A recently released legal memo describing interrogation techniques showed that Bush Administration lawyers had approved the use of "insects" in interrogations. "You would like to place [Abu] Zubaydeh in a cramped confinement box with an insect," Jay Bybee, then a Justice Department lawyer and now a federal judge, wrote in 2002. He opined that as long as the bug wasn't actually harmful, it would not violate the law to use one to scare a terrorist detainee.
That was the first mention of insects to become public. But the memo's release may make it worth looking back to a brouhaha that occurred in secret at the agency in 2005. A CIA supervisor involved in the "enhanced interrogation" program bragged to other CIA employees about using fire ants while during questioning of a top terror suspect, according to several sources formerly with the Agency. The official claimed to other Agency employees, the sources say, to have put the stinging ants on a detainee's head to help break him.
The CIA insists, however, that no matter what the man said, it never took place. In fact, even though the Bush administration lawyers condoned the use of non-harmful insects, as the memo revealed, the technique wasn't employed, the agency says. "The CIA did not use insects as part of its terrorist interrogation program," said CIA Spokesman Paul Gimigliano. "That didn't happen, period."
The CIA supervisor who purportedly bragged of using insects was, and still is, a high-level official, working at the Senior Executive Service level. Because he is still in the CIA covert side, his name cannot be published. But he was in the field and helped oversee, according to sources, the way "enhanced" interrogation techniques were used.
In fact, he was so close to the program that sources say he was caught on the CIA interrogation tapes made in Thailand inside the secret facility where Zubaydah and other terrorists were questioned. The tapes were later destroyed in circumstances currently under investigation.
"He was on the tapes," a former CIA source said. No one can know if that is true, since they were destroyed. But several sources say that although he may have been on the tapes, he actually had no direct role in interrogating anyone, but that he was present as a high-ranking supervisor. (And there were no reported insects or fire ants on the videotape.)
The official is a storied veteran of covert operations who had just returned from Baghdad. "He's a bullshitter," said one former officer, explaining that the man had a reputation for telling tall tales and embellishing.
So what is one to make of his bizarre claim to have used fire ants to get a terrorist suspect to talk? When he made the boast, according to officials familiar with the events, he was at the CIA's bar at "The Farm," where the CIA trains case officer cadets, down at Camp Peary in Virginia. It's an old U-shaped bar, as officers describe it, topped with cheap linoleum, and a couple of little booths like those found in an old cafeteria. The room opens up to a large lounge with a big open fireplace. Back in the old days, the area was decorated with photographs from Southeast Asia and other regions of CIA derring-do, but now it is a dreary place.
According to those who were told about the incident, the official was putting down drink after drink at the bar. "He was running his mouth," said one ex-officer, "carrying on." Sources say the supervisor bragged loudly that he had used fire ants to torment an al Qaeda suspect to get him to talk. As one version of the evening has it, he bragged of putting the stinging bugs in a helmet and then putting the helmet on the detainee.
Some officials say it should not be taken seriously. First, he was talking while people were drinking in a bar so his account was hardly reliable. Second, he'd just returned from one of the toughest war zones of recent memory: perhaps a bit of bizarre story-telling is to be expected in the privacy of the intelligence service's own bar. But it was all strange enough that complaints started quickly from CIA people who over heard the conversation.
The CIA launched its own review, the intelligence sources say. The agency concluded that there was no such torture and that the supervisor was simply making it up.
Still, that was before the release of the Bybee memo authorizing the use of insects. With new speculation that the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder might launch an investigation into the "enhanced interrogation," perhaps it is, at least worth recalling the in-house insect buzz at the CIA.
Meanwhile, there is already an open inquiry into the question of the destroyed tapes.
http://www.annals.org/cgi/reprint/131/6/424.pdf
This is an old article which doesn't include some of the more recent fire ant human deaths, one in particular the details of which were very gruesome and not public.
I heard about it through law enforcement channels. As is common with livestock victims and carrion, the ants partially consumed the eyes and other moist body parts before the victim was discovered. One can only hope the person was already dead, though I heard that was not the case.
People grounded in reality and healers deal with the pain of extreme interpersonal conflict and inflicted ignorance for personal gain by processing the truth.
Perpetrators of pain for personal gain get defensive when the going gets too real. The four musketeers of defensiveness are denial, rationalization, minimization, and projection. All at the expense of further pain.
A true indicator of who resides on which side of existential sequelae is the amount of projection they engage in, or endure. I do not participate in the Republican up is down, bad is good world.
And then we have the escalation of the propagation of racism to exacerbate our collective pain.
I wonder what beings of a higher power think about the grief and denial. I think I know.
-----------
On December 1, 2005, Yoo appeared in a debate in Chicago with University of Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel. During the debate Cassel asked Yoo, "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?", to which Yoo replied "No treaty." Cassel followed up with "Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...", to which Yoo replied "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo
http://washingtonindependent.com/15946/mccain-camp-buses-in-4000-kids-for-ohio-rally
http://www.armchairsubversive.org/
Republicans created their own law which made child rape and sexual mutilation perfectly legal. They also say they can take your children out of school anytime they need them.
They weren't interested in getting information.
They contracted psychologists who had created a program that was designed to torture people into lying. The lie they wanted was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney weren't looking to keep Americans safe. They were looking for a way to justify attacking and occupying Iraq.
(Jeremy Scahill's blog this week has it dead-on, too.)
Is this what passes for journalism nowadays? I'm surprised Mr. Roston didn't somehow manage to drag Cheney into it.
Oh, I forgot, no Conservative is human anymore. You are Zombies.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-14/attack-of-the-zombie-republicans
It's been proven Cheney was calling the shots in the torture program. While he may not have personally approved every torture technique, he was overseeing the program, including getting lawyers to temporarily declare as legal, tortures which had, prior to that time, been declared illegal.
So Cheney doesn't have to be dragged into any of this--he's already there.
God only knows what kind of sick, scientifically enhanced horrors were performed on other human beings in our name? We'll be finding about some of them, but we'll never know exactly what all happened. Too large a scale.
Remember that? It was reported at the time file cabinets were destroyed. Terrible accident, eh? At the time i was furious because was clear then what was up, wasn't it? Come on. The part that really pissed me off, excuse my French, was that the Vice Presidential office is in a historic building and wonderful hardwood floors were destroyed.
"A man who would destroy the peoples' hardwood floors, on purpose, to cover his own ass, is capable of any damn thing", Tulka2 said archly.
The above is the link to AP story on Huff Post story on December 19, 2007. It seems like yesterday to me.
Would you like to be working with such people "in the cause of liberty and freedom"?
Isn't there something wrong with this picture?
my country ?
Just where is the line in the sand ?
THIS is simply made up.