by digby
Jane Mayer reports on this story about the CIA's Torture Queen, a woman who was not only responsible for much of the epic cock-up of 9/11 but virtually every sick thing the CIA has done since then. She's reportedly the model for the lead character in Zero Dark Thirty, except she evidently really got off on the torture. She's been promoted, naturally.
It's a fascinating story and well worth reading but I just wanted to highlight this:
As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as “torture.” She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity. Later, in 2007, she accompanied then C.I.A. director Michael Hayden to brief Congress, where she insisted forcefully that the torture program had been a tremendous and indispensable success.
This is a war criminal, full stop. And she's being rewarded for it by the US Government.
I have to say that I've always been surprised that the right wingers didn't glom onto the black Muslim, Nation of Islam thing to bring their visceral hatred for both African Americans into the war on terror. In fact, I've considered a sign of a certain maturity that they didn't do it --- it would have been easy to concoct some connections and could have been extremely destructive.
Apparently some people tried but they were in the CIA, thank goodness. And the CIA are such royal fuck-ups they couldn't manage to get it done. Silver linings ...
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