water-boarding leaves no tell-tale marks on the surface of the body, and is no doubt easier to explain in an after-action report than the death of a high-value detainee.

The second al-Qaeda figure whose interrogation tape Hayden claims the Agency destroyed in 2005 is Abd al-Rahom al-Nashiri, allegedly al-Qaeda�s planning chief for the Persian Gulf. See, http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5geGD7gzEWvMiKRhD3OK-6eO_iWQgD8TFPGEO0; also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Rahim_al-Nashiri

Al-Nashiri was present at the January 2000 al-Qaeda planning summit held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at which the 9/11 attack and the bombing of the USS Cole were mapped out. He is reportedly the mastermind of the Cole attack. Flt.77 hijacker Nawaf Al-Hazmi was also involved in organizing the Cole attack. Al-Hazmi had been under CIA and British surveilance since the mid-1990s. Also present at that meeting with al-Nashiri and al-Midhar was fellow Flt.77 hijacker, Khalid al-Midhar. The Agency and �a half-dozen allied services� monitored the Kuala Lumpur meeting, and then tracked al-Midhar and al-Hazmi as they proceeded on to Thailand, before boarding a January 15 flight to Los Angeles. Upon their arrival at LAX, the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) drafted a cable alerting the FBI. That notice was, apparently, never sent following an order to withhold it pending the approval of higher CIA officers. The FBI reportedly did no learn about al-Hazmi and al-Midhar were in the U.S. until late in the summer of 2001, when they looked at the role of al-Hazmi in organizing the Cole attack. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/133754/60/799/420257, Ibid.. also, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00257.htm ; http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:lt53dSSXcaIJ:www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp%3Fitem%3Da0101ciacolereport+ALhAZMI+cOLE+ATTACK&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&ie=UTF-8

Beyond his water boarding, few details has been reported publicly about the testimony and condition of al-Nashiri. We have been told that Zubaydah was shot in the groin during capture, medication withheld. He was later water boarded, and is now described as insane. What is not mentioned in such reports is that his memories likely have been effectively erased by oxygen deprivation during repeated water boarding. Without killing him, that insured that he wouldn�t be able to provide credible testimony at a later date, after his usefulness had expired. The tapes, one can conclude, would document the process of rearranging his memories, along with those of al-Nashiri, who is also reported to have been water boarded.

If you want to preserve evidence, and obtain accurate testimony, repeated water boarding is the last thing you would do. But, intelligence collection apparently wasn�t the purpose of torturing Abu Zubaydah. Otherwise, they would have used other methods to extract information from that individual. As events showed, the CIA got the information it wanted soon after they captured Zubaydah, not through water boarding, but through deception.

As Mr. Posner pointed out, the CIA extracted the most valuable information simply by tricking Zubaydah into providing the names and confirming information about the five Saudi and Pakistani leaders who knew about the 9/11 attacks before the fact. That four of the five died as they did within a few short months thereafter, and Saudi Intelligence Chief al-Turki was spared, gives Posner's account a lot of credibility in my book.

To know why they erased the record of Zubaydah and al-Nashiri�s interrogations, just look at what they once knew, information that they will now likely never be able to testify about in open court.

Finally, it was Harriet Miers who read George W. Bush the famous 08/06/2001 PDB. They would no doubt claim today that what they had to say to each other about warnings of al-Qaeda attacks is still a matter of attorney-client and presidential privilege.

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