newyorker | 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.
