Free Republic

“We did call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.”-John Kirakou I would take anything John Kirakou says with a grain from the salt pit.  I question his credibility. What does anyone really know about Gina Haspel, President Trump's nominee to be the next director of the CIA? Not a heck of a lot. So far what we have is media and ideology-driven hysteria:...

Bad morning for Pelosi @ 9:53 am by Eric Zimmermann Two new developments in the "what did Pelosi know about waterboarding" series spell trouble for the Speaker. First, CNN reports that an aide told Pelosi in February 2003 that waterboarding had been used on Abu Zubaydah. This contradicts Pelosi's assertion that she only knew about the legal rationale for waterboarding, not that it had been used. Sheehy attended a briefing in which waterboarding was discussed in February 2003, with Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, who took over Pelosi's spot as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. This source says...

Terror expert and author Marc Thiessen told Bill O’Reilly tonight that Obama eliminated the enhanced interrogation tool from our counter-terrorism arsenal his second day in office. So the tool that got us the information that led us to Osama Bin Laden is no longer in use. The US has not cpatured and detained and tinterrogated a single high level detainee since Barack Obama moved into office.

A Senate Judiciary Subcmte. looks into the legal conduct of Justice Dept. lawyers who approved harsh interrogation techniques. One of the witnesses, fmr. FBI agent Ali Soufan, interrogated Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Lots of good posts lately from the authors about the interrogation of Zubaydah, the latest being Word's post on the book The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack by Ronald Kessler. To add a few more cents Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has noticed an interesting discrepancy in the tall tale coming from Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, in which he says: It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002,...

Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, psychologist and U.S. Air Force veteran Dr. James Mitchell was called back to national service. Along with a partner, Bruce Jessen, he was tasked with developing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. Designed to elicit time-sensitive intelligence from hardened al Qaeda leaders, the EITs later became immersed in controversy. In 2014, Senate Democrats released a report accusing Mitchell of torturing suspects with EITs and producing no results. In his new book, Enhanced Interrogation, Mitchell offers his own testimony on the EITs. He argues that the techniques were critical in saving the lives...

John Brennan is no Chuck Hagel. That much was clear from the confirmation hearings on Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA. Unlike Hagel, who stumbled and mumbled through his performance, Brennan demonstrated a deep knowledge of his brief and answered (or gamely parried) tough questions with great self-assurance and forcefulness. But several of Brennan’s answers before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were problematic. Indeed, his three and a half hours of testimony raised important questions on two issues central to his nomination: the politicization of intelligence and the Obama administration’s approach to fighting radical Islam. Brennan will face additional...

I had a chance to watch the Dick Cheney interview on yesterday's Fox News Sunday broadcast with host Chris Wallace, who was excellent as always. All I have to say is that I'm certainly glad I'm not on the bad side of Cheney, for he's what we in the military used to call "born again hard." … And this is why I really admire the guy and think that he's far more a figurative Prince Valiant than any sort of Prince of Darkness. Unless you happen to be an Al Qaeda baddie captured by American military or CIA-type forces, that...

Pelosi was wide-eyed as she replied to a reporter's question on the interrogation method briefings: "We were not, I repeat renot [sic] told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." The paper trail from the CIA says otherwise.

Responses among the cognoscenti to the CIA's contention that it briefed Nancy Pelosi on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques are fairly typical. Those inclined to defend Democrats point to the CIA's history of misleading Congress and the incomplete record the CIA's notes sketch out; those inclined to indict Pelosi are throwing out terms like "hypocrite" and worse. The document itself is an interesting artifact of our intelligence culture and its relationship to the oversight committees. The White House might have been reluctant to share details of certain programs; it's hard to know what the CIA's motives were. By statute,...