Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...asked the former CIA officer the question that former Vice President Dick Cheney wants more of a focus on these days - whether the abusive interrogations worked. To a degree, he said. Through the course of the interrogations of Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda prisoners the CIA learned a lot more than it knew before about al-Qaeda communications, its use of safe houses, codes, and the way al-Qaeda looks at the world. In other words, pretty much all low-level stuff. He said there were no dramatic confessions he knew of, the kind we see virtually every...
...Last Sunday former CIA Director Michael Hayden argued that abusive interrogations do indeed work. He cited the arrest of a mid-level al-Qaeda member who helped coordinate 9/11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. According to Hayden, Abu Zubaydah gave up the name after being waterboarded. This may be true, but the deeper question is, Was it worth the candle? Isn't all of the international condemnation, not to mention the demoralization of the CIA, too high a price to pay for the arrest of a mid-level al-Qaeda operative? (See pictures of the aftermath of Abu Ghraib...
...times in March 2003 (a May 2005 memo from a CIA lawyer said waterboarding could be used on a detainee up to 12 times daily for as long as 40 seconds per event). Then-CIA director George Tenet, in his 2007 memoir, says that tough interrogation of al-Qaeda members - and documents found on them, he is careful to add - thwarted more than 20 plots "against U.S. infrastructure targets, including communications nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges, and tunnels." A "future airborne attack on America's West Coast" was likely foiled only because the CIA didn't have "to treat...
...Critics of such claims argue that what was thwarted were merely al-Qaeda fantasies. "Torture gets people to talk - no question," says a former senior U.S. national security official involved in such matters. "They talk and talk and talk, until you stop hurting them. But in every instance, bar none, you later discover that they've just been lying or exaggerating, or telling you what they think you want to hear." In fact, a 1963 CIA interrogation manual warned that those resisting questioning "are likely to become intractable if made to endure pain" or generate "false, concocted as a means...
...news that the U.S. waterboarded one al-Qaeda prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, at least 83 times, and another, the confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 183 times, has given new energy to the debate over whether U.S. interrogation methods amounted to torture. Defenders of waterboarding say that the procedure, while awful for the prisoner, is relatively safe and has few long-term effects. But doctors and psychologists who work with torture victims disagree strongly. They say that victims of American waterboarding-like the Chileans submitted to the submarino under Pinochet-are likely to be psychologically damaged for life...