Thursday, September 07, 2006
Bush BS In 'Secret Prisons' Speech
President Bush's admission yesterday that the CIA had held terrorist suspects in secret prisons overseas, in addition to selling out U.S. allies who had assisted the program, managed to misrepresent the big success story of his speech.
From The Progress Report:
In his speech, Bush defended the use of coercive interrogation by reporting that the interrogation prompted suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah to reveal that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a key figure in the 9/11 attacks, used the alias "Mukhtar." This information, according to Bush, "was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM." According to a fact sheet released by the Director of National Intelligence, Zubaydah was captured in March 2002. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, however, the CIA learned that Mohammed used the alias Mukhtar in August 2001. From page 277: "The final piece of the puzzle arrived at the CIA's Bin Ladin unit on August 28 [2001] in a cable reporting that KSM's nickname was Mukhtar."
