An unmitigated failure. The Bush administration was a disaster for our nation…unless you were the beneficiary of those massive tax cuts:

Thursday’s annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau’s principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush.

It’s not a record many Republicans are likely to point to with pride.

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.

[...]

So the summary page on the economic experience of average Americans under the past two presidents would look like this:
Under Clinton, the median income increased 14 per cent. Under Bush it declined 4.2 per cent.

Under Clinton the total number of Americans in poverty declined 16.9 per cent; under Bush it increased 26.1 per cent.

Under Clinton the number of children in poverty declined 24.2 per cent; under Bush it increased by 21.4 per cent.

Under Clinton, the number of Americans without health insurance, remained essentially even (down six-tenths of one per cent); under Bush it increased by 20.6 per cent.
Adding Ronald Reagan’s record to the comparison fills in the picture from another angle.

Under Reagan, the median income grew, in contrast to both Bush the younger and Bush the elder. (The median income declined 3.2 per cent during the elder Bush’s single term.) When Reagan was done, the median income stood at $47, 614 (again in constant 2008 dollars), 8.1 per cent higher than when Jimmy Carter left office in 1980.

Such is the result of a deliberate effort to shift money away from social spending and give it back to the already wealthy, combined with a general inattention to and disinterest in the well-being of our nation (beyond torturing terrorists and launching wars of aggression.) There should be retribution for such awful stewardship, but the only punishment being meted out is to you and me.

Yeah, nobody predicted that this was the case:

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

Honestly, wouldn’t it have been more of a surprise if Ridge had produced definitive evidence that this has never happened?

And speaking of Bush-era mendacity, the NY Times appears to have uncovered the reason that the CIA and Bush administration was so secretive about that Al Qaeda assassination program; they were paying Blackwater security contractors to help them with it:

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Uh, yeah. Because as opaque as the CIA’s activities in Iraq are, Blackwater is even worse. Though I’m pretty sure that such was also considered a plus of the program by the CIA and Bush officials.

Over the last week we’ve learned a few interesting things about intelligence programs being run by the NSA and the CIA, and the participation of Bush administration officials in those programs. Last Wednesday it was revealed that the CIA concealed a top secret program from Congress for eight years. Congress became aware of the program only after they were of informed of it by current CIA director Leon Panetta, who himsefl learned of the program only last month. Over the weekend we learned that the CIA withheld information from Congress on the direct orders of Vice President Cheney, according to testimony before Congress by Leon Panetta. Panetta also indicated that the program had been canceled. And yesterday we learned that the program was an effort to assassinate Al Qaeda terrorists wherever they might be found, including in friendly countries. Now officials say that no assassination was ever carried out and due to legal and logistical problems, the program never left the planning stages. Of course, that leads one to wonder just why there was an effort to keep the program away from Congress completely, especially given that we have been assassinating Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan (a “friendly” country) for years now. If anything, one would think that Congress and the public in general would approve of targeted killings, which have the benefit of at least not killing dozens of civilians along with the terrorist you’re trying to get. I’m almost willing to bet there’s still more about the program we don’t know yet, but we’ll see.

Also, last Friday saw the release of a report compiled by the various agencies Inspectors General regarding the warrantless wiretapping program whose existence was revealed by the New York Times in late 2005. The report doesn’t offer an opinion on the program’s legality, but it does discuss the program’s effectiveness, finding that most leads generated by the program were dead ends and that this was due in part to the extensive secrecy that surrounded the program.

The report also touches on the other intelligence-gathering program maintained by the Bush administration, the “unprecedented” data mining operation that we learned in December was the cause of a now infamous showdown between the Department of Justice and senior Bush administration officials. The report provides little detail about the program though, so though we are well aware that it existed at one time and was canceled when the DOJ officials threatened to resign over it, we still don’t know exactly what it did or where all the data it collected has gone off to.

So, an interesting weekend to say the least.

UPDATE: Via Tim F, Philip Giraldi with an informative post on why the CIA assassination program would be so problematic and thus why it likely never came to fruition.

Remember the McClatchy article I blogged about a few weeks ago, wherein in a senior U.S. intelligence official claimed that there was pressure from Cheney and Rumsfeld to extract intelligence from detainees “proving” a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the run-up to the invasion, and how this echoed a claim made by Army psychologist to the Senate Armed Services Committee? Well, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff of the Department of State during Powell’s term, took to the virtual pages of Steve Clemons’ Washington Note on Wednesday to reiterate this claim (and blast Cheney generally in the process):

…what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts.

Emphasis mine. Wilkerson has gotten some pushback on his claim regarding the timing of al-Libi’s torture, but in his response to Specner Ackerman regarding that he stands by the substance of his story:

As Joscelyn writes, the DIA indeed filed a February 2002 notice indicating distrust for al-Libi’s claims about Iraq assisting al-Qaeda’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. “It is more likely that this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers,” a DIA report known as DITSUM #044-02 reads. “Ibn al-Shaykh [al-Libi] has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may describing [sic] scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.” Yet al-Libi’s dubious information made its way into the intelligence bloodstream, all the way up to Colin Powell’s since-discredited 2003 speech to the United Nations justifying the invasion — the first draft of which had a big assist from Cheney’s office, including then-chief of staff Scooter Libby. In March 2004, after the invasion, the CIA withdrew its support for al-Libi’s claims.

Joscelyn wrote, “It is doubtful that any part of Wilkerson’s story is true.” I asked Wilkerson if he wished to respond.

If their account is the accurate one, explain to me why Tenet and McLaughlin [then the director and deputy director of the CIA] came to Secretary Powell in February 2003–yes, 2003–with the information about al-Libi as if it were fresh as the morning dew. Powell was ready to throw out almost everything Tenet had given him on the contacts of Baghdad with terrorists, particularly al-Qa’ida. Suddenly, on 1 Feb, there was the shocking revelation of a high-level al-Qa’ida operative who had just revealed significant contacts between al-Qa’ida and Baghdad. Powell changed his mind and that information went into his presentation to the [United Nations Security Council] on 5 Feb 2003. We were never told of the DIA dissent.

So essentially, Wilkerson is claiming that Tenet and McLaughlin either concealed (or less likely, didn’t know about) the Defense Intelligence Agency’s claims that al-Libi’s information couldn’t be trusted when they made their presentation to Powell a year after the DIA’s report.  Does that sound like an unbelievable proposition to you? Yeah, me neither. 

As I said on my earlier post on this issue, Bush administration officials were complicit in the illegal torture of a detainee because they wanted intelligence that would justify a war of aggression against Iraq. How is this not a war crime?

The epic five-year long investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility of misconduct in the crafting of the torture memos is expected to recommend no criminal charges for the lawyers involved, but rather disciplinary actions by state bars:

An internal Justice Department inquiry has concluded that Bush administration lawyers committed serious lapses of judgment in writing secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations but that they should not be prosecuted, according to government officials briefed on its findings.

The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask state bar associations to consider possible disciplinary action, which could include reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said.

The conclusions of the 220-page draft report are not final and have not yet been approved by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The officials said that it is possible that the final report might be subject to further revision but that they did not expect major alterations in its main findings or recommendations.

The findings, growing out of an inquiry that started in 2004, would represent a stinging rebuke of the lawyers and their legal arguments.

But they would stop short of the criminal referral sought by some human rights advocates, who have suggested that the lawyers could be prosecuted as part of a criminal conspiracy to violate the anti-torture statute. President Obama has said the Justice Department would have to decide whether the lawyers who authorized the interrogation methods should face charges, while pledging that interrogators would not be investigated or prosecuted for using techniques that the lawyers said were legal.

I would prefer criminal charges, but shoddy, dishonest lawyering is also the domain of star bar associations, so it’s only appropriate that the involved DOJ lawyers could lose their ability to practice their profession (a la Scotter Libby.) Of course, that’s hardly a guaranteed outcome. And this is only a recommendation. The question of whether or not criminal charges will be filed should come down to the attorneys now occupying the DOJ.

Things you should be reading:

1. Yesterday suicide bombers killed eighty Iraqis in three separate attacks. Today at least sixty more residents of Baghdad have died in two suicide bombings. It’s stating the obvious to say that this raises concerns that progress on the security front is being undermined. So far, nobody really seems to understand what’s prompted the new attacks.

2. Pakistan’s Taliban insurgency is worsening. Fighters from neighboring Swat moved into the Buner district earlier this week, only seventy miles from the capital of Pakistan Islamabad. The Pakistani government responded by sending police forces to the district, who were promptly repelled by the militants, and other reports indicate that Taliban forces have moved into districts even closer to the capitol. Al Jazeera reports that the Taliban are now pulling their fighters out of Buner, but none of this encourages American officials to believe that Pakistan is capable of dealing with their home grown Taliban insurgency…or securing their nuclear weapons against those fighters.

3. The Washington Post reports that the debate within the Obama administration over whether to release four OLC memos was intense. One of the arguments against releasing them was surely the political furor that the move has provoked. The Obama administration says they intend to oppose any investigation in torture by Congress, a move that some Democratic members are pushing for.

4. The Jane Harman story grows even more troubling with the revelation that then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales intervened to prevent then director of the CIA Porter Goss from informing members of Congress that one of their own had been captured on an NSA wiretap speaking with an agent of Israeli government, and that Gonzales also intervened to quash any investigation of the matter by the FBI. All of this was done allegeldy so the administration could continue to count on Harman’s help in protecting the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program (and on that score, Harman didn’t disappoint.) My only question is…how long do we have to wait to get rid of her?

Bush administration officials have repeatedly claimed that high-value detainees like Abu Zubaydah were tortured only after the August 1st, 2002 memo from the OLC that gave legal sanction to numerous coercive interrogation techniques. But that timeline simply isn’t plausible, as stories like this make clear:

In April 2002, four months before the Justice Department issued its first “torture” memo, an FBI special agent who participated in the interrogation of the first “high-value” detainee captured after 9/11 reported that his treatment by the CIA amounted to “borderline torture,” according to a long forgotten report issued by the Department of Justice last year on the FBI’s role in detainee interrogations.

In recounting how the FBI agent verbally objected to the interrogation methods used against the detainee, Abu Zubaydah, sometime in April or May of 2002 Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine wrote in his report that the CIA had told another FBI agent, identified by the pseudonym “Gibson,” who was present for the interrogation that the techniques were approved “at the highest levels” of government.

[...]

Fine’s report would appear to seriously undercut assertions by Bush administration officials that “enhanced interrogation” techniques were applied to “high-value” detainees only after the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum in August 2002 authorizing the CIA to use 10 brutal methods in an attempt to extract information from prisoners about plans to attack the U.S.

There has been speculation for some time that Zubaydah’s torture preceded the Justice Department’s legal opinion. That question came up during a House Judiciary Committee hearing last year and former Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Michael Mukasey were both asked about it but said they did not know.

[...]

According to Fine’s report, “Thomas” did not see Zubaydah being waterboarded but witnessed other methods being used against him that he said were “borderline torture.”

Agent “Thomas’s” “communicated his concerns about the CIA [interrogation] methods” to the Pasquale D’Amuro, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, in a telephone conversation in May 2002, according to Fine’s report. D’Amuro told Fine that he brought the agents’ complaints to FBI Director Robert Mueller and “stated that his exact words to Mueller were ‘we don’t do that’ and that someday the FBI would be called to testify and he wanted to be able to say that the FBI did not participate in this type of activity.”

[...]

According to Fine’s report, D’Amuro decided to remove the agents from the interrogations after “Thomas” communicated his concerns in the May 2002 telephone conversation. But “Gibson” said he was not immediately ordered to leave and “remained at the CIA facility until some time in early June 2002, several weeks after ‘Thomas’ left, and that he continued to work with the CIA and participate in interviewing Zubaydah.”

When he returned to the FBI headquarters in June 2002 to meet with officials about Zubaydah “Gibson” said he had no “moral objection” to the techniques being used against Zubaydah because they were “comparable” to the “harsh interrogation” techniques he “himself had undergone…as part of the U.S. Army Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training.”

Likening the methods used to interrogate Zubaydah’s before to those applied to U.S. military personnel at a SERE facility is the clearest evidence yet that Zubaydah’s was tortured using techniques that were not yet approved in the Aug. 1, 2002 Bybee memo.

In his op-ed today, FBI interrogator Ali Soufan reveals that he was one of the agents who participated in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah prior to the CIA’s taking over of the process. Soufan says he objected to the harsher techniques, a revelation which would seem to correlate with the actions of Agent “Thomas” in Fine’s report as detailed above. But Soufan clearly says that “Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August.” Soufan is unclear in his op-ed about when he objected to these techniques, but Fine’s report makes it clear that Agent “Thomas” objected in early May 2002, implying that at least some level of “enhanced interrogation” techniques were being employed before the August 1st OLC memo was ever drafted.

But that’s not the only evidence that detainees in U.S. custody were tortured prior even to the OLC memos authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques. A Tunisian detainee originally captured in in the wake of 9/11 has filed suit against the federal government, alleging he was tortured by agents of the CIA in late 2001:

According to the lawsuit, Alhami was arrested in Iran in November 2001 and taken to Afghanistan to three CIA “dark sites” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers” and his name was not included on any publicly available list of detainees.

Beginning in December 2001, Alhami was tortured repeatedly, the lawsuit claims.
The methods were varied: At different times Alhami was stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful “stress” positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold. The suit also alleges Alhami’s interrogators sprayed pepper spray on his hemorrhoids, causing extreme pain.

The lawsuit doesn’t claim Alhami was waterboarded, a technique that simulates drowning.

The torture continued after Alhami was transferred to the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2003, where he currently is held, according to the suit.

Now it’s most interesting to that Alhami is filing suit now, in the wake of the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report and the OLC memos last week. The article says the allegations were “pieced together from Alhami’s recollections, declassified documents and information from human rights organizations.” Would those declassified documents be the recently declassified OLC memos? I’d sure like to know.

Marc Thiessen seems willing to take at face value assertions the CIA made to the OLC that traditional (non-torturous) interrogation techniques were of little use in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. But FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan directly contradicts that notion; he says flat-out that he was getting “important actionable intelligence” before he was whisked away, allegedly as a result of his unwillingness to tie Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein. This has Spencer Ackerman wondering exactly who was telling CIA attorneys Scott Muller and John Rizzo that traditional interrogations weren’t working with Zubaydah. Ackerman speculates that SERE psychologist James Mitchell had something to do with it. Why? Mitchell wanted to get paid:

…is it too cynical to suggest that Mitchell also had an interest in saying that Soufan and the FBI’s (and apparently, in part, CIA’s) non-brutal techniques failed? From page 24 of the Senate Armed Services Committee report:

Subsequent from his retirement from DoD [the Department of Defense], Dr. Jessen joined Dr. Mitchell and other former JPRA [Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which oversees SERE] officials to form a company called Mitchell Jessen & Associates. Mitchell Jessen & Associates is co-owned by seven individuals, six of whom either worked for JPRA or one of the service SERE schools as employees and/or contractors. As of July 2007, the company had between 55 and 60 employees, several of whom were former JPRA employees.

Science may be science, but money is money.

Is that unbelievable? Not to me, and not for someone like Mitchell, who sounds like a real piece of work.

McClatchy has this report out about a “narrative” released by the Senate Intelligence Committee that purports to provide an overview of the legal advice provided to the CIA from the OLC regarding torture. As McClatchy explains, the narrative makes clear that lawyers for the DOJ were operating under the guidance of senior Bush administration officials:

A newly declassified narrative of the Bush administration’s advice to the CIA on harsh interrogations shows that the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

At the same time, the narrative suggests that then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell were largely left out of the decision-making process.

Specifically, the narrative states:

In the spring of 2003, the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] asked for a reaffirmation of the policies and practices in the interrogation program. In July 2003, according to CIA records, the NSC [National Security Council] Principals met to discuss the interrogation techniques employed in the CIA program. According to CIA records, the DCI and the CIA’s General Counsel attended a meeting with the Vice President, the National Security Adviser, the Attorney General, the Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, the Counsel to the President, and the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council to describe the CIA’s interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. According to CIA records, at the conclusion of that meeting, the Principals reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy.

According to CIA records, pursuant to a request from the National Security Adviser, the Director of Central Intelligence subsequently briefed the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense on the CIA’s interrogation techniques on September 16, 2003.

In addition to these and other revelations, the narrative is useful to anyone who’s having trouble keeping up with the bevy of OLC memos and other factoids that have come to light in the last several years. It’s a short document, and I recommend reading it.

Quite frankly, it’s astonishing, the amount of information that has been revealed in only a week about the crafting of the torture policies. Between the OLC memos, the Senate Armed Services Committee report and this narrative from the Senate Intelligence Committee, we now have a far more comprehensive portrait of the evolution of the legal advice regarding torture, as well as the role of various members of the Bush administration in the crafting of that policy. And I don’t see how this news doesn’t continue to add to the building momentum for the investigation/prosecution of those involved in torture.

Daphne Eviatar writes in today’s Washington Independent that the release of the OLC memos last week, and the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse, are building momentum for prosecution of Bush administration officials involved in crafting torture policy:

On Tuesday, President Obama did not rule out that Holder might prosecute the legal architects of the abusive interrogation policies, and said he was open to a bipartisan congressional commission investigating the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques and how the policies were developed. And European and U.N. officials are increasingly saying that if the United States does not prosecute what appears to be a violation of the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory, then European prosecutors may initiate prosecution themselves.

The release on Tuesday of the complete Senate Armed Services Committee report makes turning a blind eye to the past even more difficult. That’s because the report concludes that in many respects, Bush administration officials ignored prevailing domestic and international law and the legal advice of U.S. military lawyers in developing the abusive interrogation policies.

[...]

Some of the facts set out in the report strongly suggest that further investigation is warranted as to whether the legal conclusions were reached in good faith by the lawyers, and whether policymakers acted reasonably in relying on them. That’s critical to the defense put forward by Bush administration officials such as former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have consistently defended the Bush administration’s conduct by saying they all reasonably relied on the good-faith advice of government lawyers.

The Senate Armed services report repeatedly calls that “good faith” into question.

“The report talks about Haynes disregarding the advice from JAGS [Judge Advocates General], and disregarding other legal opinions,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights who has been calling for years for appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation policies. “If you’re a prosecutor, that gives you something. That questions good faith.”

That’s because crafting a legal opinion that ignores legal precedent, and ignoring legal advice that’s inconvenient, do not constitute “good faith.”

Also Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent who interrogated Abu Zubaydah, takes to the pages of the NY Times to criticize the torture policies as not only ineffective but counter-productive:

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.

Of course as we know, what the Bush administration really wanted out of Zubaydah was proof that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were collaborating, which naturally they didn’t get because no such collaboration existed. Zubaydah’s unwillingness to provide politically convenient false testimony is what got him waterboarded 83 times.