[quote]dhickey wrote:
Was the CIA lying when they claimed to have stopped a planned attackin LA based on info they gathered from KSM? I know enough of the CIA to chuckle a bit while typing that, but unfortunatly they are all we have. If they say it works, who else can we cite to say that it doesn’t?
I have seen others disect reports and peal out parts they like, but have not seen anyone refute that we have gathered useful information.
[/quote]
I posted this in another thread, but per a Bush Whitehouse briefing, it was stated that the LA plot was busted before KSM was even apprehended.
Here is the link to the briefing again: Press Briefing on the West Coast Terrorist Plot by Frances Fragos Townsend, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism
So, yes, the CIA lied.
As another dispute of how useful the information collected was, here is a list of the 10 pieces of intel gathered from Abu Zubaydah by torture, as reported by the 9/11 Commission: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/22/abu-zubaydah-waterboarded-83-times-for-10-pieces-of-intelligence/
And finally after 17 hours in a coffin, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, gave the golden ticket to the CIA by telling the there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
[i]The emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, al-Libi was one of hundreds of prisoners seized by Pakistani forces in December 2001, crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Most of these men ended up in Guantanamo after being handed over (or sold) to US forces by their Pakistani allies, but al-Libi was, notoriously, rendered to Egypt by the CIA to be tortured on behalf of the US government.
In Egypt, he came up with the false allegation about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, just days before Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the President to go to war against Iraq, in which, referring to the supposed threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Bush said, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”
Four months later, on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the same claim in his notorious speech to the UN Security Council, in an attempt to drum up support for the invasion. “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda,” Powell said, adding, “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.” As a Newsweek report in 2007 explained, Powell did not identify al-Libi by name, but CIA officials - and a Senate Intelligence Committee report - later confirmed that he was referring to al-Libi.
Al-Libi recanted his story in February 2004, when he was returned to the CIA’s custody, and explained, as Newsweek described it, that he told his debriefers that “he initially told his interrogators that he ‘knew nothing’ about ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden and he ‘had difficulty even coming up with a story’ about a relationship between the two.” The Newsweek report explained that “his answers displeased his interrogators” who then apparently subjected him to the mock burial. As al-Libi recounted, he was stuffed into a box less than 20 inches high. When the box was opened 17 hours later, al-Libi said he was given one final opportunity to “tell the truth.” He was knocked to the floor and “punched for 15 minutes.” It was only then that, al-Libi said, he made up the story about Iraqi weapons training."[/i]
It is very possible that torture gave the administration the final ingredient of the lie pie, and put us in a war we should have avoided.