Did torture really help US find al Qaeda chief?

WASHINGTON - Hailed as a major success in the U.S. "war on terror," the capture of Indonesian cleric Hambali if often touted by the U.S. intelligence community as evidence that harsh interrogation produces results.

But the U.S. Senate report on CIA interrogation methods released this week suggests that more mundane steps - email monitoring, a tip off from a CIA source and help from Thailand - may have been what brought down Hambali, head of militant group Jemaah Islamiah.

"Frankly, we stumbled onto Hambali," the report quoted the head of the Central Intelligence Agency's counterterrorism center in southeast Asia as saying in 2005.

Conflicting stories about the trail of clues that led investigators to Hambali illustrate one of the main disputes over the U.S. interrogation of terror suspects: Awful as it was, did it actually work?

Senior CIA officials told Congress, the White House and the Justice Department for years that a snippet of information from the brutal interrogation of senior al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed led to Hambali's capture.

Accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Mohammed was repeatedly subjected to some of the CIA's harshest methods after he was captured. He was waterboarded - a technique intended to simulate drowning - 183 times, and was slapped, grabbed and deprived of sleep, according to the Senate report.

Mohammed told CIA interrogators in early 2003 about a plan to have a former resident of Baltimore, Majid Khan, send $50,000 to southeast Asia to fund al Qaeda attacks.

The spy agency says that information helped investigators uncover a network of terror suspects in southeast Asia that led to Hambali himself. Hambali, also known as Riduan Isamuddin, was detained in Ayutthaya, Thailand, in 2003.

Described by former President George W. Bush as "one of the world's most lethal terrorists," Hambali is suspected of having been involved in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and the bombing of a nightclub in Bali that killed more than 200 people. He has been held at the Guantanamo U.S. military prison in Cuba without trial since 2006.

TORTURE PLAYED "NO ROLE"

Although the CIA frequently presented the capture of Hambali as evidence that torture did produce valuable intelligence, the Senate report said that the harsh treatment of Mohammed, known as KSM, did not help catch Hambali.

In 2003, Hambali was among Asia's most wanted men. The main go-between for the Jemaah Islamiah group of Southeast Asia and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, Hambali was considered the only man from the region to win a place at al Qaeda's top table.

His capture was seen as a coup for the Bush administration and Southeast Asian governments fearful of Jemaah Islamiah's ability to launch attacks across the region.

The CIA gave "inaccurate representations regarding the capture of Hambali" in 18 documents sent to policymakers and the Department of Justice between 2003 and 2009, said the report, compiled by the Democratic majority on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"A review of CIA operational cables and other records found that information obtained from KSM during and after the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques played no role in the capture of Hambali," the report said.

Before Mohammed gave up information about Khan during interrogation, the CIA was already assembling leads that would eventually bring it and Thai investigators to Hambali, the report said.

Some clues came from monitoring emails between al Qaeda and Khan, who was later captured in Pakistan. He gave Pakistani investigators details about al Qaeda's links to Southeast Asia that eventually pointed to Hambali, the report said.

In contrast to the CIA's use of torture, Pakistani interrogators pried information from Khan with a soft questioning technique known as "rapport building," the report said.

A CIA source contributed to the capture of Hambali by identifying an associate of Khan in Thailand who gave information to Thai authorities that brought them closer to the Indonesian militant, the Senate document said.

After Hambali's capture, Thailand also claimed credit.

"We received tipoffs from local people that there were strange-looking people staying around there so we checked their background and passports and realized that they were the people we were looking for," then Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said in 2003.

Former intelligence officials disputed the Senate committee's assertions that the CIA interrogation program played no role in the hunt for Hambali.

"The report errs in not recognizing that a piece of information can be useful and even critical to reaching an analytic conclusion, even if there also are other pieces of information that were at least as useful," said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst.

They said the United States never would have tracked down and killed bin Laden in 2011 without information acquired in the interrogation program, although the Senate committee strongly refutes that.

The committee said the CIA misrepresented how it got useful information from a detainee that helped locate bin Laden.

The terror suspect, Hassan Ghul, did tell his captors the name of Bin Laden's courier as the CIA reported but he did so before undergoing torture, not during it, the report said

Hambali, the nom-de-guerre of Indonesian-born Riduan Isamuddin, was believed to be in the process of organizing a follow-up to the Sept. 11 attacks, possibly involving airplanes, but this time directed at the West Coast of the United States, former CIA officials say.

Michael Hayden, the ex-director of the CIA, told Fox News on Wednesday that the agency is still using information gleaned from harsh interrogations, which have since been banned.

"These interrogations of all the detainees gave us kind of a Home Depot-like storage of information on al Qaeda on which we relied, well we are still relying on it today."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Retired Fil-Am major general denounces CIA torture

REDWOOD CITY, California – The Filipino-American army general who wrote the official 2004 report on the abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, sounded off on a scathing report on torture that was released by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.

For the first time since the controversial report on the CIA’s torture of detainees was released, retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba admonished what he called "indefensible" acts cited in the report.

Here is the full transcription of Gen. Taguba’s statement, given Wednesday in an exclusive phone interview with Balitang America:

"It’s difficult to defend the indefensible, especially coming from senior government leaders who intentionally and purposely misled, deceived and lied about the torture program to the American people and Congress.

These are the same officials that took an oath, assumed their offices to defend the country and obey the Constitution of the United States to the best of their ability, to which they failed hugely in doing so.

The Senate’s report is one of several reports that have condemned torture, identified the CIA whose mission was not originally detaining and torturing detainees — because their mission was for espionage, selecting intelligence and defending our country.

So they extended that mission, thinking and believing that they had the legal authority when members of the executive offices of the White House, in stark violation of Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and laws of warfare to which the United States is a signatory.

The Senate’s report is one of many since the revelation of Abu Ghraib in 2004. The Senate Armed Services Committee report in 2008 had several findings and conclusions that the military, the CIA, and other element agencies committed the illegal detainee abuse, torture, and inhumane treatment.

However, the question that still requires answers is that who and what individuals will be held accountable for violating the rule of law? Even if they are not prosecuted, their reputation, character and identify will be known and they will not be able to hide from the truth.”

Gen. Taguba said his 2004 report played a major role in this latest report on what he calls violations of the rule of law.

Read more from Balitang America.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

CIA interrogation techniques 'amounting to torture' - report

WASHINGTON - The CIA misled the White House and public about its torture of detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks and acted more brutally and pervasively than it acknowledged, a U.S. Senate report said on Tuesday, drawing calls to prosecute American officials.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's five-year review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents concluded that the intelligence agency failed to disrupt a single plot despite torturing al Qaeda and other captives in secret facilities worldwide between 2002 and 2006, when George W. Bush was president.

The CIA interrogation program was devised by two agency contractors to squeeze information from suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The interrogations took place in countries that included Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

Some captives were deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, and the report recorded cases of simulated drowning or "waterboarding" and sexual abuse, including "rectal feeding" or "rectal hydration" without any documented medical need.

It described one secret CIA prison, its location not identified, as a "dungeon" where detainees were kept in total darkness and shackled in isolated cells, bombarded with loud noise and given only a bucket in which to relieve themselves.

Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, speaking on the Senate floor after releasing the report, said the techniques in some cases amounted to torture and that "the CIA's actions, a decade ago, are a stain on our values, and on our history."

The U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, said the report revealed a "clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration" and called for prosecution of U.S. officials.

Civil rights advocates also called for accountability.

"Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a 'policy option' for future presidents," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York.

The CIA dismissed the findings, saying its interrogations secured valuable information. Many Republicans criticized the decision by Democratic lawmakers to release the report, which was put together by the committee's Democratic majority, saying it would put Americans at risk.

The report found the techniques used were "far more brutal" than the CIA told the public or policymakers. Before the report's release, the United States boosted security at its military and diplomatic facilities abroad.

The report said the CIA had tried to justify its use of torture by giving examples of what it called "thwarted" terrorist plots and suspect captures, but the "representations were inaccurate and contradicted by the CIA's own records."

CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS UNLIKELY

Despite the calls for accountability, there seemed little prospect of criminal prosecutions of those who implemented the program, or measures to hold politicians who authorized it accountable.

A law enforcement official said the U.S. Justice Department had no plans to conduct any investigation of the CIA's actions.

Intelligence officials said that at one point, the Justice Department, through a specially designated prosecutor, conducted a criminal investigation into around 20 cases of allegations the CIA abused detainees. However, that investigation was closed without charges being filed.

President Barack Obama signaled he was more interested in focusing on the future than reopening a dark and contentious period from the country's recent past.

While in office Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, and other Bush administration officials said the "harsh interrogation" program was justified by results that included halting plots and catching terrorists.

Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and Obama swiftly banned "enhanced interrogation techniques" after his 2009 inauguration.

FAULTY INTELLIGENCE

The report says CIA records showed that seven of 39 CIA detainees subjected to harsh interrogations produced no intelligence at all while in CIA custody. Others made up stories, "resulting in faulty intelligence."

The CIA had failed to use adequately trained and vetted personnel, the report said. The two psychologists contracted to set up the program and run it had no experience in interrogation or specialized knowledge of al Qaeda.

The report accuses the CIA of failing to thoroughly brief Bush about the interrogation techniques. Senate investigators said official records suggested that while the CIA planned to brief Bush in 2002, the White House subsequently told the agency Bush was not getting the briefing.

Investigators say Bush was not fully briefed on the program until 2006, around the time he shut it down, and expressed discomfort at learning the full details. In his memoirs Bush said he had been briefed on the program.

Republican Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam in the 1960s, said Americans were entitled to the truth about the program and its disclosure that such methods were ineffective.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com