Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee’s bombshell torture report reveals multiple CIA misrepresentations about the effectiveness of its post-9/11 torture program to justify mistreatment of detainees.

Below are some of the most egregious CIA claims that “enhanced interrogation techniques” produced new and viable information when, in fact, they did not, according to the summary of the committee’s report released Tuesday.

The Capture Of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Despite Bush administration assertions that enhanced interrogation helped lead to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, his seizure was actually the result of a conventional human intelligence relationship — a relationship that the CIA did everything it could to bungle and nearly destroy.

President George W. Bush indicated in a Sept. 6, 2006, speech that information from the torture of Abu Zubaydah identified and led to the capture of 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, which ultimately led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (often referred to as KSM). In the speech, Bush described the CIA’s enhanced interrogation procedures as “safe and lawful and necessary.”

“Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th,” said Bush.

But the summary of the Senate report says, “Contrary to CIA representations, there are no CIA records to support the assertion that Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, or any other CIA detainee played any role in the ‘the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.'” It was a CIA informant, referred to in the report as Asset X, who provided the information. In the report, the CIA officer who handled Asset X says it “was a [human intelligence operation] pretty much from start to finish.”

In its response to the torture report, the CIA describes the Senate’s version of the account as an “incorrect repetition of an error made by a CIA officer in a cable in 2003.” The CIA says the Senate report “fails to note that detainees gave us the critical information on KSM.”

The Capture Of Majid Kahn

The CIA claimed that intelligence gathered by using enhanced interrogation methods on KSM led to the capture of Majid Khan. But that’s “inaccurate,” the summary of the Senate report says. “There is no indication in CIA records that reporting from KSM — or any other CIA detainee — played any role in the identification and capture of Majid Khan,” the report says.

Khan is a Pakistani citizen who was living in Maryland at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He later returned to Pakistan to work for KSM. In interviews with the CIA Office of Inspector General, agency officers claimed the use of these interrogation methods on KSM led them to Khan. “KSM gave us Majid Khan,” one officer is quoted as telling the inspector general’s office. The report says CIA leaders made this claim in a presentation to senior White House officials on July 29, 2003, and repeated it in a briefing to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith. The claim was included in a May 2004 CIA Inspector General report on detention and interrogation activities.

On the contrary, the Senate committee found, the CIA knew more than a month before KSM was even captured where Khan was. On Jan. 10, 2003, the FBI field office in Baltimore opened an international terrorism investigation into the email account “BobDesi@hotmail.com” after it had been linked to a known al Qaeda email account that the CIA was already tracking, according to the report summary. On Jan. 16, the FBI linked that email to Khan’s personal website via “open source research.” Through February 2003, investigators tracked Khan’s Internet activity and were “confident he was located at his brother’s house in Karachi, Pakistan.” On March 5, 2003, Pakistani officers raided his brother’s house, and captured Khan there.

According to the Senate report summary, it wasn’t until after that — on March 17, 2003 — that CIA officials showed KSM a photograph of Khan and discussed him for the first time.

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA acknowledges it “mistakenly provided incorrect information to the Inspector General that led to a onetime misrepresentation of this case” in the 2004 report. But the CIA denies it did so repeatedly and in other venues.

The Identification, Capture And Arrest of Sajid Badat

The CIA repeatedly told Congress and the Bush Justice Department that waterboarding KSM led to the arrest of the so-called second shoe bomber, Sajid Badat. He was associated with Richard Reid, the man who actually tried to blow up an airliner using a shoe bomb in 2001 — but Badat backed out of the plot on his own before he was arrested in November of that year.

Nevertheless, in the 2000s, Bush administration officials presented Badat as an active terror plotter and a signature success of enhanced interrogation tactics.

On April 15, 2005, the CIA sent the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel an eight-page document justifying the value of its interrogations. The CIA’s document claimed that leads provided by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after waterboarding “led directly to the arrest” of Sajid Badat in November 2003.

“These representations were inaccurate,” the Senate report summary says. The summary says U.K. authorities had already identified Badat on their own, and that Mohammed’s eventual identification of Badat was of no original value.

After KSM was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, he “inaccurately identified Richard Reid’s U.K. associate as ‘Talha.'” In August he “did not recognize” Badat in a picture the CIA presented to him. CIA officers noted Mohammed’s failure to identify Badat in the picture and said themselves that he “might be lying.” Months after waterboarding ended, on Aug. 10, Mohammed identified the picture as “Issa al-Britani,” a pseudonym for Badat. He never identified Badat by name.

All along, U.K. authorities were conducting their own intelligence operation on Badat. They already had a picture of him and phone records that placed him near Reid, underscoring how little the value Mohammed’s ambiguous identification of Badat would have been. “U.K. domestic investigative efforts, reporting from foreign intelligence services, international law enforcement efforts, and U.S. military reporting” led to Sajid Badat’s arrest, according to the Senate report summary. U.K. authorities arrested him on Nov. 27, 2003.

Thwarting Of The Heathrow Airport And Canary Wharf Plotting

In a September 2006 speech, Bush said information from CIA detainees had helped stop an al Qaeda plot to fly airplanes into London’s Heathrow Airport and its Canary Wharf commercial district.

“They helped stop a plot,” said Bush. The plot against Heathrow was cited by former CIA Director Porter Goss in a December 2005 letter to other Bush administration officials as proof that the agency’s brutal tactics had “allowed the U.S. to save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.”

But those plots were already disrupted by the time the CIA had detained the likes of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — because at the time, the plot existed only in their heads.

“While each of these four detainees provided information on the plotting during their detentions, none of this information played any role in the disruption of the plot,” says the report summary. “No operatives were informed of the plot, no pilots were ever identified by al-Qa’ida for the attacks, and only schedules of potential flights were collected for review.”

In its June 2013 response to the Senate study, the CIA significantly downgraded its claim that “enhanced interrogation saved thousands of lives.” Rather than actually disrupting the plot, the CIA acknowledged, the methods allowed the agency to “conclude (the plot) had been disrupted.”

So Bush was wrong. And by the CIA’s own accounting, “enhanced interrogation” at most gave the government peace of mind that no attack would ever come, because all the plotters had already been captured.

CIA Detainees Subjected To Enhanced Interrogation Help Validate CIA Sources

In June 2004, the CIA received information from a source that there was a plot to attack the U.S. before the upcoming presidential election. The source claimed a man named Janat Gul knew all about it.

Unfortunately for Gul, he knew nothing of the plot. It turned out that the Election Day attack plot didn’t exist, and that the CIA had received faulty intelligence.

But Gul’s interrogators tortured him to give up information, which caused Gul to become disoriented and tell CIA officers that he saw “his wife and children in the mirror and had heard their voices in the white noise.” The interrogation continued. According to a CIA cable, Gul “asked to die or just be killed.”

After the interrogations, CIA personnel were convinced he knew nothing about a pre-election plot. The investigators wrote that the “team does not believe [Gul] is withholding imminent threat information” and that he “may not possess all that [the CIA] believes him to know.”

But CIA headquarters demanded that the interrogations continue. And continue they did, with a 47-hour session of standing sleep deprivation during which Gul wore a diaper. Still, no information about an alleged attack surfaced.

That’s because it was entirely made up by the CIA’s original source, who admitted he “fabricated the information” in October 2004. Gul was transferred to a “foreign government” and was released. While Gul never provided information about an attack and the CIA finally acknowledged the pre-election plot was fake, the agency remained steadfast in its suspicion of Gul, calling him “a known terrorist facilitator.”

The Identification And Arrest of Saleh al-Marri

The CIA repeatedly used a subsection of a 2004 CIA Inspector General report titled “Effectiveness” as evidence that enhanced interrogation methods were effective. In that section, the CIA claimed that using the techniques on Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed led to the arrests of multiple terrorists, including that of New York sleeper operative Saleh al-Marri.

It turns out that’s not true. According to the report summary, al-Marri was arrested more than two years before KSM was captured in 2003, so whatever information KSM provided to the CIA couldn’t possibly have led to the arrest of al-Marri.

After the release of the inspector general’s 2004 report, the CIA maintained that the agency had “no concrete information” on al-Marri prior to the interrogation of KSM. But that position is “incongruent with CIA records,” the Senate’s report summary states. The CIA actually “possessed significant information” on al-Marri including knowledge that he had “suspicious information” on his computer when he was arrested in 2001, that his brother had travelled to Afghanistan the same year to join the anti-U.S. jihad, and that al-Marri was “directly associated” with KSM, as well as Mustafa al-Hawsawi, an al Qaeda member and suspected 9/11 facilitator.

The FBI also had extensive records on al-Marri. A year before any information from the KSM interrogation was released by the CIA, the FBI provided the Senate committee with “biographical and derogatory” information on al-Marri including connections to other extremists as well as some of the information the CIA had on al-Marri, the summary notes.

In June 2013, the CIA responded to the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel about the inaccurate information, saying it was a “one-time misrepresentation” not “repeatedly represented” or “frequently cited” as evidence that the CIA torture program was effective. The CIA also acknowledged that the information it obtained was “fragmentary” and that both the FBI and CIA “lacked detailed reporting to confirm suspicions” that al-Marri had links to al Qaeda or a “nefarious” objective.

However, the Senate committee found that, “in addition to the multiple representations to the CIA OIG, the inaccurate information in the final OIG Special Review was, as noted above, provided by the CIA to the Department of Justice to support the Department’s analysis of the lawfulness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques … was also relied upon by the Blue Ribbon Panel evaluating the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, and later was cited in multiple open source articles and books, often in the context of the ‘effectiveness’ of the CIA program.”

The Collection Of Critical Tactical Intelligence On Shkai, Pakistan

The Senate committee also looked at information obtained from detainee Hassan Ghul in January 2004. The report summary notes that a CIA memo on the “Effectiveness of the CIA Counterterrorist Interrogation Techniques” from March 2005 states that the “interrogation of Hassan Ghul provided detailed tactical intelligence showing that Shkai, Pakistan was a major Al-Qa’ida hub in the tribal areas.” (The Senate report spells his name “Ghul,” while the CIA’s response spells it “Gul.”)

Ghul was captured in January 2004 in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and rendered to detention at the CIA’s Detention Site Cobalt, where he spent two days, according to the Senate report summary. He provided valuable information about Shkai, including details about al Qaeda senior leaders’ locations, movements and operational security and training, according to the Senate report summary. He also provided phone numbers and email addresses that were associated with operatives based in Shkai.

According to the summary, it was not until Ghul was transferred two days later to Detention Site Black that he was “immediately, and for the first time, subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” The summary, citing a CIA cable, says Ghul “provided no new information during this period and was immediately placed in standing sleep deprivation with his hands above his head, with plans to lower his hands after two hours.”

The most valuable information from Ghul came before he was subject to these tactics, the summary says. It notes a Jan. 31, 2004, cable that it says “referenced nine cables describing Hassan Ghul’s reporting prior to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, and no cables describing Ghul’s reporting after the use of the techniques.”

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA stated that it “continues to assess that the information derived from Hassan Gul after the commencement of enhanced techniques provided new and unique insight into al-Qa’ida’s presence and operations in Shkai, Pakistan.”

“We never represented that Shkai was previously unknown to us or that Gul only told us about it after he was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques,” wrote the CIA. “We said that after these techniques were used, Gul provided ‘detailed tactical intelligence.’”

Ryan J. Reilly, Matt Sledge and Donte Stallworth contributed reporting.

After months of anticipation, one awesome behind-the-scenes adventure and a slew of Angel-worthy selfies, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show has finally happened!

And while we already knew there were going to be some stellar performances, gorgeous lingerie and even an Arianna Grande/Angel wing run-in, tonight we were finally able to see it all come to life on the small screen.

Of course, what would a major fashion event be without some seriously GIF-able moments? Relive the scantily-clad magic below!

Deep breath, everyone. It’s showtime!

High five for that awesome Taylor Swift performance!

The wink that stopped us in our tracks:

Kisses from Karlie!

BFF ALERT!

And THEN the fantasy bras showed up.

The fierceness was in full swing.

Twerk. Twerk. Twerk. Twerk.

We didn’t get to see Ariana Grande’s wing run-in, but she did rock the runway.

Like, seriously rocked it.

But don’t worry, Tay. You were pretty amazing, too.

Until next year, Angels.

Quick story.

It was like a game.

I come from a family that doesn’t easily go along with government stuff. We hate taxes. We hate surveillance. We’re suspicious. We’re smart. Here’s one example: My dad served in Vietnam, and he was like, “Hell naw! You’re never going in the military!” Since I’m a member of the Blackfeet Nation and our nation transcends the Canadian border, my dad’s plan was that I’d go live with my Canadian Native family if ever there was talk of a draft.

Likewise, I didn’t register to vote for a long time. Voting simply is not a value in my family; our allegiance is to the Blackfeet Nation and the Suquamish Nation. (“These are white people’s elections. That’s not our stuff.”) Finally, a college convinced me to give voting a try. (“You might make a difference!”) But as soon as I registered, I got my first summons for jury duty. “This could be fun,” I thought. My friends and I began scheming up the most ridiculous excuses we could think up. We were laughing and scheming while watching Beavis and Butt-Head. “I’m not going along with this! I’m a radical! Radicals don’t do jury duty!” First plan: Tell them, “I’m a racist.” That is, no matter who the defendant was, I was going to hate whoever the defendant was and say that I couldn’t give him or her a fair shake. Second plan: Tell them honestly that my first allegiance was to the Blackfeet Nation and the Suquamish Nation and I didn’t know if I could be trusted to uphold the United States’ laws.

Predictably, I was quickly eliminated from the jury pool. In victory, I rubbed my hands together, mastermind-style. “I just beat the man!” I knew I was a smart guy. Heck, I’d just outsmarted justice.

Why am I telling you this?

The first time I argued a jury trial, I saw a lot of the same behavior: smug smiles and dishonest replies that indicated that they wouldn’t be a good juror. Of course, by this time I wanted good folks on the jury; how else would I win? But all the people who I thought would make fair-minded and good jurors wanted nothing to do with it. I could tell. Their body language said so. Their mouth language said so. It wasn’t a huge, highly publicized case, but all court cases are social-justice issues, because rich people get a fairer shake than poor people, irrespective of color. So I wanted some folks in the jury box who might be able to reflect some of the values of my client. That’s fair; that’s why it’s called a “jury of one’s peers.” But my client’s peers wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible!

They beat the man. They didn’t have to participate in these games. They outsmarted me and the justice system. As a result, someone didn’t get as fair a shot as they otherwise might have.

Look, America has always been sick with the disease of racism. That’s not new. As Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently stated, “Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.”

This shit is not new. Ask Emmett Till. Ask James Byrd Jr. Ask Dred Scott. Ask the Natives massacred at Sand Creek.

But we’re still in the same place we’ve been in for the past 50 years: merely diagnosing the problem. As we used to say in the ’80s, “No shit, Sherlock.” We’re pointing at the racism, pointing at all these agencies and municipalities that we cannot do anything about. The one place where we’re not pointing? We’re not pointing at ourselves. We let this happen. Black folks. White liberals. Pigeon-toed Natives. Conservatives. All of us. We’re all complicit.

Let me explain.

See, the grand jury that was convened to decide whether the police officer(s) who killed Eric Garner should be indicted concluded that there was no probable cause to seek an indictment. The grand jury that was convened to decide whether the police officer who killed Michael Brown should be indicted concluded that there was no probable cause to seek an indictment.

Yet one can only serve on a grand jury if one is a registered voter. Moreover, that registered voter can only serve on a grand jury if he or she sticks around long enough to serve on that jury and doesn’t try to outsmart justice by giving silly-ass excuses to get off that jury — like I did.

I didn’t use the tools that were there. I let the Eric Garners and Michael Browns down.

Moreover, county prosecutors — like Bob McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County who essentially decided whether the St. Louis County grand jury would indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown — are usually elected officials. They get voted in and out of office on the strength of the people who vote. In the 2014 primary for St. Louis County prosecutor, a black woman ran against McCulloch. Her name is Leslie Broadnax. Most importantly (to me!), she is a former public defender who may have come into contact with some of these police-brutality cases during her time as a defender. But she got far less than half the votes that McCulloch received: around 33,000 votes. Only 30 percent of the county turned out for that primary.

We’re simply not using the tools that are there.

Racism is real, and black men get killed in tragically disparate numbers. Absolutely. It’s been that way since the first interloper landed on this continent, and now many of us brown- and black-skinned people have even been infected with that racism disease against each other. That’s deep. So it’s going to take some time to remove that racism sickness out of America’s DNA. That’s long-term. In the short term we’ve got a responsibility to use the tools that exist right now. I admit that I have no clue whether the system will actually work; it might be as much of a joke as I was raised to believe it is. But I also cannot honestly say that these tools don’t work until we actually try to try them. Failing to register to vote is not playing the game. Thirty-percent voter turnout is not playing the game. Finding creative ways to get out of serving on juries is not playing the game. You don’t want to participate in the American justice system? I get it. Yet non-participation has consequences. I mean, there’s absolutely a place for marching, sounding off on social media and being outraged and indignant. We should be; that’s all positive stuff. Yet we have to use the tools that we have currently; otherwise we’ll keep “outsmarting” justice.

Gyasi Ross is a father, author and attorney from the Blackfeet and Suquamish Indian Reservations. He is the author of two books — How to Say I Love You in Indian and Don’t Know Much About Indians (But I Wrote a Book About Us Anyways) — both available at cutbankcreekpress.com. He has a column in Indian Country Today Media Network called “The Thing About Skins.”

With the current news cycle highlighting police brutality against African Americans, it is hard not to contemplate the continuing role of race in American life. Despite our progress as a nation and more broadly as a human race, we still struggle with seemingly antiquated modes of thinking that lead to unnecessary frictions between people. It is as if the impressive advances in social psychology and neuroscience have not sunk into the consciousness of the broader population.

We now have a much deeper understanding of the countless fallacies of thought, biases, and group dynamics to which all humans are prone. We now understand that socioeconomic status, culture, education, language, environment, personal experience, and differential treatment are among the most important causal factors behind the varying behavioral outcomes of different social groups. Our differences have absolutely nothing to do with skin color. Sensible people always understood this, but science has now proven it.

So why we do we continue to behave as if different gradations of pigment and varying facial structures matter? Why do we still look at each other as if we are anything other than fellow humans? Sadly, it is because race does still matter. It is those very fallacies of thought, biases, and group dynamics that, when combined with differential treatment and social power, create meaningful divisions within human society out of otherwise meaningless differences.

It is human nature to notice differences in skin tone and react to them. Studies of how young children react to race provide evidence of this. But the way in which we react is not foreordained. Different people may naturally react with curiosity, pity, fear, hatred, admiration, and so on. Our new understanding of neuroplasticity makes it clear that we can train our minds. We now have concrete evidence that our brains are malleable and can be conditioned to a certain degree throughout our lives. This means we can teach ourselves and each other not to react negatively to race. On a biological level, different skin tones can tell us about our relative abilities to absorb or repel the Sun’s rays. They may also tell us something about proclivity to specific diseases or ability to process certain types of food, but even these are unclear and vary on an individual level.

The peril of race comes when we imbue it with greater meaning than it actually has, when we use it as a tool to categorize people and then assume certain characteristics based on those categories. Of course, we know scientifically that these categories are, quite frankly, stupid. They simply don’t withstand any kind of meaningful analysis, and those who use them as a proxy for actually getting to know different people are guilty of intellectual laziness at best, and intolerance and bigotry at worst.

Tragically, racial groupings in America and much of the world are still given importance — which is often referred to as the social construction of race. When this imagined meaning is paired with intolerance and asymmetrical social power between different racial groups, it leads to all of the differences that we observe between the races. But they are not caused by race. They are caused by ignorance, hatred, and differential treatment. They are caused by marginalization and abuse of power. This is why one racial group or another may exhibit higher rates of poverty, violence, or drug abuse. In the United States, African Americans as a group still lag behind the American average in many indicators because they have suffered historical injustices, tend to be treated unfairly by police, are often viewed with a higher degree of suspicion and fear by their fellow citizens, are not afforded the same opportunities, and so on.

In short, American society has been mistreating African Americans for centuries. Despite the civil-rights movement and all the advances in our scientific understanding of human behavior, we still mistreat them. Of course, they are not the only ones who are mistreated. But of any social grouping in America, they have probably suffered the greatest. And yet we still continue to treat them differently even knowing that skin color is meaningless.

It has to stop. Like right now. It makes no sense. It is the product of antiquated thinking that is not only unjust, wasteful, and damaging to society but based on deeply flawed reasoning or a complete lack of reason. Continuing to think about race as a causal factor of behavior is as foolish today as it was to believe that the Sun revolved around the Earth in late 17th-century Italy. It is a now disproven mode of thought that is slowing human progress. As soon as the differential treatment of races stops, the social frictions of race will start to disappear.

Of course, we all have unconscious biases and are susceptible to lazy thinking, so we have to catch ourselves. We have to practice empathy and recognize the biases and mental shortcuts that we use throughout the day that aren’t based on actual facts or knowledge. Observing differences in skin tone is natural simply, because our vision registers shades and colors, but believing that this tells us anything substantive about the person we are looking at is entirely in our own minds. Armed with this knowledge, we can all train ourselves to be better people. As a society, we should teach empathy and the basics of social psychology in our public schools; we should retrain our police to understand the tricks that our minds play on us; and we should foster social inclusion of all of our citizens. Doing so will help erase the scars of race that still plague America and will make us stronger in every way. It’s not just a question of justice — it’s science.

Nissan has announced plans to recall approximately 470,000 vehicles across the globe due to fuel pressure sensors that mightn’t have been tightened adequately. Vehicles with this issue may eventually begin leaking fuel as vibration and heat take their toll, and that fuel leak then poses a fire risk. The affected vehicles range from 2012 to 2015 model years, and include … Continue reading