How rabbit hole deep are the politics of torture memos Obama faces? Just think about a few things.

[HamdenRice]

The media is reporting that four former directors of the CIA held up the release of the torture memos -- George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and John Deutch.

I wish people would just stop and think about these things a little.

Think deeply about this. Really. Stop and think.

Four former CIA heads prevented the president from releasing these memos for about a month.

Four former CIA directors.

Some of you people think that Obama is like an elected king and can snap his fingers and make things happen.

Yet the president and the current CIA director seemed to have been unable to overrule four former CIA directors for a month.

Doesn't that make anybody stop and think about how things actually work in Washington?

Now, it's possible that they just put up very good arguments that made the current administration stop and think and debate. Or maybe they said they’d get on the TV and be very publicly cross.

Or is it possible that they threatened something or that they presented information about something very dire happening if the memos were released?

Has anyone noticed that one of the former CIA directors who managed to delay the release of the memos was the head of the NSA when it, it is now alleged, was spying widely on citizens, politicians and journalists -- far beyond the scope of "listening to terrorists’s phone conversations"?

Obama is playing chess. Most of DU thinks it's watching a checkers game.

Have any of you actually begun to read and analyze the memos? Can you see why there is something fishy going on?

Some of the four former CIA directors and other opponents of releasing them have suggested that the disclosure of the methods outlined in these memos would compromise intelligence gathering – that, for example, our interrogation tactics would be ineffective against terrorists who would know from the memos what we were going to do to them and what our limits are.

But the strange thing about the memos is how little new information there is in them. They are chillingly inhumane, sure. But all of the major tactics have been disclosed already. Plus Obama says we're never going to use them. So how could disclosing these already known tactics which are never going to be used again affect the usefulness of these tactics?

Doesn’t anyone else think this is even a little bit fishy?

What is all this really about?

The first memo is about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, supposedly one of the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks.

All of Abu Zubaydah's torture tapes have been destroyed, supposedly because they were evidence of torture. But strangely, they kept the Abu Ghraib pictures and videos, which are much worse.

The Zubaydah memo is dated August 2002. Now here's the odd thing about his interrogation. By most accounts, he was initially described as high ranking al Qaeda who was difficult to interrogate. He gave some information, but not enough. The CIA asked for permission to use tougher tactics, which the August memo granted.

What has been lost in the recent news is what tactics the CIA used. They became much, much rougher and more violent with him. Then took him overseas to a CIA black site in Afghanistan.

But they told him that they had transferred him to the Saudis . The CIA thought that Zubaydah would be terrified that the Saudis would kill him or torture him much worse than the CIA, and that he would therefore tell the Saudis more. But the Saudis were fake. They were CIA officers pretending to be the Sauidis.

What little we know about what happened next doesn't come from "crazy conspiracy theorists". It comes from Robert Baer, the former CIA case officer, and media go to guy about Middle East intelligence, as well as the author of the well respected CIA memoire, “See No Evil” (and supposedly the basis for the main character in “Syrianna”). The other source of this story is professional anti-conspiracy theorist Gerald Posner, who claims it was leaked to him by disgruntled CIA agents.

Now, here's where it gets weirder. When Zubaydah was delivered to the fake Saudis, instead of being terrified, he was relieved and happy. He told the fake Saudis that he had been afraid that the CIA was going to kill him (a clear violation of the memo, which said the CIA could not cause a prisoner to think he was going to be killed).

Zubaydah then told the fake Saudis that he was happy he was in their custody because high ranking Saudis would know what to do with him . He began to give out personal and cell phone numbers of Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews . The fake Saudi's threatened to torture him because he was disparaging the Saudi kingdom.

But Zubayday went further. He gave the names of two other Saudi princes, and the head of Pakistan's air force as his handlers. He said all these officials knew about the 9/11 attacks before hand. He implicated Saudi Intelligence Minister Prince Turki al-Faisal.

According to information leaked by disgruntled CIA officers, he then gave a narration that has never been released to the public, that the CIA officers called, the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11 -- none of which, of course, got into the 9/11 Commission Report.

Wrong answer!

Poor Zubaydah!

According to Saturday's New York Times, in his Red Cross testimony, Zubaydah said it was then that the real torture began -- the dehumanizing, degrading, mind killing torture.

And in the press, the Bush administration began backpeddling about Zubaydah's importance. Suddenly he was just a glorified supply clerk!

So the question is, if he already given the Rosetta Stone of 9/11, why did the really severe torture begin after that? Maybe the purpose wasn't to get more information.

Well, maybe we could talk to those three Saudi princes named in Zubaydah’s “Rosetta Stone” of 9/11? Sadly, prince number one died of a blod clot or heart attack while having liposuction. Prince number two died the next day in a one-car car crash on the way back from the funeral of prince number one. Prince number three died one week later of “thirst”. And the Pakistani air force chief was dead by February 2003, when his plane exploded in mid air, killing him, his wife and 15 aides.

When the public was closing in on the Zubaydah torture case, the CIA destroyed all the tapes -- including the "Rosetta Stone" tapes. According to Robert Baer, "the people who think 9/11 was an inside job might easily be able to believe that Abu Zubaydah named his American accomplices in the tape that has now been destroyed by the CIA."

The real conflict over the torture memos may not be over torture at all. It may be that an inquiry into the torture of Zubaydah is the thread that begins to unravel the cloth of the official story.

So if you think that Obama can just snap his fingers and make all the torture information public and put the "bad guys" on trial -- well, just think about it for a minute.