Wiki: Gina Haspel

Gina Cheri Haspel is a US intelligence officer. She joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1985.[1] In February 2017, she was selected as Deputy Director of the CIA by President Donald Trump.[2][1][3][4] According to the CIA she is the "first female career CIA officer" to receive that appointment.[1] Meanwhile various news agencies reported she was the second woman.[5][6] Oliver Holmes, writing in The Guardian, pointed out that Avril Haines had been appointed by Barack Obama in 2013.[7]

While at the CIA, Haspel was Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service and the National Clandestine Service for Foreign Intelligence and Covert Action.[8] She ran Cat’s Eye, a CIA black site prison in Thailand where terror suspects Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded in 2002.[8][9][10] Haspel later was the chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez, who headed the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. In his memoir, Rodriguez wrote that Haspel had "drafted a cable" in 2005 ordering the destruction of dozens of videotapes made at the black site in Thailand.[10]

Haspel is the recipient of the George H. W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism, the Donovan Award, the Intelligence Medal of Merit and the Presidential Rank Award.[1]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Haspel

Prince and the '28 pages': Indirect 9/11 link to Saudi royal revealed

Washington (CNN)When the United States caught its first big al Qaeda operative, six months after the 9/11 terror attacks, it found a disturbing clue: phone numbers linked to the United States.

In an overnight raid, Pakistani forces captured Abu Zubaydah, allegedly a recruiter for the terror group and a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle.

Now, 14 years after Zubaydah was apprehended, newly declassified information from a 2002 congressional report on the 9/11 attacks, dubbed the "28 pages," reveals an indirect link previously hidden from the American public between the alleged al Qaeda operative and a company associated with a key member of the Saudi royal family, former Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

Ever since 19 men -- 15 of them Saudi nationals -- hijacked four airplanes and changed the course of American history, the possibility of official Saudi involvement has hung over the relationship between the two countries. While the alleged association with Bandar revealed in the newly declassified pages does not provide direct evidence the prince was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, it raises new questions about Saudi Arabia's involvement.

The connection to Bandar was made through Zubaydah's phone book, retrieved during the Pakistani raid in which he was taken. In it, the FBI found numbers linked to the United States, including an unlisted number for a company that managed Bandar's estate in Aspen, Colorado. An unlisted number was also found for a bodyguard who worked at the Saudi Embassy in Washington...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/28-pages-saudi-prince-bandar-9-11/

Ex-CIA officer to speak on government whistleblowers

CHAPEL HILL

A former counterrorism agent who was the first former CIA officer to publicly acknowledge the use of waterboarding on prisoners will speak Tuesday on the role of whistleblowers in government.

John Kiriakou spent almost 2 years in a federal prison for giving classified information to a reporter. He was released this year.

Kiriakou worked as an analyst and counterrorism officer for the CIA from 1990 to 2004. His 2012 memoir, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.’s War on Terror,” tells of his role in the operation that captured Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaida organizer and leader under Osama bin Laden.

In 2007, Kiriakou publicly expressed concern about the interrogation of some prisoners captured in the war on terror. He told ABC News that Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to waterboarding, a practice that Kiriakou said he later came to consider torture.

Kiriakou in 2012 was charged with disclosing classified information and admitted in a plea deal to revealing the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist.

Kiriakou’s address, “Keeping Government Honest: Whistleblowers, Torture, and America’s War on Terror,” will be at 7:15 p.m. at the Freedom Forum Conference Center at Carroll Hall on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article41319801.html

U.S. government blocks release of new CIA torture details

U.S. government officials have blocked the release of 116 pages of defense lawyers' notes detailing the torture that Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah says he experienced in CIA custody, defense lawyers said on Thursday.

The treatment of Zubaydah, who lost one eye and was waterboarded 83 times in a single month while held by the CIA, according to government documents, has been the focus of speculation for years.

"We submitted 116 pages in 10 separate submissions," Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s lead defense lawyer, told Reuters. "The government declared all of it classified."

Margulies and lawyers for other detainees said that the decision showed that the Obama administration plans to continue declaring detainees’ accounts of their own torture classified. A Central Intelligence Agency spokesperson declined to comment.

Exclusive: Freed CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Says "I Would Do It All Again" to Expose Torture

In a broadcast exclusive interview, we spend the hour with John Kiriakou, a retired CIA agent who has just been released from prison after blowing the whistle on the George W. Bush administration’s torture program. In 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly confirm and detail the agency’s use of waterboarding. 

In January 2013, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Under a plea deal, Kiriakou admitted to a single count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by revealing the identity of a covert officer involved in the torture program to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. In return, prosecutors dropped charges brought under the Espionage Act. Kiriakou is the only official to be jailed for any reason relating to CIA torture. Supporters say he was unfairly targeted in the Obama administration’s crackdown on government whistleblowers. 

A father of five, Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA as an analyst and case officer, leading the team that found high-ranking al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He joins us from his home in Virginia, where he remains under house arrest for three months while completing his sentence. In a wide-ranging interview, Kiriakou says, "I would do it all over again," after seeing the outlawing of torture after he came forward. Kiriakou also responds to the details of the partially released Senate Committee Report on the CIA’s use of torture; argues NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden did a "great national service," but will not get a fair trial if he returns to the United States; and describes the conditions inside FCI Loretto, the federal prison where he served his sentence and saw prisoners die with "terrifying frequency" from lack of proper medical care...

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/9/exclusive_freed_cia_whistleblower_john_kiriakou

Poland 'helped in CIA rendition', European Court rules

Poland broke the European human rights convention in helping the CIA to render two terror suspects, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.

The judges said Poland had co-operated with the secret illegal transfers in 2002-2003, allowing two suspects to be interrogated on its territory.

It is the first such case concerning a CIA "black site" prison in Poland.

Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian, was arrested in Pakistan and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi, in Dubai.

Polish officials called the ruling "embarrassing for Poland", but also "premature" because Poland's investigation into the prison allegations was still going on.

The court held that "the treatment to which the applicants had been subjected by the CIA during their detention in Poland had amounted to torture".

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28460628

Top US Psychologist Allegedly Met With SERE Psychologist James Mitchell in Days Before Zubaydah Torture

America 2013: A top U.S. psychologist touting “Positive Psychology” is to be a keynote speaker at a huge Southern California conference on psychotherapy. Other speakers include psychiatry heavies Aaron Beck, Irvin Yalom, as well as Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, and big media names like James Foley and Alanis Morissette.

The famous psychologist — Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania — has been linked to the CIA’s Bush torture program. The charges lack a smoking gun, but there is lots of circumstantial evidence. What is reported below shows that Seligman wasn’t fully open about his contacts with those accused of waterboarding Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and torturing various CIA “black site” prisoners circa 2002-2006. Why did he hide this information?

A Forgotten Book

A 2011 book written by Georgetown academic and ethics expert M. Gregg Bloche (currently co-director for the Georgetown-Johns Hopkins Joint Program in Law and Public Health) broke important new ground about the origins of the post-9/11 CIA torture program. Unfortunately, he did so just as the Obama administration’s policy of non-investigation and non-prosecution of those involved in U.S. torture had gained ascendancy among both press and the public...

http://pubrecord.org/torture/11073/psychologist-allegedly-psychologist/

Zubaydah diaries shed new light on Twin Towers and links to bin Laden

Al Jazeera has obtained a copy of the secret personal diaries of Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-profile prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The six notebooks, which were obtained from a former U.S. government intelligence official who worked with the CIA and FBI on Al-Qaeda’s rise to power, were discovered at a safe house in Pakistan where Abu Zubaydah was captured in 2002. 

Today is your turn, America
Today, your turn has come …
— from Abu Zubaydah’s diaries, September 2001

Abu Zubaydah clearly knew something big was in the works. Returning from Pakistan in mid-2001, he writes in his diary about an atmosphere of restless anticipation in Afghanistan, which was now his home, “People were waiting for the new operation, which Sheikh Bin Laden announced.” But when the news comes that Al-Qaeda hijackers had killed almost 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, Abu Zubaydah is awed by the scale and audacity of the attacks.

Al-Qaeda had twice struck high-profile blows against U.S. interests abroad — the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the December 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden. But spectacular strikes at the power centers of what bin Laden liked to call "the far enemy" was beyond the imagination of even many of bin Laden’s acolytes and fellow travelers in Afghanistan.

“On the 11th of September, a passenger airplane hit one of the giant towers … and people were surprised by something that was unimaginable,” Abu Zubaydah writes 17 days later. “As soon as they caught up their breath, another airplane hit the other tower, so screaming and crying was heard and the surprise was magnified. A third airplane hit the American Department of Defense building (the Pentagon). Then, the fourth airplane tried to hit the White House, but it did not hit the target, so it swerved away from its target; then we later heard that it crashed or was downed in another location, and news kept coming.”

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/12/zubaydah-diariesshednewlightontwintowersandlinkstobinladen.html

Forgetting Torture: Lee Hamilton, John Brennan, and Abu Zubaydah

The pervasive news surrounding the confirmation hearing of John Brennan, Obama’s nominee for CIA director, is paralleled by another, related story that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media. That is the story of the man called Abu Zubaydah, whose alleged torture testimony, obtained by the CIA while Brennan was the head of the agency’s Terrorist Threat Center, built the foundation for the official account of 9/11. This week I spoke to Lee Hamilton, former vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, about the serious problems that the government’s new stance on Zubaydah creates for the 9/11 Commission Report.

As stated in my last article on the subject, Zubaydah is at the center of an unraveling of the official account of the 9/11 attacks.[1] His extensive torture at the hands of the CIA during Brennan’s tenure, which included at least 83 water-boarding sessions, hanging the man naked from the ceiling, slamming him against a concrete wall, and other atrocious experimental techniques, was said to produce valuable evidence about al Qaeda. However, the government now claims that Zubaydah was never a member or associate of al Qaeda and therefore he could not have known any of the information that the 9/11 Commission attributed to him...

http://digwithin.net/2013/02/10/forgetting-torture/