Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney “demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration,” despite the fact that the CIA told them repeatedly that no such collaboration existed. So, extracting false confessions was the goal.

You mean it wasn’t to defuse a ticking time bomb?

you know the U.S. army inteligence and CIA personell actually DID that during the Vietnam occupation.. they threw VC suspects out of helicopters.

Democracy Now! had good coverage of Jessen and Mitchell yesterday.

Amy Goodman was one of the first to treat the grassroots revolt against the APA’s high poohbahs as news, which it was. I congratulated her about it a few weeks ago when she was in town.

Jessen and Mitchell modeled their torture program on methods used by the North Koreans to extract false confessions.

Sen Carl Levin phrased it diplomatically to McClatchy: BushCheney were trying to make linkages where none actually existed.

May 2003 was the month that Kristof mentioned Wilson’s claims about the Niger forgeries, and IIRC it was also the month that Bolton and others started trying to find out the identity of Kristoff’s source. Then within two months, Plame was ‘outed’.

Putting the various timelines together, this thing is incredibly sinister.

Nobody who torments children to extract information is acting in good faith; where is that in SERE, by the way?

And nobody who assists in waterboarding 266 times between two detainees a la méthode de la Corée du Nord is acting in good faith.

Bad faith -> outside the four corners.

As I suggested the other evening in EW’s post, what happened in no way looks like SERE training; it looks like the Shock Doctrine at highly individualized level, like the work of Ewen Cameron as described by Naomi Klein.

Zubaydah was both a first attempt and a proof-of-concept; they were going to make it work with KSM because it had to with the start of the war in the same month. They needed it to work so badly that they moved KSM to a black site in Poland only days after he was taken into custody, which further implies that worse was done than we’ve read so far. (Transit time eats into your waterboarding schedule, you know?) The stakes were so high they even paid off Poland with a missile defense system for their cooperation and potential exposure to prosecution by the ICC. (God knows the Ossetian/Georgian mess last year was probably a ruse to ensure the payoff would go through Congress.)