Soufan, a long-time special agent working with the FBI, worked on some of the more notorious terrorist cases post-9/11, including the interrogation of Mohamed Al-Qahtani and Abu Zubaydah. According to Soufan, he was pulled off these interrogations when the CIA or military officials wanted to use torture on the detainees. In these cases, and it turns out others, Soufan and his colleagues were pulled out of interrogations at the behest of the Bush administration or the CIA.

Threat Matrix is a “biography” of the FBI’s development of counter terrorism capabilities from the days of state sponsored terrorism through the rise of domestic terrorism and to the new world of NGO
(non-governmental organizations) terrorism.

One of the main narratives emerging in coverage of the violence that plagued Egypt’s popular uprising on Wednesday and Thursday is that the Interior Ministry is primarily responsible, as seen for example in the CNN video here. We heard from Al Jazeera English on Thursday that Egypt’s attorney general has banned former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly from leaving the country and has frozen his assets. In this post, I provide some background on the Interior Ministry and how its 1.4 million employees are deployed. But one should not assume that the Interior Ministry is the only other problem once Mubarak is gone. As Jane Mayer has pointed out in detail, Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is now being openly discussed by the US government as the leader of a potential interim government should Mubarak step down, has been the primary conduit for CIA renditions to Egypt for torture.

Our Justice Department is not even being held to the very low standard that our nation’s spooks are.

One of the most curious documents turned over in last week’s FOIA dump is the last one, titled “The CIA Interrogation of Abu Zubaydah” (PDF 110-122). While these are just wildarsed guesses, I suspect it may either have been a summary developed for the CIA Inspector General’s office for use in its review of the torture program or a summary to prepare Stan Moskowitz, then head of CIA’s Office of Congressional Affairs, to brief the Gang of Four in early February 2003.

I wrote in my last post on David Passaro that he knew precisely how to defend himself (go here for general background on Passaro and his case). Even before he was indicted, Passaro asked for discovery on CIA’s rules of engagement for detainee interrogations, which he tied to SERE techniques well before the connection had been made publicly. Which is why Passaro’s requests–and CIA’s refusals–for interrogation guidelines are so interesting.

As I said in my last post, bmaz and I are about to let loose a slew of posts on David Passaro, the only CIA guy prosecuted for detainee abuse. I first decided to look into Passaro’s case given that he was prosecuted in relation to the death of an Afghan detainee, Ahmed Wali, in June 2004, whereas the CIA guy in charge of the Salt Pit was not prosecuted in relation to the death of Gul Rahman seven months earlier. Why, I wanted to know, was Passaro tried and convicted but Gul Rahman’s killer has, thus far, avoided any consequences for Rahman’s death.

As we’ll eventually see, Passaro’s lawyers tested many of the theories John Yoo laid out in his OLC memos.

As former legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, David Addington apparently took the lead on refusing the 9/11 Commission’s request to review interrogation tapes or access to detainees. It appears Addington got the draft of the letter from 9/11 Commission–which was addressed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. Tenet and Addington clearly had a conversation about how to respond. But it seems that Addington drafted the response, got Condoleeza Rice, Andy Card, and Alberto Gonzales to review it, and then sent it to Tenet (and, presumably, Rumsfeld) to okay and sign the letter.

Why would Addington have obstructed the 9/11 Commission’s review?

Nothing quite has the power of hearing the words contained in critical documents the torture era read out loud.