Why did Bush-Cheney and the CIA Destroy the Minds of 9/11 Detainees? Others Disappeared or Dead.

leveymg

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Wed May-20-09 11:49 AM
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Why did Bush-Cheney and the CIA Destroy the Minds of 9/11 Detainees? Others Disappeared or Dead.

Edited on Wed May-20-09 12:48 PM by leveymg

The question is being asked, why did the White House order the CIA to waterboard 9/11 suspect Abu Zubaydeh 83 times? That's an important start to this line of inquiry.

Here's a more telling question: why did they waterboard AZ without monitoring his blood-oxygen level, which predictably resulted in his brain damage and memory loss?

And, why are so many other material witnesses now disappeared or dead?

Fingertip Blood Oximeter - $48 Monitoring of blood-oxygen is a routine part of any procedure where respiration may be interrupted. The device that measures oxygen levels, a pulse oxomiter, is hardly an exotic medical instrument - they are in common use in clinics, dental offices, and geriatric care facilities around the world. Many Scuba divers and mountain climbers use them to monitor for anoxia, a drop in oxygen levels.

Abu Zubaydeh blacked out several times and almost died while he was waterboarded repeatedly and for extended periods without oxygen monitoring.

Why did they interrogate him this way?

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From the recently-leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report on "High Value" Detainees ("ICRC Report (PDF)"), Zubaydah described his interrogation during waterboarding in August, 2002:

On this occassion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled without success to breathe. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.

<snip>

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by a doctor.

It appears the IG report footnote is referring to a waterboarding "ADVERSE EVENT" of Zubaydah that required resuscitative medical intervention.

The CIA dramatically altered the protocol for waterboarding by March 2003. Specifically, The ICRC report description of the waterboarding of AZ and KSM is almost identical with the exception of one detail. KSM had a pulse oximeter (a device to measure blood oxygen levels) attached to his finger to measure the level of oxygen in his blood during waterboarding, and he noted that there was a doctor present in the room each time this procedure was used. This suggests that "ADVERSE EVENTS" in the experience of waterboarding Zubaydah led to this drastic change in protocol requiring close medical supervision.

They stopped waterboarding after KSM in March 2003. This suggests they knew waterboarding was prone to "ADVERSE EVENTS". See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/27/724318/-The-CIA-Almost-Killed-Both-Zubaydah-and-al-Nashiri

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This wasn't something that was done in some isolated cellar by untrained goons. The waterboarding of AZ was carried out at Baghram Air Base, where it was overseen by a team of experts in waterboarding who had developed the SERE program for the U.S. military. These contractors were paid a thousand dollars a day each plus expenses for their subject matter expertise. CCTV video cameras were "everywhere" according to CIA officers interviewed, broadcasting every one of these interrogations back to Washington and Langley. Each painful step of these interrogations had to be approved in advance.

The Agency's own recordings of these sessions were later ordered destroyed by Director of CIA Clandestine Operations
Jose A. Rodriguez. It was Rodriguez who had been in charge of the unit, the Director's Counter-Terrorism Center (CIA/CTC), that actually carried out the torture of Abu Zubaydeh and the waterboarding of two other "high-value" detainees.

Under the previous CTC Director, Cofer Black (1999-May 17, 2002), that same unit had monitored the al-Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where AZ and several of the principal 9/11 hijackers planned out the 9/11 attack. Under Black, later CTC set up the "black site" rendition and torture program.

Cofer Black had been CIA Chief of Station in Sudan in the mid-1990s when bin Laden and Abu Zubaydeh were running their own worldwide operations from that location, including the training of Islamic militants for combat in Bosnia and later Chechnya. AZ trained six the principal 9/11 hijackers, originally recruited for such operations against the Russians.

Based on ongoing NSA monitoring of Nawaf al-Midhar, in December 1999, Black's CTC monitored preparations and travel to the Kuala Lumpur summit of the future Flt. 77 hijackers and others who planned there and went on to lead the "Planes Operation". The attendees were tracked as they scattered and went their various ways. CTC monitored the January 15, 2000 arrival at LAX of al-Midhar and his partner, Khalid al-Hazmi, who had originally been recruited by AZ to fight in Chechnya. A series of at least three warning cables drafted by FBI liason officers at CTC were drafted about the Kuala Lumpur meeting and the travels of the future Flt. 77 hijackers, but these were ordered withheld by Black's Assistant at CTC, a man identified as "Robert B", a protege of CIA Director George Tenet. See, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/413

The same CIA unit and key managers that had monitored bin Laden and then failed to deter the 9/11 attacks was then given the task of interrogating the surviving witnesses. How do you spell conflict of interest? What were the White House and CIA Director Tenet thinking?

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MORE DEAD 9/11 SUSPECTS

What was it that AZ knew that the White House and CIA Director thought was so important that he had to be waterboarded into a near-vegetative state?

The connection of the 9/11 hijackers and CIA itself provides an apparent motive. Was there another group with a possible interest in erasing and altering the knowledge that Abu Zubaydeh had inside his head?

According to author Gerald Posner, the CIA had already extracted the most important facts from AZ before he was waterboarded. Abu Aubaydeh was captured in Pakistan in late March 2002. While he was still recovering from gunshot wounds to his groin and abdomen suffered during his capture, he was transferred from Pakistan to the "dark prison" in Afghanistan.

Initially, his interrogation was done more by guile than torture, and AZ was still quite intact after he divulged the "Rosetta Stone", some of most critical information about the 9/11 operation: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-posner/the-cias-destroyed-inter_b_75850.html

In my 2003 New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, I discussed Abu Zubaydah at length in Chapter 19, "The Interrogation." There I set forth how Zubaydah initially refused to help his American captors. Also, disclosed was how U.S. intelligence established a so-called "fake flag" operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers.

Instead, when confronted by his "Saudi" interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah assured them

That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.

American interrogators used painkillers to induce Zubaydah to talk -- they gave him the meds when he cooperated, and withdrew them when he was quiet. They also utilized a thiopental sodium drip (a so-called truth serum). Several hours after he first fingered Prince Ahmed, his captors challenged the information, and said that since he had disparaged the Saudi royal family, he would be executed. It was at that point that some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue, that one investigator told me was the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

He named two other Saudi princes, and also the chief of Pakistan's air force, as his major contacts. Moreover, he stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King's nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11.

It would be nice to further investigate the men named by Zubaydah, but that is not possible. All four identified by Zubaydah are now dead. As for the three Saudi princes, the King's 43-year-old nephew, Prince Ahmed, died of either a heart attack or blood clot, depending on which report you believe, after having liposuction in Riyadh's top hospital; the second, 41-year-old Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, died the following day in a one car accident, on his way to the funeral of Prince Ahmed; and one week later, the third Saudi prince named by Zubaydah, 25-year-old Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, died, according to the Saudi Royal Court, "of thirst."

The head of Pakistan's Air Force, Mushaf Ali Mir, was the last to go. He died, together with his wife and fifteen of his top aides, when his plane blew up -- suspected as sabotage -- in February 2003. Pakistan's investigation of the explosion -- if one was even done -- has never been made public.

Zubaydah is the only top al Queda operative who has secretly linked two of America's closest allies in the war on terror -- Saudi Arabia and Pakistan -- to the 9/11 attacks. Why does Bush, and the CIA, continue to protect the Saudi Royal family and the Pakistani military, from the implications of Zubaydah's confessions?

MORE THAN 30 OTHER AQ DETAINEES DISAPPEARED OR DEAD IN CUSTODY

Yet another explanation for repeated and prolonged waterboarding of Abu Zubaydeh has recently emerged. There are a number of observers who have speculated in the last month or so that AZ was tortured into false confessions intended to link al-Qaeda with Iraqi WMD programs. This theory is reinforced by the prison "suicide" of Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi, who was captured before AZ, the confessions of whom served as the source of much of the Bush-Cheney Administration's phony charges that Iraq had trained AQ operatives in chemical and bioloigical warfare. Before he turned up dead following CIA rendition to Libya, al-Libi was one of three dozen AQ detainees that have disappeared after capture. Is the record of evidence being destroyed?

Of course, none of these explanations exclude the others, and there appear to be multiple interested groups at various levels of the Bush Administration and the CIA with plausible motives to alter or erase the memory of Abu Zubaydeh and other 9/11 detainees. Here's another question: when are these figures involved in ordering torture finally going to be put under oath to answer the questions they have already perjured themselves about before Congress and the 9/11 Commission?

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