Gina Haspel: What I did for fun in Thailand

[dalton99a]

https://www.propublica.org/article/cia-cables-detail-its-new-deputy-directors-role-in-torture
CIA Cables Detail Its New Deputy Director’s Role in Torture
Gina Haspel, President Trump’s choice for the CIA’s number two position, was more deeply involved in the torture of Abu Zubaydah than has been publicly understood, according to newly available records and accounts by participants.
by Raymond Bonner, special to ProPublica | Feb. 22, 2017, 6 p.m. EST

....

As the CIA’s video cameras rolled, security guards shackled Abu Zubaydah to a gurney and interrogators poured water over his mouth and nose until he began to suffocate. They slammed him against a wall, confined him for hours in a coffin-like box, and deprived him of sleep.

The 31-year-old Zubaydah begged for mercy, saying that he knew nothing about the terror group’s future plans. The CIA official in charge, known in agency lingo as the “chief of base,” mocked his complaints, accusing Zubaydah of faking symptoms of psychological breakdown. The torture continued.

When questions began to swirl about the Bush administration’s use of the “black sites,” and program of “enhanced interrogation,” the chief of base began pushing to have the tapes destroyed. She accomplished her mission years later when she rose to a senior position at CIA headquarters and drafted an order to destroy the evidence, which was still locked in a CIA safe at the American embassy in Thailand. Her boss, the head of the agency’s counterterrorism center, signed the order to feed the 92 tapes into a giant shredder.

By then, it was clear that CIA analysts were wrong when they had identified Zubaydah as the number three or four in al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden. The waterboarding failed to elicit valuable intelligence not because he was holding back, but because he was not a member of al-Qaida, and had no knowledge of any plots against the United States.

[Solly Mack]

1. Keep in mind, she's only there because she got away with her war crimes.

She isn't the only one still walking around free, available to take more government jobs and cause more damage.

America played the game of "debates" about torture, behaving as if torture was a matter of opinion, and that if you call torture "policy" it somehow makes it a political attack to point out torture is illegal - and then allowed the guilty to walk free.

Shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that war criminals are still in government jobs and will receive promotions within those job.

They are out there walking free - free to do as they please.

Anyone that was here for the Bush years and after will not be surprised by my thinking. I made no bones about it then and I'll make no bones about it now.

The guilty should have been jailed and in not doing so, we made possible for the elevation of war criminals (Haspel, for one example). Made possible the fonder (gags and shudders of disgust) remembrance of war criminals. (as in comments about Bush)

[malaise]

2. Excellent post

Bush and Cheney should be in a cell in the Hague.

[Solly Mack]

3. They should and not just them.

[malaise]

4. +1,000

It's why we as a planet are where we are today.

[bigtree]

5. k&r