Not only did the new CIA Director personally oversee the torture of Abu Zubaydah, she did so in order to lie you and your mom into supporting the aggressive war against Iraq.
From David Rose’s report “Tortured Reasoning“:
Some of what he did say was leaked by the administration: for example, the claim that bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [Zarqawi was not an ally of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden -editor] were working directly with Saddam Hussein to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. There was much more, says the analyst who worked at the Pentagon: “I first saw the reports soon after Abu Zubaydah’s capture. There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”
Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was “an important chapter,” the second analyst says: overall, his interrogation “product” was deemed to be more significant than the claims made by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, another al-Qaeda captive, who in early 2002 was tortured in Egypt at the C.I.A.’s behest. After all, Abu Zubaydah was being interviewed by Americans. Like the former Pentagon official, this official had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured.
“As soon as I learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the Pentagon analyst says. “I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.”
Says here Zubaydah wasn’t moved to the black site in Poland until late 2002. Not that I know she wasn’t there too, but “soon after Zubaydah’s capture” means on Haspel’s watch in Thailand it seems fair to conclude.
By the way, Zubaydah was not even a member of al Qaeda at all, much less their “Number 3 Lieutenant.”
Update: Pro Publica has completely retracted their story claiming that Gina Haspel was in charge of the torture dungeon in Thailand at the time Abu Zubaydah was held there.
He was still tortured into lying us into war with Iraq, but not by her, apparently.
Update 2: June 27, 2022: The National Security Archive at George Washington University now says, “Gina Haspel, 15 years before President Trump nominated her and the US Senate confirmed her as CIA director, personally oversaw the waterboarding of alleged USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a black site prison in Thailand in 2002, according to recent testimony at a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. … The confirmation by James Mitchell, one of two CIA contract psychologists who designed the agency’s infamous torture program, builds on documentation previously obtained by the National Security Archive that Haspel authored or authorized memos on al-Nashiri’s torture while she was chief of base at the prison from October through December of 2002.”
So the original report was incorrect about Abu Zubaydah, but Haspel is still a guilty war criminal on the same accusation against someone else. Same difference.
