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CIA Supervisor Claimed He Used Fire Ants On Detainee
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.
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Anyone who thinks fire ant stings could never pass the point of nuisance to become torture, please educate yourself:
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.
Sequelae is usually interpreted as meaning the residual effects from an illness or injury. Is it not peculiar that many of us continue to fight to share the truth as we see it about the ongoing damage of the Bush/Cheney debris fields, while others deny, rationalize, minimize and project the fact that the debris fields exist at all?
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.
hess44: Talk to Daniel Pearl's family.
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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.
Instead of asking the experts, "What works?", the disease that is George W. Bush and Dick Cheney went to their lawyers and asked, "How can we torture?"
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.
The CIA killed people. People died because of their "interrogation techniques". Why isn't that in bold, glittery letters going round and round the news cycles? Even the so-called liberal branch of the media is making this sound much more complex and nuanced than it really is. They say they're liberal, but they only report the parts of the story that make the conservatives sound like they have a valid argument, leaving out huge gaps where the info didn't fit the frame. They're inventing controversy on clear-cut cases of criminal activity. It's just giving license to the new administration to selectively borrow tactics from the old one.
(Jeremy Scahill's blog this week has it dead-on, too.)
"According to several [unnamed] sources formerly with the Agency. The [unnamed] official claimed to ... to have put the stinging ants on a detainee's head to help break him."
Is this what passes for journalism nowadays? I'm surprised Mr. Roston didn't somehow manage to drag Cheney into it.
I am surprised you defend Cheney... Why didn't he stop this inhumane program? Why didn't someone inform Congress?
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
"I'm surprised Mr. Roston didn't somehow manage to drag Cheney into it."
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.
This brings back memories. When I lived in the sandhills of S.C. a few years back, my son and his best buddy started their own all boys club. The initiation for any newcomers was they had to kick off the top of a fire ant mound then hold their hand on the mound and count out loud to 30. If they took their hand away before they got to 30 they could not get in the club. Every kid that wanted to get in the club did so, but it was painful. As for the parents... they were not too happy about it.
What a joke! Fire ants? Yeah, they're bad, I know (had the experience), but you think this is even close to the tip of the iceberg these loonies were up to?
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.
Most of it was simple, straightforward beatings, torture, "stress positions", etc.--simple stuff easily taught and performed by CIA, etc. Reliable, inexpensive techniques developed over the past few decades, instead of bizarre scientifically enhanced stuff, though "interestingly" enough, these simple techniques were finally settled on by the CIA after decades of creepy scientific experiments as you hint at--it was found that the more complex stuff (electronics, drugs, etc.) was too unwieldy to implement, with unreliable results. Discovering that some relatively simple basic torture techniques worked better at breaking people (though useless for getting actual information) than the complex stuff, was the CIA's grand discovery, their crown jewels for all that research effort. They still research the wilder stuff--mind control via electronics, etc.--but so far we haven't seen as widespread a use of these methods (unless you count some TV programs and advertising in general).
Have all of you forgotten 9/11...............To my thinking that was cruel........so many lives lost.....Do you think that our leaders should turn their cheeks and let that happen.......I pray to God that if something like that ever happens again that Obama or whoever is in charge won't just smile and say that just wasn't nice or something so stupid.......Our leaders must protect our nation. They must decide what action needs to be taken and we only pray that they are successful.
It feels as if we have lost what is most dear, our ideals, because of fear mongering.
With fire ants?
BJean,
You have to try and forgive some of the people here. They have been taught to believe that good is bad and bad is good. Some sort of new age garbage.
What's bad, in this context, has already been determined and put into law years ago, in such things as the Nuremburg Trials. Nothing "new age" about it. If these laws were good enough for the people who won WWII without torture, then they're good enough for us--unless you consider yourself so far below the people who won WWII, that doing things right, in ways that won't create many more terrorists, doesn't matter to you any more.
Forgiveness, is a WAY OF BEING. . Not something you 'do' ' . .much like LOVE. Love is not an EMOTION. IT'S A WAY OF BEING.... .And YOU, GOLDEN, have apparently been asleep. NEW AGE no longer holds the connotation it did in 1999.This IS a New Age! , Like PRES. OBAMA openly AFFIRMS. . . LIKE IT OR NOT "NEW AGE" no longer holds a 'woo-woo' connotation / depicting silly 'out there' ca-ca. . as early on folks touted wo/ giving it a chance to gain refinement- like other historical transitions/ .evolution of our species. We are evolving from five sensory Beings into more evolved MULTI SENSORY BEINGS --A NEW PARADIGM IN CONSCIOUSNESS. Unity =the scientific and spritual will hold hands -- not FIGHT FOR DOMINANCE as the old world order DID -- and lost. WAKE UP- become inpired: INSPIRED, btw = Latin deriv ''tve. meaning "in the spirit of" anyway. Don't pacify. It's condescending! Science/spirit are now holding hands. We will too-- or we won't 'be' at all.
THE NEW AGE IS HERENOW . . .and IT 'GOES LIKE IT GOES'-- if we aren't NOW HERE; we are NOWHERE!
BJean: yes, 9/11 was cruel, but that was them, and it's not supposed to be us. You need to do some research into the effects of torture on the people in the countries where the people being tortured come from. Intelligence officers usually admit that torture creates many more recruits for more terrorists than the ones that were tortured, and it almost never generates useful information. This is what many of the people who actually did the torturing in Iraq, Guantanamo, etc. have reported themselves. It's a bad approach any way you look at it. The same interrogators have said they got the most useful info when they treated the prisoners with restraint, and sometimes even respect as human beings, since the terrorists then said they didn't realize Americans could be anything but abusive--when they found out differently, they cooperated, even Abu Zubaydeh. The issue of torture being cruel should be enough of a reason not to do it, but the fact that it's counter-productive and nearly useless, and that restraint works far better, should count for something in your worldview of how to handle terrorism, regardless of your "gut" feeling. I'm more interested in results, not some childish "we should spank them hard for being bad children" approach to "parenting".
It's treatment like this that causes people to turn to terrorism.
Nobody who ordered or authorized torture flies commercial. The George Bushes and Dick Cheneys never suffer for their acts. It's only the little people, you and me, who are in the line of fire. The orderers of torture don't do it to keep us safe either. Setting aside their diseased psyches for the moment, the only reason they do anything is because terror attacks like on 9/11 hurt business. It stops us from buying.
When are we going to talk about the fire that broke out in Vice President Cheney's office last year?
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.
I missed that. It is easy for me to believe that Cheney destroyed evidence because he wiped his ahs with the Constitution.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20071219/white-house-fire/
The above is the link to AP story on Huff Post story on December 19, 2007. It seems like yesterday to me.
Actually, since only "an" insect was OK'd by George Bush - wouldnt it be not allowed if there were 2 or more antts in the box? Doesnt matter I guess since its a fact that it was only "an" ant.
But, it was only 1 ant in the box at a time - confirmed fact.
Oh yeah. 1 fire ant can ruin your day.
These people are sitting around dreaming up tortures to use on people who may be innocent of any crimes.
Would you like to be working with such people "in the cause of liberty and freedom"?
Isn't there something wrong with this picture?
And I thought it was just me.
So I ask you, "America",
my country ?
Just where is the line in the sand ?
"The agency concluded that there was no such torture and that the supervisor was simply making it up.
THIS is simply made up.
And you know this how?
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