Spencer Ackerman, former stalwart of TPMmuckracker, writing now for The Washington Independent, has penned a beauty, detailing the sorry, sad road the Central Intelligence Agency (oxymoron?) – at the direction and order of The Commander Guy – has taken us down;
But 9/11 changed all that. Despite having nearly no off-the-shelf experience, the CIA was tasked by President Bush to come up with a robust interrogation program for the most important al-Qaeda captives. So the agency turned to its partners for assistance in designing its interrogation regimen: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia-all countries cited by the State Department for using torture-among others. Additionally, as Mark Benjamin has reported for Salon, two psychologists named Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who worked as contractors for CIA, helped the agency “reverse-engineer” the military and CIA training on resisting torture for use on detainees. Suddenly, waterboarding, an illegal practice of simulating or in some cases inducing drowning, became an American-administered practice.
So much for the “CEO” presidency… Be it launching unneeded wars, to reacting to natural disasters (versus the ones they created), to running the Injustice Department, to protecting its’ own intelligence agents, It’s been DIY all the way, and bad DIY at that …
Read Spencer Ackerman’s “CIA Largely in the Dark on Interrogation Tactics; Bush Tasked Agency To Build a Robust System, Despite Its Limited History” … It’s a good one!
Bonus CIA Riffs
Top Ten Cloves: Problems Created With President Bush Admitting To CIA Black Site Prisons
Top Ten Cloves: Ways White House Aides Got President Bush To Claim “We Do Not Torture”
Top Ten Cloves: Ways CIA Will Cut Back On Using Contractors
Top Ten Cloves: Things About The New CIA Personality Test
