Forgetting Torture: Lee Hamilton, John Brennan, and Abu Zubaydah

[JohnyCanuck]

One of the 9/11 Commission's Co-chairs, Lee Hamilton, in a recent interview seems to be unable to remember very much at all about how torture victim Abu Zubaydah's testimony, extracted under CIA directed torture, came to be relied on in a rather substantial manner in creating the 9/11 Commission's Report. Now that the US government has officially acknowledged there is no evidence that Abu Zubaydah paricipated in or had any advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks nor any evidence that he was a member of al-Qaida, Mr. Hamilton does not appear concerned that this revelation undermines or detracts in any way from the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission's report itself.

Forgetting Torture: Lee Hamilton, John Brennan, and Abu Zubaydah
by Kevin Ryan

The pervasive news surrounding the confirmation hearing of John Brennan, Obama’s nominee for CIA director, is paralleled by another, related story that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media. That is the story of the man called Abu Zubaydah, whose alleged torture testimony, obtained by the CIA while Brennan was the head of the agency’s Terrorist Threat Center, built the foundation for the official account of 9/11. This week I spoke to Lee Hamilton, former vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, about the serious problems that the government’s new stance on Zubaydah creates for the 9/11 Commission Report.

As stated in my last article on the subject, Zubaydah is at the center of an unraveling of the official account of the 9/11 attacks. {1} His extensive torture at the hands of the CIA during Brennan’s tenure, which included at least 83 water-boarding sessions, hanging the man naked from the ceiling, slamming him against a concrete wall, and other atrocious experimental techniques, was said to produce valuable evidence about al Qaeda. However, the government now claims that Zubaydah was never a member or associate of al Qaeda and therefore he could not have known any of the information that the 9/11 Commission attributed to him.

From the start of our conversation, Hamilton told me that he was having trouble remembering Zubaydah. That was odd considering that an article he and Thomas Kean wrote for the New York Times in 2008, describing how the CIA obstructed the 9/11 investigation, referred several times to Zubaydah specifically. {2} The article claimed that “Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information on these broad topics that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 118 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two senior Qaeda operatives.” Kean and Hamilton further wrote that, “in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.’s general counsel. One set posed dozens of specific questions about the reports, including those about Abu Zubaydah.”

snip

For example, in response to the habeas corpus petition filed by Zubaydah’s defense team, the government stated that it does not contend that Zubaydah had “any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.” {7} The same response states that the government no longer claims that Zubaydah was ever “a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.” But footnote 35 to Chapter 5 of the 9/11 Commission Report states the exact opposite. According to this footnote, “Abu Zubaydah, who worked closely with the al Qaeda leadership, has stated that KSM originally presented Bin Ladin with a scaled-down version of the 9/11 plan, and that Bin Ladin urged KSM to expand the operation with the comment, ‘Why do you use an axe when you can use a bulldozer?’” {8} That’s pretty extensive and intimate knowledge for someone who was never associated with al Qaeda.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article177634.html

[JohnyCanuck]

1. kick n/t

[KoKo]

2. Recommend.... More and more comes out...

and those Gitmo Detainees having to do a Hunger Strike to get attention to the fact that most of them should have been released by now since they were not conspiring with or themselves terrorists.

It's all over the place about the detainees and hunger strike but here the posts since like stones.

Anyway it's being covered elsewhere.

Thanks for this post about Lee Hamilton not being able to remember
Abu Zubaydah and the difference in "9/11" report and what's known now.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. So I guess the big question is......

If the CIA was torturing some designated patsies into making false confessions regarding their supposed roles in plotting/carrying out the 9/11 attacks, what exactly was the CIA trying to cover up and who were they trying to protect?

[Octafish]

4. Lee Hamilton has carried water for the national security state since way before Iran-Contra

The October Surprise treasons, that is, like Poppy Bush and William Casey and the Ayatollah.

Thank you, JohnyCanuck for the heads-up on the latest strategic "I dunno" out of the public servant.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. When an agency of the US gov't tortures patsies into making false connfessionms....

and the official commission established to investigate the crime ignores that the evidence they are using to make their case as to who was responsible for the 9/11 attack was obtained by torturing suspects using torture methods copied from communist torture techniques designed to "generate propaganda and not intelligence":

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD's most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA's teaching academy, said he immediately knew the true value of the PREAL manual if employed as part of an interrogation program.

"This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence," Kleinman said in an interview. "If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using."

Indeed, in their newly published book "The Hunt for KSM," which refers to self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, investigative reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer wrote that the torture of the top al-Qaeda figure, which included 183 waterboarding sessions, resulted in false confessions about pending attack plans.

Kleinman, who has testified before four committees of Congress about interrogation and detainee policy - and the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" - has publicly called for a thorough investigation into how a program such as this could have found its way into the interrogation doctrine that guided US-sanctioned operations.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/8278-exclusive-guidebook-to-false-confessions-key-document-john-yoo-used-to-draft-torture-memo-released

and when one of the chief suspects whose evidence was relied on by the commission in establishing responsibility for the attacks to to al-Qaida and to specific individuals within that alleged organization is later cleared by a different government agency (from the one which subjected him to torture) as having had no known part in the planning and execution, of 9/11, is it any wonder that people start to think that just maybe their might be something to this "9/11 was an inside job" thing.

How Many People Believe 911 Was an Inside Job Now (Feb 2013)?