9/11 "Confession" Falls Apart
http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2007/12/911-confession-falls-apart.html
An article in the Washington Post quotes "FBI officials, including agents who questioned [alleged Al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaida] after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home" as concluding that he was:
[L]argely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures.
***
even though he knew some al-Qaeda players, he provided interrogators with increasingly dubious information as the CIA's harsh treatment intensified in late 2002."
For example:
Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida's information.
"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much."
***
"They said, 'You've got to be kidding me,' " said Coleman, recalling accounts from FBI employees who were there. " 'This guy's a Muslim. That's not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?'" Coleman helped lead the bureau's efforts against Osama bin Laden for a decade, ending in 2004.
Coleman goes on to say:
Abu Zubaida ... was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.
***
Looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Abu Zubaida had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had severe mental problems that called his credibility into question. "They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaeda operatives. "You think they're going to tell him anything?"
The article also says that Abu Zubaida might have been tortured for months.
Bottom line: According to the FBI, the information which formed the basis for the 9/11 Commission Report was based on the ramblings of a literally crazy guy after he had been tortured for many, many weeks in a manner that was guaranteed to destroy his trust in his interrogators and which was contrary to effective interrogation techniques.
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Let's not forget the other prominent al Qaeda witness
Zacharias Moussaoui, a paranoid schizophrenic.
paranoid schizophrenic who should not be in prison ?
John A MITCHELL
Herblay FRANCE ,
bonjour ,
this Guy being French made me pay more attention to the press coverage here in France and it is evident to me that his guy is ill and could certainly not legally defend himself. I had a feeling that the French government at the time could have done a lot better in defending his case.
This guy was not capable intellectually of playing an important role in the 911 attacks.
He is someone rotting in prison because we had to have at least someone convicted for the 911 crimes.
His torture and imprisonment should be a shame for our society.
Yours
John
Sometimes if they start out kinda sane
the feds torture them into mental problems, like Jose Padilla.
Tried And Proven Technique
Patsies
And . . . George Washington is a fine info warrior!
Some things to keep in mind about Zubaida:
1) When he was captured in Pakistan, he was shot and left to bleed to death in the back of a truck by ISI and CIA operatives when a naive FBI agent recognized him as a person of interest and made sure he got medical treatment and survived. Clearly, he was not supposed to be caught alive.
2) During his first round of interrogation he was fooled into thinking his interrogators were Saudis and implicated three Saudi princes and a Pakistani Air Force general, who all died in very short order under extremely questionable circumstances. He had private cell numbers of the princes and was sure that they would help him gain his freedom. He gave all of this information freely well before being tortured.
3) Up until now he has always been considered to be a valued and important part of al Qaeda. Clearly, he is being tortured into insanity to discredit him and make sure that if he ever does see a public courtroom he will never be able to give a credible and coherent account of who and what he knows. This is an obvious attempt to downplay his significance and rewrite his mental history to explain his newly acquired mental instability and thus undermine the credibility of all of his earlier statements.
I also think that if Ali Abdelsaud Mohamed (or his double) ever sees a public courtroom, he will also have been tortured to the point of insanity and thus completely useless as witnesses against the perpetrators of 9/11. If you can't kill them or otherwise make them disappear, just make sure they're nuttier than a walnut grove and no one will believe a word they say.
I think this is one of the main reasons they wanted to be able to torture "terrorists", these criminals really need to be behind bars asap. I could not be more disgusted.
The truth shall set (most of) us free. Others will be going to Leavenworth.
Love is the only way forward.
LeftWright makes good points
9/11 was easy for the white house to greenlight because: no trials. No living perpetrators to try (suicide attack), and so all the evidence can be dismissed, ignored, covered up, because a judge isn't going to demand it.
The rest of the "war on terror" gets a new black/torture "special" designation, and so no trials there either. The government has complete discretion to manufacture, destroy, ignore evidence as it sees fit. It can claim anything it wants (and has), and therefore does not have to worry about the consequences.
The claims of Posner regarding Zabudayah are uncorroborated. We don't know if he actually had phone numbers of Saudi and ISI officers. Perhaps he did, and therefore these other reports about him having no important role at all are the bogus ones.
Can't tell. Posner has a bad track record, a la JFK cover up. He wrote a terrible book that ignores the important evidence and attempts to spin the testimony of the doctors who saw Kennedy's wounds.
The point that needs to be mentioned in every thread on torture issues is that TORTURE IS A CRIME. Those who perpetrated and approved it, and covered it up can all be arrested and sent away for 20 years under the Torture Act and the War Crimes Act. This is a new front in going after the perps.
Just because Congress makes the pretense of trying to pass "new" torture laws misleads people that torture isn't already a felony! Don't be sidetracked. This is a black and white criminal matter, and should be stated as such. This is another conspiracy (torture) that we must press for justice on.
PS
The Moussauoi trial was revealing in several ways. He claimed he had evidence that the FBI (handlers?) knew all about his activities. The next day, the judge closed the proceedings and wouldn't let Moussaoui reveal any evidence to this effect.
The Moussaoui "trial exhibits" lack proof that the alleged hijackers got on the planes at all! They show some video allegedly from Dulles airport on 911. No time codes are visible. How do we know when and where and who is in this video?
There are some photos of Atta supposedly going into the Portland Maine airport on 911. BUT THERE ISN'T ANY EVIDENCE THAT ANY HIJACKERS WERE IN BOSTON LOGAN AIRPORT.
You'd think that if they were attempting to prove 9/11, they could show us the airline tickets and security cameras of them getting on the planes.
They don't feel they need to prove the case.
70 Disturbing Facts About 9/11
John Doraemi publishes Crimes of the State Blog
http://crimesofthestate.blogspot.com/
johndoraemi --at-- yahoo.com.
A key point is missing in
A key point is missing in this essay--no transcripts were made of Zubaida's interrogations.
Sources: Destroyed CIA Videotapes Were Hundreds of Hours; No Transcripts Made
from the article...
"...The destroyed CIA videotapes at the center of a growing investigation recorded roughly a "couple hundred hours" with two terror suspects, a small portion of which showed interrogators using "enhanced" interrogation methods that might have included waterboarding.
But, U.S. officials tell FOX News, no transcripts of the standard, VHS-style videotapes ever were made. That would mean the only record of what happened during the interrogations captured on the tapes appears to lie in interrogators' summaries that were sent electronically from the sites of the interrogation back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va".
This means that crucial 9/11 "evidence" is based on torture sessions, the records of which were destroyed by the torturers themsleves. All we have now are summaries, also provided by the torturers themselves.
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JFK on secrecy and the press
Don't go down the road they are pointing you towards
My first thought was . . . maybe there are recordings (video tapes . . . really? . . . not electronic) and they haven't been destroyed and they show an insane man (Al Kida mastermind) talking about girls boobies.
The way media can be moved around electronically, I have my doubts that there was one copy and it was destroyed.
Their MO is to get people arguing about the wrong questions. Masters of Cognitive Dissonance they are.
I admit, this reply is pure conjecture.
There is no argument here.
There is no argument here. Just even more reason to doubt the official 9/11 story. Not only was Zubaida tortured and made insane, no record was made of his "confession." Thus, his "evidence" is worthless on three counts, at least. Zubaida's "testimony" is a key part of the gov't story of 9/11 and the "war on terror." The true nature of this testimony is beyond absurd--it hardly meets the standards of the middle ages.
The torturers themselves destroyed the transcripts of a man driven insane by torture. And it is only from them that we learn what he supposedly said. If the gov't ever does provide transcripts, they will be totally worthless anyway. If they ever provide the videos, it will surely gut their whole case--that's why they destroyed them.
Also, notice that the media is playing this as a "waterboarding right or wrong" story, or "did the gov't even have to save the tapes," or "which lawyer said what," etc. The main point should be clear to all--Zubaida's (and others) "evidence" is total 100% garbage. It's completely worthless and thus anything built on that evidence is too--the gov't 9/11 story and war on terror, etc.
Was Mukassey appointed just to help cover this up? It sure looks that way, though it's hard to prove that.
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JFK on secrecy and the press
That Sums Things Up
Nicely. Great Comment AlvinR.
"Here is a post from a thread on Emptywheel that contains some good information.
A small group of officials within the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center was put in charge of supporting the prisons and managing the interrogations.”
Now, that’s significant. In April or May 2002, when Abu Zubayda was tortured, Cofer Black was still CTC Director. Wasn’t he?
The really significant thing about Cofer is that he was also in charge of CTC on 01/15/2000 when Nawaf al-Hazmi and Midhar al-Midhar, the Pentagon hijackers, entered the U.S. What’s so significant about that? The pair were entering the U.S. after attending the al-Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumur where 9/11 and the USS Cole attacks were planned January 5-8. Just so happens, al-Hazmi had earlier trained at Abu Zubayah’s camp in Afghanistan, along with five of the other 9/11 hijackers. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....911/423196 (Faulty link-see below)
The second al-Qaeda figure tortured at that time, Abd al-Nashiri, also had a role in recruiting and training the 9/11 attack cell. These two worked closely with another trainer, Sakkra, who now states that he was a double-agent working for U.S. and Syrian intelligence in organizing al-Hazmi and the others as part of the CIA’s secret war in Chechnya. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/.....799/420257 (Faulty link-see below)
Here’s the kicker. Cofer Black was CIA Chief of Station in Khartoum at the same time bin Laden made his base of operations there. Black admits the two had a confrontation shortly before they both left Sudan in 1996. bin Laden went to Afhanistan. Black was made commander of CIA CTC, where he maintained his focus on UBL.
Bottom-line: Cofer Black was in immediate command of CTC at the time CIA let the Flt. 77 hijackers into the U.S. — and an intentional decision was then made at CTC not to alert the FBI when they came in — and Cofer Black was in immediate command of CTC when CIA tortured those who knew the details of the CIA’s role in training at least six of the 9/11 hijackers.
Why torture these two and then “erase” the tapes? Begins to make sense now, doesn’t it?"
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2007/12/19/in-which-country-were-the-t...
Edit: Not sure why those Dailykos links dont work.
Update Edit:: Okay these should work...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/17/82324/911/911/423196
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/133754/60/799/420257
Update, update edit:::The Daily Kos links look very good . They may be worth checking out.
Great. Excellent info, and
Great. Excellent info, and where is Cofer now...?
Former Top Counterterrorism Official Cofer Black Joins Romney For President
And Romney's star has been rising ever since. But you knew that.
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JFK on secrecy and the press
Replace Pelosi For Impeachment
I know this is "off topic" but we NEED to impeach in order to help clear the way for whistleblowers and a new investigation into what really happened on 911.
Never before has a President and Vice President deserved to be impeached more than these.
Yet our Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is working behind the scenes with House Democrats, not to build a consensus for impeachment, but to do just the opposite. To keep others from succeeding in their effort to hold this president accountable by means of impeachment.
With the FISA bill looming in the Senate, we have to show the leaders of the House and Senate that this is still our country. Please read the petition to replace Pelosi with a Democratic Representative who will bring impeachment proceedings to the floor.
http://www.petitiononline.com/everyman/petition.html
Please comment on the WP article
Articles like this always provide a good opportunity to bring in some 9/11 truth.
the bits and pieces, the strategy
so well described above..... the machinations used to create and maintain the trance. And ultimately to destroy the trails leading back to the actual 'evil doers' on 9/11 and beyond. All the above articles are really good reads. Thanks.
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"There are none so hoplessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." (Goethe)