Former Vice President Dick Cheney had a lot to say on Meet The Press last Sunday about his love affair with torture as he responded to the newly released Senate Torture Report, but the New Yorker's Jane Mayer dug deeper into the report along with NBC News and found a very scary women at the heart of it all and who she dubbed:
The Unidentified Queen of Torture
The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
She's no stranger to movie audiences around the world as she was the inspiration for Zero Dark Thirty's heroine. The movie painted her as a Bin Laden expert and the only person dogged enough to find him, but that is more fiction than anything else as we now learn. As her blood lust for torture grew, she sent U.S. operatives on a wild goose chase in Montana to find African American Muslim AQ terrorists that was nothing more than confirmed lies told by KSM so she would stop torturing him. You have to read this to believe it.
As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as “torture.” She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States.
The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity. Later, in 2007, she accompanied then C.I.A. director Michael Hayden to brief Congress, where she insisted forcefully that the torture program had been a tremendous and indispensable success.
Oh, yea. torture works real well. Instead of locking her up in jail as a war criminal herself, she earned a promotion to the rank of General.
Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world.
This is horrifying on some many levels and explains many things for which Dick Cheney and all his torture apologists would gladly do all over again.
