Torture Works

[QUENTIN]

Water-Bored

Al-Qaida's plot to bomb the Library Tower was not worth torturing anyone over.

By Timothy Noah

The Library Tower? Is that the best that Bush's torture apologists can do?

On April 16, the Obama administration publicly released four Justice Department memos, now repudiated, in which President George W. Bush's administration defined the parameters of what it termed, euphemistically, "enhanced interrogation techniques." This has enlivened the debate about whether water-boarding, walling, Room 101-ing and whatever other torture methods the Bush-era CIA may have used against al-Qaida captives actually prevented acts of terror. Various journalists (Ron Suskind, the Washington Post's Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, the New York Times' Scott Shane) have looked into Bush administration claims that water-boarding Abu Zubaida, the first "high-value" captive, yielded vitally important information, and concluded it did not. We have since learned that Abu Zubaida was water-boarded 83 times. ABC News reported a couple of years ago that water-boarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was what prompted him to confess, "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the American Jew, Daniel Pearl." That same report claimed Sheikh Mohammed had been water-boarded only once, an estimate we now know was off by 182. The confession may have been shaky, too. Bernard-Henri Lévy, among others, doubts Sheikh Mohammed killed Pearl. In any event, confessing to past murder had no obvious bearing on future acts of violence.
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Now Mark A. Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, argues in a Washington Post op-ed ("The CIA's Questioning Worked") that justification for the Bush administration's techniques is there for all to see in a memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel dated May 30, 2005, one of the four made public.

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

Ah, the Library Tower. The thwarting of al-Qaida's attack on it was a favorite talking point of President Bush (though he sometimes called it the "Liberty Tower"; for the past six years, its formal name has been the U.S. Bank Tower). Because the Library Tower is in Los Angeles, the al-Qaida plot to bring it down is sometimes confused with the Millennium Plot, a separate plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Day 2000—supported but not organized by al-Qaida—that came much closer to fruition. The Library Tower, designed by I.M. Pei's architectural firm, stands 73 stories high and is the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi.* Sheikh Mohammed initially planned to crash a jetliner into it on 9/11 as part of a scheme involving not four but 10 passenger planes on both coasts. Osama Bin Laden vetoed that as too ambitious and scaled back the plan to focus on New York and Washington. After 9/11, Sheikh Mohammed still hoped to execute the attack on the Library Tower and, working with a Southeast Asian al-Qaida affiliate (the aforementioned Hambali), recruited four terror cell members to carry it out.

The first reason to be skeptical that this planned attack could have been carried out successfully is that, as I've noted before, attacking buildings by flying planes into them didn't remain a viable al-Qaida strategy even through Sept. 11, 2001. Thanks to cell phones, passengers on United Flight 93 were able to learn that al-Qaida was using planes as missiles and crashed the plane before it could hit its target. There was no way future passengers on any flight would let a terrorist who killed the pilot and took the controls fly wherever he pleased.

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

How could Sheikh Mohammed's water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration "broke up" that attack during the previous year? It couldn't, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn't realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter. If foiling the Library Tower plot was the reason to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then that water-boarding was more than cruel and unjust. It was a waste of water.

The last remnant of argument torture apologists try to claim as unsullied or legitimate is now added to the long list of discredited ones.

Beyond being immoral, beyond being illegal, torture does not produce remotely reliable, valuable intelligence.

 

[kyzr]

The best reason to waterboard KSM and the others terrorist planners is to download intel and to punish them for killing 3,000 innocents, including 3 & 4 year olds in the planes. If ever anyone deserved to be waterboarded 186x a day until they die its those MFs.

 

[Xenophon]

To this day I still can't raise a single give a fuck over those shitheads being abused.

They should have cut their nuts off and sowed them in their mouths while they bleed to death.

On PPV.

 

[CMike]

It's hard to follow the gibberish of the OP.

This is based on an Obama declassified CIA memo, from the CIA to the justice department.

This is the CIA criteria for waterboarding, which was done only 3 times.

JEFFREY: Waterboarding saved L.A. - Washington Times

"In March 2003, KSM became the third and final terrorist ever waterboarded by the CIA. The other two were Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. So few were waterboarded because the CIA applied very strict criteria in deciding when the technique could be used.

As CIA Acting General Counsel John A. Rizzo explained in a 2004 letter to then-Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the CIA would only resort to waterboarding a top al Qaeda leader when the agency had "credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent," "substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack" and "*ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit the information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack."

Mr. Rizzo's letter, as quoted here, was cited in a May 30, 2005, memo to Mr. Rizzo from then-Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury, also of the Office of Legal Counsel.

...Both KSM and Zubaydah had 'expressed their belief that the general U.S. population was "weak," lacked resilience and would be unable to "do what was necessary" to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals,' " the memo says. "Indeed, before the CIA used enhanced techniques in its interrogation of KSM, he resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, 'Soon, you will know.' "

After he was waterboarded, KSM provided the CIA with information that enabled the U.S. government to close down a terror cell already "tasked" with flying a jet into a building in Los Angeles.

"You have informed us that the interrogation of KSM - once enhanced techniques were employed - led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles," the memo says, referring to information the CIA provided to the Justice Department.


"You have informed us that information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemaah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave,' " the memo says.


"More specifically, we understand that KSM admitted that he had [redaction] large sum of money to an al Qaeda associate [redaction] ... . Khan subsequently identified the associate [Zubair], who was then captured," the memo says. "Zubair, in turn, provided information that led to the arrest of Hambali. The information acquired from these captures allowed CIA interrogators to pose more specific questions to KSM, which led the CIA [to] Hambali's brother, al-Hadi. Using information obtained from multiple sources, al-Hadi was captured, and he subsequently identified the Garuba cell. With the aid of this additional information, interrogations of Hambali confirmed much of what was learned from KSM."


Though waterboarding was exceedingly rare in CIA interrogations of al Qaeda terrorists, it was used routinely on certain members of our own armed forces who went through Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training. According to another previously classified memo released last week by Mr. Obama, some branches of the U.S. military stopped using waterboarding in training certain troops not because it had harmful long-term effects, but because it was so universally effective in extracting information.

 

[MIPS]

To this day I still can't raise a single give a fuck over those shitheads being abused.

They should have cut their nuts off and sowed them in their mouths while they bleed to death.

On PPV.

Feeling a bit bloodthirsty today are we?

"Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance." -- Winston Churchill

 

[LibocalypseNow]

Yea this is a very over-played and tired issue. Just can't waste a minute of my day worrying about the poor brutal terrorists. Way too many other more important things to worry about. The Left really has over-played their hand on this one just like their tired BOOOOOOOOSSH & FOX NOOOOOOOOOOZ screeching. Enough is enough already.

 

[CMike]

Water-Bored

Al-Qaida's plot to bomb the Library Tower was not worth torturing anyone over.

By Timothy Noah

The Library Tower? Is that the best that Bush's torture apologists can do?

On April 16, the Obama administration publicly released four Justice Department memos, now repudiated, in which President George W. Bush's administration defined the parameters of what it termed, euphemistically, "enhanced interrogation techniques." This has enlivened the debate about whether water-boarding, walling, Room 101-ing and whatever other torture methods the Bush-era CIA may have used against al-Qaida captives actually prevented acts of terror. Various journalists (Ron Suskind, the Washington Post's Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, the New York Times' Scott Shane) have looked into Bush administration claims that water-boarding Abu Zubaida, the first "high-value" captive, yielded vitally important information, and concluded it did not. We have since learned that Abu Zubaida was water-boarded 83 times. ABC News reported a couple of years ago that water-boarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was what prompted him to confess, "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the American Jew, Daniel Pearl." That same report claimed Sheikh Mohammed had been water-boarded only once, an estimate we now know was off by 182. The confession may have been shaky, too. Bernard-Henri Lévy, among others, doubts Sheikh Mohammed killed Pearl. In any event, confessing to past murder had no obvious bearing on future acts of violence.
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss in the FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAILGet Slate RSS FeedsRSSShare This ArticleRECOMMEND...Single PageSINGLE PAGE
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Facebook FacebookPost to MySpace!MySpaceMixx MixxDigg DiggReddit RedditDel.icio.us del.icio.usFurl FurlMa.gnolia.com Ma.gnoliaSphere SphereStumble UponStumbleUponCLOSE

Now Mark A. Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, argues in a Washington Post op-ed ("The CIA's Questioning Worked") that justification for the Bush administration's techniques is there for all to see in a memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel dated May 30, 2005, one of the four made public.

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

Ah, the Library Tower. The thwarting of al-Qaida's attack on it was a favorite talking point of President Bush (though he sometimes called it the "Liberty Tower"; for the past six years, its formal name has been the U.S. Bank Tower). Because the Library Tower is in Los Angeles, the al-Qaida plot to bring it down is sometimes confused with the Millennium Plot, a separate plan to attack Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Day 2000—supported but not organized by al-Qaida—that came much closer to fruition. The Library Tower, designed by I.M. Pei's architectural firm, stands 73 stories high and is the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi.* Sheikh Mohammed initially planned to crash a jetliner into it on 9/11 as part of a scheme involving not four but 10 passenger planes on both coasts. Osama Bin Laden vetoed that as too ambitious and scaled back the plan to focus on New York and Washington. After 9/11, Sheikh Mohammed still hoped to execute the attack on the Library Tower and, working with a Southeast Asian al-Qaida affiliate (the aforementioned Hambali), recruited four terror cell members to carry it out.

The first reason to be skeptical that this planned attack could have been carried out successfully is that, as I've noted before, attacking buildings by flying planes into them didn't remain a viable al-Qaida strategy even through Sept. 11, 2001. Thanks to cell phones, passengers on United Flight 93 were able to learn that al-Qaida was using planes as missiles and crashed the plane before it could hit its target. There was no way future passengers on any flight would let a terrorist who killed the pilot and took the controls fly wherever he pleased.

What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

How could Sheikh Mohammed's water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration "broke up" that attack during the previous year? It couldn't, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn't realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter. If foiling the Library Tower plot was the reason to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then that water-boarding was more than cruel and unjust. It was a waste of water.

The last remnant of argument torture apologists try to claim as unsullied or legitimate is now added to the long list of discredited ones.

Beyond being immoral, beyond being illegal, torture does not produce remotely reliable, valuable intelligence.

I care zero about what the nutjob is skeptical about and his opinion.

I provided the documentation.

 

[Anguille]

If torture works, where is Bin Laden?

 

[Anguille]

Oh, I see. This is nothing to do with gathering intelligence or suppressing terrorism. It's about justifying sadism. Got it!

 

[sboyle24]

Torture works sometimes, and hurts chances of getting vital information otherwise. It casts a "shadow" over the government, ruins international views and friendliness, and provides strong inspiration for new terrorists.

 

[Kalam]

To this day I still can't raise a single give a fuck over those shitheads being abused.

They should have cut their nuts off and sowed them in their mouths while they bleed to death.

On PPV.

Never mind that you have no idea in hell whether or not those being held in Guantanamo are innocent. I suppose they could be tortured for "breathing while Muslim."

 

[Skull Pilot]

To this day I still can't raise a single give a fuck over those shitheads being abused.

They should have cut their nuts off and sowed them in their mouths while they bleed to death.

On PPV.

I like the glass rod inserted into their penises and then smashed torture technique.

That would work a lot better than waterboarding IMHO.

 

[Kalam]

To this day I still can't raise a single give a fuck over those shitheads being abused.

They should have cut their nuts off and sowed them in their mouths while they bleed to death.

On PPV.

I like the glass rod inserted into their penises and then smashed torture technique.

That would work a lot better than waterboarding IMHO.

Into the whole gay BDSM thing, huh?

 

[Skull Pilot]

To this day I still can't raise a single give a fuck over those shitheads being abused.

They should have cut their nuts off and sowed them in their mouths while they bleed to death.

On PPV.

I like the glass rod inserted into their penises and then smashed torture technique.

That would work a lot better than waterboarding IMHO.

Into the whole gay BDSM thing, huh?

Nothing gay about it.

You have a beautiful woman do it to the prisoner to be tortured and she tells him if you tell me what I want to know I won't smash the glass.

Now that's torture that will work.

 

[Kalam]

I like the glass rod inserted into their penises and then smashed torture technique.

That would work a lot better than waterboarding IMHO.

Into the whole gay BDSM thing, huh?

Nothing gay about it.

No, there's nothing gay at all about a man having cock-torture fantasies.

You have a beautiful woman do it to the prisoner to be tortured and she tells him if you tell me what I want to know I won't smash the glass.

Now that's torture that will work.

Do that and you'll have them confessing to the Tate murders. Some people are clearly unable to get their heads around the fact that people will confess to anything, including false charges, to avoid intense physical anguish.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Into the whole gay BDSM thing, huh?

Nothing gay about it.

No, there's nothing gay at all about a man having cock-torture fantasies.

You have a beautiful woman do it to the prisoner to be tortured and she tells him if you tell me what I want to know I won't smash the glass.

Now that's torture that will work.

Do that and you'll have them confessing to the Tate murders. Some people are clearly unable to get their heads around the fact that people will confess to anything, including false charges, to avoid intense physical anguish.

Where do you get that i fantasize about it.

I am a pragmatist and if one is going to torture a man for information one must threaten what a man holds most dear.

Most men fear death less than they fear emasculation.

 

[Kalam]

Where do you get that i fantasize about it.

You've clearly put some thought into it.

I am a pragmatist and if one is going to torture a man for information one must threaten what a man holds most dear.

Most men fear death less than they fear emasculation.

Under threat of torture, do you believe that people are more likely to tell the truth or say what they believe their torturers want to hear? If you faced the method of torture that you dreamed up, would you be willing to confess to, say, a murder that you did not commit in order to avoid it?

 

[Skull Pilot]

Where do you get that i fantasize about it.

You've clearly put some thought into it.

No I actually saw it in a movie and realized that it would certainly be effective.

I am a pragmatist and if one is going to torture a man for information one must threaten what a man holds most dear.

Most men fear death less than they fear emasculation.

Under threat of torture, do you believe that people are more likely to tell the truth or say what they believe their torturers want to hear? If you faced the method of torture that you dreamed up, would you be willing to confess to, say, a murder that you did not commit in order to avoid it?

Haven't you learned, war is not about truth?

 

[CMike]

What is "torture" is very subjective. It can mean just about anything.

The facts are:

1) Waterboarding was used only on 3 arch-terrorists

2) Without it the three arch terrorists refused to cooperate, only responding "soon you will know" when asked about future terrorist attacks

3) All other methods failed

4) It met the CIA's strict guidelines of when it should be sued

5) Based on the Obama declassified CIA memo it stopped a 911 attack of a plane flying into a Los Angeles building

So for the CIA operatives who got this information to stop the terrorist attack

 

[Kalam]

Where do you get that i fantasize about it.

You've clearly put some thought into it.

I am a pragmatist and if one is going to torture a man for information one must threaten what a man holds most dear.

Most men fear death less than they fear emasculation.

Under threat of torture, do you believe that people are more likely to tell the truth or say what they believe their torturers want to hear? If you faced the method of torture that you dreamed up, would you be willing to confess to, say, a murder that you did not commit in order to avoid it?

depends.

On what? Under the American justice system, you'd probably be looking at a couple of decades in prison for involvement with "terrorism", a sentence that would be drastically reduced if you confessed to false charges and falsely implicated other "terrorists." Are you saying that you'd take a lacerated dick over a few years in prison?