- Aug 4, 2009
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How Bush at the direction of Cheney sold out our countries morals
How George W. Bush and Dick Cheney brought torture to America
The most striking example of this came directly after 9/11, when al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured. Since the CIA had zero personnel with experience in interrogation, the FBI was initially brought in. Ali Soufan, a highly experienced interrogator and Muslim who speaks fluent Arabic, took charge of the questioning. He deployed the traditional police model, which focuses on building rapport and a criminal case. Almost immediately, Zubaydah gave up Khalid Sheik Mohammad as a member of al Qaeda.
A man named James Mitchell convinced the Bush brass that he had a better way. The CIA eventually paid his company — co-founded with another psychologist, Bruce Jessen — $81 million. The two had been psychologists in the Air Force, where they oversaw the mock interrogators in the SERE program, which trained Navy SEALs what to do in case they were captured or tortured by the enemy.
Mitchell did not speak Arabic. He had no experience whatsoever in Islamic extremism generally or al Qaeda in particular. And he had never even interrogated anyone. That is who replaced Soufan, who was without question one of the finest al Qaeda specialists in the entire country at the time. That is the level of competence the Bush administration was willing to flush down the toilet to validate its iron belief that non-violent interrogations (soft, weak, liberal) could never work, despite Soufan's proven success.
How George W. Bush and Dick Cheney brought torture to America
The most striking example of this came directly after 9/11, when al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured. Since the CIA had zero personnel with experience in interrogation, the FBI was initially brought in. Ali Soufan, a highly experienced interrogator and Muslim who speaks fluent Arabic, took charge of the questioning. He deployed the traditional police model, which focuses on building rapport and a criminal case. Almost immediately, Zubaydah gave up Khalid Sheik Mohammad as a member of al Qaeda.
A man named James Mitchell convinced the Bush brass that he had a better way. The CIA eventually paid his company — co-founded with another psychologist, Bruce Jessen — $81 million. The two had been psychologists in the Air Force, where they oversaw the mock interrogators in the SERE program, which trained Navy SEALs what to do in case they were captured or tortured by the enemy.
Mitchell did not speak Arabic. He had no experience whatsoever in Islamic extremism generally or al Qaeda in particular. And he had never even interrogated anyone. That is who replaced Soufan, who was without question one of the finest al Qaeda specialists in the entire country at the time. That is the level of competence the Bush administration was willing to flush down the toilet to validate its iron belief that non-violent interrogations (soft, weak, liberal) could never work, despite Soufan's proven success.
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