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Cia destroyed tapes of suspects waterboarded { February 6 2008 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/02/06/us_warns_of_terror_threat_in_pakistan/http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/02/06/us_warns_of_terror_threat_in_pakistan/
US warns of terror threat in Pakistan
Number of attacks, deaths on the rise; Al Qaeda, Taliban cited
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post | February 6, 2008
WASHINGTON - Radical elements are now a threat to the survival of Pakistan, prompting Pakistani military leaders to recognize that more aggressive efforts are needed to get the elements under control, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said yesterday in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
"In the last year, the number of terrorist attacks and deaths were greater than the past six years combined," McConnell said in an unusually strong warning about Pakistan's political problems. "What's happened is Pakistan has now recognized that this is an existential threat to their very survival."
Pakistan leaders, he said, are "starting a process to be more aggressive in getting control of the situation." The elements include Al Qaeda and Taliban members who for years were nurtured by Pakistani military and intelligence officials, prompting US lawmakers and others to question the sincerity of the government's effort.
At the same hearing, focused on threats to US interests around the globe, CIA Director General Michael Hayden publicly confirmed for the first time that the agency's interrogators had used a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding on a total of three Al Qaeda detainees in 2002 and 2003.
After the hearing, Hayden told reporters that the information obtained from those detainees amounted to a quarter of all the human intelligence the CIA gained about the terrorist organization between 2002 and 2006.
"We would not have done it if it were not that valuable," Hayden told reporters after he and other leaders of the intelligence community testified. The agency has been under pressure to justify its use of the technique because military officials, lawmakers, human rights experts, and international lawyers have called it torture banned by US laws and treaties.
Hayden confirmed previous reports that waterboarding was used against Abu Zubaida, Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, and Khalid Sheik Mohamed, the latter considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time," Hayden said, adding, "There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about Al Qaeda and its workings."
A specially appointed federal prosecutor has opened a probe into the CIA's destruction of tapes showing Nashiri being interrogated and Zubaida being waterboarded. Typically, the technique involves strapping the victim on a board tilted head downward while water is pored onto cloth or cellophane covering the face.
A senior intelligence official at the hearing yesterday said the CIA officers and contractors who conducted interrogations involving waterboarding were told it was legal at the time but "the legal landscape has changed." The official, who spoke privately, said the Justice Department's investigation was "potentially chilling" for the agency personnel.
FBI Director Robert Mueller, asked at the hearing whether the FBI used the same interrogation techniques as the CIA, replied, "It has been our policy not to use coercive techniques." He added that this policy reflected the fact that FBI questioning was mostly within the United States and often involved US citizens.
Meanwhile, McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, yesterday to register their opposition to several Democrat-proposed amendments to a new surveillance bill that are slated to come to a Senate vote today.
One of the controversial amendments would strike a provision granting immunity to telecommunications companies from dozens of lawsuits alleging violations of privacy because of the firms' cooperation with a warrantless government surveillance program initiated after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Another would require the attorney general and director of national intelligence to certify that any surveillance the government conducts "is limited to communications" involving specific individual targets reasonably believed to be outside the United States. A third would require that a special court approve surveillance if a "significant purpose" of that effort is to acquire the communications of a person reasonably believed to be inside the United States.
© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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