WASHINGTON, DC— Today, Senator Edward M. Kennedy sent the following letter to to Robert S. Mueller III, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, regarding the destruction by the CIA of videotapes of the interrogation of two detainees.

…the question has arisen whether other copies exist of the videotapes, transcripts of the interrogations, or other documents related to the interrogations or the destruction of the tapes. Today’s Washington Post report on FBI participation in the interrogation of Abu Zubaida clearly raises the question whether the FBI has such copies now, or had them in the past.

“After all, you know, you have to torture a 6 year old if you want to get really good, solid intelligence information.”

Its hard work for a Commander Guy trying to deciderer hows yur gonna go bout protektun teh homeland. Hard work I tell ya. Anyway, Big Dick said Ayrab chillun are fair game.

What is the date of your source? If it is only 2004 or shortly after, they could have moved the center of operations. Or maybe your info refers to the political front office, and not necessarily the center of operations.

The article I linked to was dated in 2006.

Bob in HI

IMO, the fact that the Emir wanted that kept quiet bc it was betraying the reporting source just happily coincided with Tenet’s need to meet the President’s demand that they get something out of Zubaydah, so they could create the question – apply torture to get an affirmative answer – and voila. Keep in mind, the fact we had Zubaydah wasn’t a secret – Bush had plastered it all over the press immediately when it happened and he had also jumped the gun to call him something like the number 3 guy in al-Qaeda.

What really appeared to be the case, once they found him, was that the reason Z’s name came up in sigint so often was not that he was a big operationally important guy – but rather that he was the guy the foisted off all the “get the families here and there, hook up this guy with transportation, help that guy’s family get moved” guy. I think Coleman (who doesn’t hide behind anonymity – never has – and who doesn’t make any pretense of buying into torture as a state secret) gave the most descriptive phrasing when he called him something like the travel agent and meet & greet guy.

Pincus and Eggen pretty much omit that Coleman wasn’t just some FBI guy who looked at stuff. He was on O’Neill’s terrorism team and also worked as liason with Scheurer’s CIA team. The reason the Z’s documents went to him is that he was about the top source we had after 9/11. If there is anyone who can call bull on whether or not info was helpful and credible – he’d be the guy.

The real treasures they got from the capture of Z were, as P&E do briefly mention, “Documents, cellphones and computers were seized at multiple sites.”

Some of the other info that was important is what comes, as they mention about the Padilla info, “incidentally.” That is, after all, why you do the kind of questioning Coleman wanted to do – with someone who is knowledgeable. And it is why you tape and KEEP THE TAPES questioning. For those details. Of course, if you are taping yourself being a depraved criminal at the same time, I guess saving a personal hide trumps preserving information that might be important to keep babies from dieing in the next 9/11. It’s a pretty new definition of cowardice.

In any event, here’s Suskind on where we got the binalshibh info:

http://www.democracynow.org/20…..nalist_ron

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to follow up on Al Jazeera. You talk about the direct targeting, the deliberate targeting by the United States of the offices in Kabul. But you also talk about the Emir of Qatar providing key information based a reporter’s notebook.
RON SUSKIND: Yeah, it’s an extraordinary moment. This book, it’s like a spy thriller, for some folks, with the future of the planet at stake. They run up and down as the administration did on victories and defeats. We are in a global battle here. Intelligence often comes from human sources and personal relationships. George Tenet had those relationships. No one else kind of does now.
One of them was with the Emir of Qatar. He, of course, owns Al Jazeera. And at a moment, a key moment, in the summer of 2002, their star reporter, Yousri Foudah, comes to his bosses at Al Jazeera with the biggest scoop they had had up to that point. He had visited the safe house in Karachi where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner, and his deputy Ramzi Binalshibh were hiding. He says, well, it was a whole, you know, skullduggery where he went, you know, through various channels. He delivers it to his bosses. They all say, “We must keep this secret.” Of course, it goes up the ranks to the Emir. The Emir summarily tells George Tenet exactly what the reporter has said.
I mean, just in terms of how reporters feel about the primacy and privilege of information they receive, it’s extraordinary. It’s arguably the most important piece of information we got up to that point. Three months later we raided that safe house in Karachi. We almost caught Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. We did catch Ramzi Binalshibh, and we caught Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s wife and children, children who we he later threatened to try to get Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to talk.

Oh, and btw. When DOJ came up with the bizarre argument that one of the GITMO detainees could not speak with his lawyers about anything that happened before he came to GITMO, including his torture, bc it was all state secrets – it’s no real “accident” that the detainee the have clamped down on so hard is Majid Khan, who reportedly was kept at the same facility as those minor children of KSM and has his own story on how they were being abused.

After all, you know, you have to torture a 6 year old if you want to get really good, solid intelligence information.

n August 2004, the President established the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to serve as the primary organization in the United States Government (USG) for integrating and analyzing all intelligence pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism (CT) and to conduct strategic operational planning by integrating all instruments of national power. In December 2004, Congress codified the NCTC in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) and placed the NCTC in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Located at the Liberty Crossing Building in Northern Virginia, the NCTC is a multi-agency organization dedicated to eliminating the terrorist threat to US interests at home and abroad.

Mukasey helped evolve the law regarding terrorism from the first WTC bombing to 9/11 and beyond. He gave Bushco significant judgements from the bench that were crucial to implemetation of legal fiasco we see today.

There is much at stake including the truth about those events.

“CIA’s harsh treatment intensified in late 2002“

When it was 24/7 Iraq, Iraq, WMD’s, WMD’s…

In these discussions, part of the dynamics that we should keep in mind are the contemporary partisan debates. Wasn’t this also shortly after the Democrats were hammering the administration for failing to “connect the dots“? That was big news in June, 2002. Of course,there were probably several factors involved (such as the desire to create a pathway of excuses to Iran), but getting hammered about something by your political opponents usually gets attention.

And, BTW, I don’t recall mention in our debates anything about The Top Secret National Counterterrorism Center. I’ll bet you don’t know where it is. Is this where all those warrantless wiretaps go?

Bob in HI

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/….._1218.html

Which brings me to something a bit OT, but not really.

I’m really starting to dislike the functionality of the site. There appears to be no way to either find a post more distant in time than the last ten posts (i.e., maybe a day or two old), nor an old comment I may have posted. If it isn’t in “recent posts”, it isn’t.

Compare that to the way Talkleft, for example, is arranged. I can post a comment there and, if six months later (or a year, or two) it comes to mind that someone said something relevant on a news item today, I can go back and, with a little effort, find what was written then and maybe use it today to flesh out a story.

Similarly, the search function on this site seems (in the words of a male relative) “about as useful as teats on a bull”. I typed in the word “kiriakou”, the name we’re using for the WH’s disinformation agent, and I get back one match. Today’s story. Even though that clown’s been in the news, and commented on here, for over a week.

Here, there is a nice function where I can put in my profile. Like I give a shit about that. If I wanted to tell everyone all about myself, I sure as hell would neither write under a nom de plume, nor make the effort to deliberately omit location, gender, name, relationships and all the other personally identifying information that I really try to keep out of my posts.

Is this site (and this applies to FDL, too) going to be a place where we all sit around clucking, gabbling and flapping our wings uselessly, or one where we can work together to (a) disassemble the bullshit the Admin and TradMed feed and (b) try to move policy and its’ execution toward what the Constitution and “Rule of Law”* actually say and mean. With the current setup of the site, it seems like we’re inclining toward the former.

* I get a kick out of using that phrase, remembering back to James Baker repeatedly intoning those words as the public face of the coup, when the Republicans fixed the Supreme Court decision in the winter of 2000-2001. The kick, being, of course, to my stomach acid level.