Torture helped foil a planned 2002 attack on Los Angeles? The guy they tortured was captured in 2003

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0423chapmanapr23,0,4882177.column

Waking up to torture truths

Steve Chapman
April 23, 2009

When the Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote his epic, "The Gulag Archipelago," some Americans read it to measure the gulf between the brute savagery of communism and the principled standards of free, civilized nations. But apparently some Americans took it as a helpful how-to volume.

Where would CIA officers have gotten the idea to extract cooperation from detainees by keeping them awake for as long as 180 hours at a time, or more than a week? Maybe from the jailers in Solzhenitsyn's grim account, who used the method on a mass scale.

Enforced sleeplessness, he explained, was favored because it was cheap, easy and left no marks on the prisoner -- not to mention that it was effective. Solzhenitsyn attested from bitter experience that "it is not really necessary to use a rack or hot coals to drive a human being out of his mind." snip

The Bush administration claimed that the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed helped foil a planned 2002 attack on Los Angeles -- forgetting that he wasn't captured until 2003. Maybe we'll get a better answer if the administration grants Cheney his request that it declassify material supporting his case, as it should.


Edit. Here it is too:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Shaikh_Mohammed

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on March 1, 2003 by the Pakistani ISI, possibly in a joint action with agents of the American Diplomatic Security Service, and has been in U.S. custody since that time. snip


List of confessions

A plan for a "second wave" of attacks on major U.S. landmarks to be set in the spring or summer of 2002 after the 9/11 attacks, which includes more hijackings of commercial airlines and having them flown into various buildings in the U.S. including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Columbia Center in Seattle and the Empire State Building in New York

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

1. OMG! They are just making themselves more ludicrous daily. nt

[L. Coyote]

19. K&R. Yes, "to drive a human being out of his mind" ....

that's why we have governments?

Seems to have worked really well on the former torturers!!

[KansDem]

2. Hmmm...Maybe its time to waterboard Bush & Cheney...

...if "protecting America" is so important to them.

[Kutjara]

3. He also coughed-up the secret....

...of time travel, so the FBI could go back and foil the plot before it happened. Pretty clever, eh?

Dunno why they didn't go back and prevent 9/11, though. Probably something to do with quantum physics.

[glitch]

6. Lol! nt

[G_j]

4. stop splitting hairs

we are all better off because of torture!.

[Froward69]

5. Dates, times, facts and History

mean nothing to the GOP. they bank on historical ignorance.

[L. Coyote]

20. Nothing like testimony under oath to end their Up-is-Down delusions.

They LIE into everyone's face on the principle that Up-is-Down propaganda works, as long as it is endlessly repeated.

Solution: Turn off the feed; consider Manuel Noriega. Prison is not a bully pulpit! :rofl:

[Botany]

7. But dick told sean that torture helped stop this attack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5N_ZhcB8Zo

these fuckers need to be on trial

[HereSince1628]

8. Take something everyone dimly remembers, twist it into a lie and repeat, again and again and ...

after a few dozen repetitions it becomes the truth.

The Cheney administration is nothing if not notorius for doing this sort of thing.

And they haven't given up on a proven tool.

[Botany]

9. Cheney is like Rove in that he can lie w/out the bat of an eye

He told John Edwards that he, Edwards, never went to work @ the U.S. Senate.

"Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that--i
t's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence
service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack."

[HereSince1628]

11. An artisan of propaganda, a wizard of misdirection,

powered like the Energizer Bunny.

2920 American daze, each one more fantasy than the previous one. And the guy is still shovelling the shit.

[havocmom]

10. Bookmark this stuff. So handy when those RW emails clog up your inbox

:evilgrin:

[Spazito]

12. Excellent!

I can't wait to hear how the torture apologists explain how someone captured in 2003 gave valuable intel after being tortured in 2002, it should be VERY interesting!

I would take issue with the reporter on one issue he raised:

"By that rationale, we can justify subjecting enemy captives to every form of torture ever devised. We can even justify torturing and killing their spouses, siblings, parents and children, right in front of them."

We do know that the family of at least one of the "high value detainees" was used to try and make the detainee talk so we do NOT know what was done to those family members "right in front of" the captive.

[sabra]

13. not that I believe any of them - but in the GITMO tribunal he said he made false statements

[Supersedeas]

14. ah, so the torture of KSM in 03 helped solve the plot foiled in 02 - Bushian Logic

[Peacetrain]

15. Keep this at the top, and off to all voices in the media..

The vermin cannot even get their lies straight.. and the hell hounds of the media are lapping it up without question.

Explains how we all got in this mess

[havocmom]

16. yeppers, back to the top with ya!

:kick:

[autorank]

17. k*r Damn! I just knew this would come up

Not this case but this undoing of their lousy lies. These people are not that smart. They got
their way because they cheated all the time and stole elections. But now that there's a bit more
freedom, they're screwed.

Bring it on!

[Luminous Animal]

18. More from Media Matters

http://mediamatters.org/items/200904220036

[Peacetrain]

21. Back up again... too important to let go down in one day

[Duer 157099]

22. OMG! Torture enables time travel!!

Y'know, if that were true, I just might be able to get behind it. I'd volunteer even, if I could go back to Nov 2000 and do something.

[malaise]

23. Good LIARS must have good memories

These fuggers just lied for the sake of lying. It was all one lie after another.


Good catch.

[Uncle Joe]

24. Maybe it was the thought of getting tortured before he was caught that scared him

in to talking... yeah that's the ticket preemptive capture, torture and confession!:think:

[Senator]

25. K&R

[Cali_Democrat]

26. As soon as he was captured he was tortured so Bushco could find a "link" between Saddam and Al-Qaeda

It had nothing to do with stopping terrorism or preventing another imminent attack.

They wanted to justify their war.

[MadMaddie]

27. The Repug Administration was always sloppy

this is more proof that the treachery goes beyond what we can only imagine.

If they can't even get the years right....geeze....

[Just-plain-Kathy]

28. Thank you NNN0LHI, we have to keep a spotlight on the truth.

plus we have to hold Obama accountable to hold Bushco accountable.

[struggle4progress]

29. If the Bushistas did stop a plot to attack (say) Library Tower, there ought to be a conviction

somewhere


Bush Details 2002 Plot to Attack L.A. Tower
Intelligence Officials Play Down Importance of Case, Attribute Remarks to Politics
By Peter Baker and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 10, 2006; A04

President Bush, under pressure from Congress, defended his campaign against terrorism yesterday, offering for the first time a vivid account of a foiled al Qaeda plotto strike the United States after Sept. 11, 2001, by crashing a hijacked commercial airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper. Bush said four Southeast Asians who met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in October 2001 were taught how to use shoe bombs to blow open a cockpit door and steer a plane into the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The four were captured by Asian authorities before they could execute the plan, he said ... But several U.S. intelligence officials played down the relative importance of the alleged plot and attributed the timing of Bush's speech to politics. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly criticize the White House, said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk ... The officials said four Asian countries were involved but would not identify them ... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/25/AR2006092500402_pf.html


Volume 53, Number 5 · March 23, 2006
Are We Safer? An Epilogue
By David Cole

On Thursday, February 9, shortly after my article "Are We Safer?" <NYR, March 9> went to press, and as criticism of his National Security Agency spying program mounted within his own party, President Bush delivered a speech to the National Guard Association in Washington, D.C., that offered new details about a foiled al-Qaeda plot aimed at flying an airplane into the Library Tower, a skyscraper in Los Angeles. President Bush presented the details as an illustration that the "war on terror" has been successful in keeping us safe. He did not explain why new details about a four-year-old plot were being made public now, but they appeared to be part of a concerted effort to dampen the increasing criticism of the NSA spying program. (The next day, CIA Director Porter Goss published an Op-Ed article in The New York Times making broad claims about how "leaks" about government initiatives in the war on terrorism—presumably including the one that disclosed the existence of the NSA spying program—had endangered American lives.)

The President's assertions about the Library Tower plot again underscore the need for close scrutiny in assessing the administration's claims. The President described a plan in 2002 to use shoe bombs to break down the cockpit door, overpower the pilots, and then fly the hijacked plane into the tower. The alleged planners, described only as Southeast Asians, were captured in early 2002 in Asia. As far as we know, no one has been charged, much less convicted, of any crime in connection with the alleged plot. Intelligence officials told The Washington Post that there was "deep disagreement within the intelligence community over... whether it was ever much more than talk." A senior FBI official said that "to take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous." Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, said of Bush's latest account: "It doesn't really give us any more indication of whether this was a plot that was derailed or preempted, or a plot that was more in the realm of an idle daydream."

The Los Angeles Times reported that when the plot was first publicly disclosed, authorities "said that, at best, the alleged plot was something that had been discussed but never put into action." Moreover, while US officials reportedly learned about some of the plot's details by interrogating captured al-Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, he was captured in 2003, long after the planners had been arrested. As the Los Angeles Times put it, "By the time anybody knew about it, the threat — if there had been one — had passed, federal counter-terrorism officials said" ... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18810

[AtomicKitten]

30. Doh! Could this get more surreal? LOL n/t