Results tagged “waterboarding” from SpyTalk

CIA Furious Over New Secret Site Expose

By Jeff Stein | August 20, 2009 3:05 PM | | Comments (0)

Already wrestling with a renewed controversy over contract killers, the CIA reacted angrily Thursday to a news organization's revelation of yet another secret interrogation center.

ABC News reported that the CIA had a secret site in Lithuania where interrogators grilled terrorist suspects,  "one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top al Qaeda operatives captured around the world."

Tags: Afghanistan, assassination, CIA, counterrerrorism, espionage, ghost_prisoners, global_ war_on_terror, international_affairs, interrogation, Morocco, Poland, Romania, safe_house, secrets, Thailand, waterboarding

Continue reading CIA Furious Over New Secret Site Expose.

Intelligence Official Blasts Times' Defense of Naming Interrogator

By Jeff Stein | July 18, 2008 6:57 PM | | Comments (0)

The National Intelligence Directorate late Friday released a "recent" letter from Joel F. Brenner, its counterintelligence chief, to the New York Times, calling its rationale for identifying a CIA interrogator by name in a June story "nonsense" and "morally confused."

"The Times also trivialized the risk to the man by putting him to the impossible burden of showing with near certainty that he would be harmed," wrote Brenner, who heads the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX). "This was morally confused. This man and many others like him undertake difficult, dangerous, and lawful missions on behalf of their country, and they deserve better from The Times."

The letter, posted on the DNI Web site, was not dated, nor was it printed by The Times, a search of its Web site indicated.

On June 22, The Times published a feature story by reporter Scott Shane describing a skillful interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by a CIA analyst it identified as Deuce Martinez. The paper said it helped protect Martinez by using only his nickname.

Tags: Guantanamo, interrogation, torture, waterboarding

Hitchens Cracks Quickly In Waterboarding Lark

By Jeff Stein | July 2, 2008 11:05 PM | | Comments (0)

Writer Christopher Hitchens beat cigarettes this year, but he couldn't take  waterboarding for more than a few seconds.  

In the new Vanity Fair, the prolific British ex-pat describes how underwent a waterboarding experiment in the hands of tough U.S. counterterrorism experts at a secret site in Western North Carolina in May.

He says that he's embarrased at how little time it took for him to crack and trigger the pre-arranged "stop signal." but in the disturbing video on VF's Web site I counted it out at 13 seconds.

The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. 

The operative words here are any answers. As I wrote earlier this week, 15 top fomer FBI, CIA and military interrogation specialists meeting in Washington last week declared that one reason torture isn't very useful is that its subjects will say anything to stop the pain -- there's no guarantee that any of it is the truth. 

Until his own experiment, the influential Hitchens labelled waterboarding  merely "extreme interrogation." But the headline on the VF piece is, "Believe Me, It's Torture."

Hitchens' interrogators warned him that even his brief experiment could have lasting effects. 

And so it has.

I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. 

Hitchens allowed to his interrogator that he felt shame from surrendering when just a cup or less of water was dripped onto the towel over his face. 

The man gently told him, "Any time is a long time when you're breathing water."

Says Hitchens now: "If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

Tags: CIA, FBI, Hitchens, torture, waterboarding