CIA torture of innocent Afghan

This 9 December 2014 video is called CIA Torture Report: What Should We Think? Russell Brand The Trews (E207).

By Jason Leopold, Truthout in the USA:

CIA Kidnapped, Tortured “the Wrong Guy,” Says Former Agency Operative Glenn Carle

Sunday 23 October 2011

Rob Richer, the No. 2 ranking official in the CIA’s clandestine service, paid a visit to Glenn Carle’s office in December 2002 and presented the veteran CIA operative with an urgent proposal.

“I want you to go on a temporary assignment,” Carle recalls Richer telling him. “It’s important for the agency, it’s important for the country and it’s important for you. Will you do it?”

Richer, who resigned from the CIA in 2005 and went to work for the mercenary outfit Blackwater, told Carle that agency operatives had just rendered a “high-value target,” an Afghan in his mid-forties named Haji Pacha Wazir, who was purported to be Osama bin Laden’s personal banker as well as financier for a number of suspected terrorists. Wazir was being held at a CIA black site prison in Morocco, and the agency needed a clandestine officer who spoke French to take over the interrogation of the detainee.

Carle, formerly the deputy national intelligence officer for transitional threats, who had no prior interrogation experience, agreed, and within 72 hours, he boarded a CIA-chartered jet bound for Morocco.

The Interrogator

Carle recounts what unfolded next in his riveting book, “The Interrogator: An Education,” which stands as a damning indictment of the CIA’s torture and rendition program and the Bush administration’s approach to the so-called Global War on Terror.

Carle refers to Wazir in his book as CAPTUS. The CIA, which did not respond to requests for comment for this report, would not allow Carle to print Wazir ‘s name in his book, nor was he permitted to disclose the locations of the two black site prisons where Wazir was imprisoned and tortured.

A report published in Harper’s in July first disclosed that CAPTUS is Wazir and the location of the CIA black site prisons where he was held.

During an on-camera interview with Truthout in Washington, DC, Carle said he originally believed the agency had captured a “significant Al-Qaeda leader” who had been a concern to US intelligence agencies “for a long time.”

“The assessment that was made of [Wazir] was quite compelling and I accepted it,” Carle said. “I knew my colleagues to be hard-working and careful and that they reviewed their assessments regularly and the assessment was that [Wazir] was one of the top players in Al-Qaeda.”

Although Carle was told by a top agency official that he should do “whatever it takes to get this man to talk,” which he said he understood meant using torture to “break this fellow’s will” and obtain intelligence, Carle said he “would not do it [because] it was wrong.”

Instead, Carle said he interrogated Wazir using standard rapport-building techniques and “psychological manipulation” that led the detainee to believe Carle was his “friend.”

Carle concluded not long after he began interrogating Wazir that the agency had “kidnapped” the “wrong guy” and Wazir, who ran an informal money-transfer business known as a Hawala, was not a “committed jihadist” or Bin Laden’s personal banker.

Wazir was “more like a train conductor who sells a criminal a ticket,” Carle writes in “The Interrogator.” “Slowly, progressively, first in dismay, then in anger, I had realized that on the CAPTUS case the Agency, the government, all of us, had been victims of delusion.”

Wazir’s life had been “destroyed” based on what Carle characterized as an “error.”

But the CIA’s position did not change. The agency believed Wazir was withholding intelligence due to the fact that he could not answer specific questions. So in an attempt to convince him to reveal information about Al-Qaeda, agency operatives kidnapped his older brother, Haji Ghaljai, in December 2002 and held him captive for six months at the same black site prison.

Carle documented his conclusions about Wazir, and called for his immediate release, in top-secret cables he prepared that were supposed to be sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. However, Carle said when he later inquired about his cables he discovered they “were never transmitted so they never formally existed.”

The US government eventually moved Wazir from Morocco to the infamous Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan, which Carle refers to as “Hotel California,” and then transferred him to the Bagram prison facility.

U.S. Inflicting Misery on Afghanistan, by Kathy Kelly: here.

US troop deaths in Afghan War under Obama now twice that under Bush: here.

US soldier goes on trial for Afghan civilian murders: here.

USA: Peter Fuller removed from duty as a top Afghanistan commander for remarks to POLITICO: here.

A July United Nations report asserting that only 30 civilians died in targeted raids in Afghanistan during the first six months of 2011 reflected only a very small fraction of night raids in which civilians were killed, according to officials of the independent Afghan commission which had co-produced the 2010 report on civilian casualties with the U.N. Mission: here.

More than half of Afghans see NATO as occupiers: here.

Afghan army trainee kills three Australian soldiers: here.

An Afghan fact-finding team appointed by President Hamid Karzai on Saturday blamed NATO-led troops for what it said was the unnecessary killing of dozens of civilians: here.

Psychologists and Torture, Then and Now. Laura Melendez-Pallitto and Robert Pallitto, Foreign Policy in Focus: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. The ‘tragedy’ occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation and the like found its way into the Agency’s counterintelligence interrogation manual. The ‘farce’ was played post-9/11, as psychologists became involved once again in aiding counterintelligence interrogators…. Psychologists were complicit in designing and using techniques to break subjects rather than aid them, and in so doing they made a mockery of their ethical obligation to ‘do no harm’”: here.

A Kenyan national who has accused MI5 and the FBI of complicity in his rendition and torture won a key legal victory in the British courts this week: here.

Britain: The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will not prosecute an MI5 officer over the torture of UK resident Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan in 2002, Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer announced yesterday: here.

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