Ron Suskind's ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Did Bush Make Torture American?
Ron Suskind's ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Did Bush Make Torture American?
#0Ron Suskind's ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Did Bush Make Torture American?
Posted: 6/20/06 at 4:25pm
With the sorrowful news that the bodies of the two American soldiers have been found, brutally tortured, more stories come to light in Ron Suskind's new book of how Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld abnegated the Geneva Code by using "coercive interrogation techniques," and, in doing so, completely destroyed the moral standing of the United States of America.
Snippet:
===
The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light
By Barton Gellman, a Washington Post staff writer who reports on intelligence and national security
Tuesday, June 20, 2006; C01
THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
...One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.
How could this have happened? Why are we learning about it only now? Those questions form the spine of Suskind's impressively reported book....
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
Washington Post: The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light
cheezedoodle
Broadway Legend Joined: 11/15/05
#1re: WaPo Review of Ron Suskind's ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE
Posted: 6/20/06 at 4:30pmI just picked this book up at B Dalton on my lunch break!
"Oh Link...your pork is ready..." - Edna Turnblad
#2Ron Suskind's ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Did Bush Make Torture American?
Posted: 6/20/06 at 11:26pm
Ron Suskind on Wolf Blitzer's show on CNN.
Ron Suskind: US deliberately bombed Al-Jazeera
#3Ron Suskind's ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Did Bush Make Torture American?
Posted: 6/21/06 at 12:11am
Salon pulled this from the book:
We've known for years now that George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, in which he was warned: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." We've known for almost as long that Bush went fishing afterward.
What we didn't know is what happened in between the briefing and the fishing, and now Suskind is here to tell us. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: "All right. You've covered your ass, now."
brdlwyr
Broadway Legend Joined: 1/14/05
Videos