Scarborough Singing Torture’s Praises Again
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SCARBOROUGH: I know for a fact that waterboarding brought our interrogators, brought Americans, probably about 70-75 percent of what they get. What they got from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed opened doors that we are still going through. Waterboarding has produced and given so much evidence to our people in the CIA and in the other intelligence agencies. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by himself has done more to crush al Qaeda than Dick Cheney or George Bush because of waterboarding.
For a fact? Really?
From Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side:
While Tenet continued to assure the White House that Mohammed’s interrogation in particular had been a gold mine of invaluable intelligence, a few officers began to question the reliability of his coerced confessions. Some also feared that the torturous methods used by the Agency would undermine eventual efforts to convict him in any legitimate court. Mohammed claimed responsibility for so many crimes that his testimony began to seem inherently dubious. In addition to confessing to the [Daniel] Pearl murder, he said that he had hatched plans to assassinate President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope John Paul II. CIA cables carrying Mohammed’s interrogation transcirpts back to Washington with the warning that "the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead."
After Mohammed had been interrogated for some time, a top Agency official asked for a few choice revelations from his confession that he could share with officers from an allied foreign intelligence agency. To his surprise, he was told by top CIA officials that there really was noting "solid" enough to pass on. Although few outside of the CIA knew it, Mohammed had recanted substantial portions of his initial confessions.
Mohammed brazenly boasted later about his ability to mislead the United States. He claimed that false information he fabricated caused the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to issue urgent terrorist threat alerts on several occasions, for no real reason. He just wanted the interrogators to stop, he said, so he told them whatever they wanted to hear.
And David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair:
K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”
Mayer’s book recounts how the administration never sought to find out whether torture would be effective, they just assumed that it was and went from there.
Intelligence gained from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi by FBI terrorism agent Russell Fincher and NYC detective Marty Mahon just by talking to him and forging personal connections was copious and considered "invaluable." But the FBI lost control of al-Libi in a battle with the CIA and he was ultimately taken to Egypt and tortured, where he fabricated a story about ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Bush relied on this information when he claimed that the United States had "learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," and Colin Powell was referring to al-Libi when he mentioned "a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaida" in his speech to the UN.
The information used by Bush and Powell turned out to be erroneous and al-Libi later admitted he made it all up in order to tell his torturers what they wanted to hear.
"Matthew Alexander" recounted his experience conducting more than 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervising over 1000. He argues that torture is not only morally repugnant, it’s remarkably inefficient and it makes us "Al Qaeda’s best recruiters."
Why Scarborough (or anyone) wants to wade out into the middle of the torture debate armed only with misinformation from George "16 words" Bush at this point is a mystery, but the revisionist history of the Kahlid Shaikh Mohammed story is a central tenet of the Bush Legacy Rehabilitation Project and is mindlessly being repeated by many.
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