Terrorism News Articles

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Federal prosecutors have said they possess a trove of evidence in their terrorism case against Najibullah Zazi, a set of damning accusations laid out in a powerful narrative. But interviews with people briefed on the case — and an examination of court papers filed by prosecutors — show that a great deal of the evidence presented against Mr. Zazi was not the result of a lengthy investigation. Instead, much of it was collected on the fly in the last two weeks, with hundreds of F.B.I. agents, federal prosecutors and detectives rushing to fashion a mosaic of details into a case that could be brought to court. The review of the government’s presentation, which is largely contained in a preliminary court document filed last week, suggests that many important facts asserted by prosecutors were discovered after Mr. Zazi was told by a Queens imam on Sept. 10 that investigators were looking for him. Moreover, several crucial discoveries were made after Mr. Zazi, a 24-year-old airport shuttle bus driver, had returned on Sept. 12 to Colorado, with his mission, if he had one, aborted. Some store and hotel employees in the Denver area said F.B.I. agents did not ask about Mr. Zazi’s purchases of beauty salon products that contained the raw materials to make explosives or his stay in a hotel suite to mix them until Sept. 17, five days after his return to Colorado. The lawyer who appeared beside him in Brooklyn, J. Michael Dowling, said after the hearing that prosecutors could not secure a conviction of his client on the conspiracy charge based solely on the evidence presented in the detention memorandum, because it contained no proof that he conspired with anyone to commit a crime.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the highly dubious "evidence" presented by federal authorities in their prosecutions of domestic "terror" cases, click here. For a powerful BBC documentary which shows how cases like these are used by politicians to manipulate public opinion to their advantage, click here.

One of the ways that the Bush administration tried to avoid accountability for its serious misconduct in the name of fighting terrorism was the misuse of an evidentiary rule called the state secrets privilege. The Obama administration has essentially embraced the Bush approach in existing cases, trying to toss out important lawsuits alleging kidnapping, torture and unlawful wiretapping without any evidence being presented. The other day, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. issued new guidelines for invoking the state secrets privilege in the future. They were a positive step forward, on paper, but did not go nearly far enough. Mr. Holder’s much-anticipated reform plan does not include any shift in the Obama administration’s demand for blanket secrecy in pending cases. Nor does it include support for legislation that would mandate thorough court review of state secrets claims made by the executive branch. It remains to be seen whether, and to what extent, the new regimen will succeed in avoiding flimsy claims of secrecy. Much depends on how the rules are interpreted and enforced, and the Justice Department’s willingness to stand up to insistent intelligence agency demands. Since assuming office, Mr. Holder has reviewed the administration’s position in ongoing cases and has continued broad secrecy claims of the sort that President Obama criticized when he was running for president. Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, noted that without a clear, permanent mandate for independent court review of the administration’s judgment calls, Mr. Holder’s policy “still amounts to an approach of ‘just trust us.’”

Note: For more on the Obama administration's proposed rules, click here.

Security contractors at the giant US Embassy in Kabul were accused yesterday of fostering a “Lord of the Flies environment” built on abuse and humiliating initiation rituals. The allegations, made by the independent Project On Government Oversight, are contained in a report submitted to Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State. The report is based on e-mails, some of which describe the alleged abuse of Afghan nationals. Among those implicated are Britons employed by ArmorGroup North America, the contractor providing security at the embassy, where nearly 1,000 diplomats and support staff work. The report quotes an e-mail from a guard currently working for the contractor, describing scenes of guards and supervisors “peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks” and drinking “vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks”. In another incident, a male Afghan caterer complained last month of being grabbed by a supervisor and told: “You are very good for f***ing.” The supervisor, who was in only his underwear, also brandished bottles of alcohol. The allegations at the Kabul embassy come in the wake of scandals surrounding Blackwater, another security contractor, in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it has been accused of fraud, abuse and involvement in civilian deaths.

Note: For lots more on the illegal activities of military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq, click here.

Paranoid, competitive and fuelled by guns, alcohol and steroids. That is how one senior contractor in Baghdad describes the private security industry operating in the city's Green Zone. It was the world to which Danny Fitzsimons, a 29-year-old former soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia, and with an extensive criminal past, returned three weeks ago. Despite rules against alcohol, his ArmorGroup colleagues welcomed him with a drinking session. A fight broke out and he shot and killed two of them – a Briton, Paul McGuigan, and an Australian, Darren Hoare – then wounded an Iraqi, Arkhan Mahdi. He faces a premeditated murder charge and execution if found guilty. Mr Fitzsimons's family is determined to save him and say he was suffering from severe psychiatric problems after a brutal career in the Army and in the security industry. But those on the ground hold little hope. They are already resigned to Mr Fitzsimons's execution and say that he is a tiny pawn in a huge, expensive and vicious game of chess. They say the private security business in Iraq is in a vice-like crush. The gold rush that began with the conflict in 2003 is drying up. Contracts are not as lucrative, the trend is towards employing Iraqis instead of Westerners and, crucially, the Iraqi authorities ... are clamping down. "We are loathed out here. We are the single most hated entity in Iraq," said Ethan Madison, a security contractor who has worked in Baghdad for five years.

Note: For lots more on the illegal activities of US military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency's main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world's most threatening terrorists. Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, ... agreed to the assignment. With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees. The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate [captives] has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account. Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison. Eventually, the agency's network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100. Mr. Foggo's success in Frankfurt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.'s executive director, in effect its day-to-day administrative chief. "It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he now runs the regiment," said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.'s executive director from 2001 to 2004. "It popped people's eyes."

Note: Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's case is highly unusual. Very few high-level CIA officers have ever been imprisoned for corruption. His predecessor as Executive Director of the CIA, quoted in the article above, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who held the office on 9/11, had been the chief executive of a branch of the investment company which placed the still unexplained "put options" on American and United Airlines stocks the week before the attacks, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of profits to "unknown" parties.

The Obama administration is fighting on multiple fronts - in courts in San Francisco, Washington and London - to keep an official veil of secrecy over the treatment of a former prisoner who says he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay. The administration has asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco to reconsider its ruling allowing Binyam Mohamed and four other former or current prisoners to sue a Bay Area company for allegedly flying them to overseas torture chambers for the CIA. Most recently, a British government lawyer told her nation's High Court last month that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of Mohamed's treatment in Guantanamo. The British court declared in August 2008 that there was evidence Mohamed had been tortured, but deleted the details from its public version of the ruling at the Bush administration's insistence. Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian refugee and British resident, ... and four other men have sued Jeppesen Dataplan, a San Jose subsidiary of the Boeing Co., for its alleged role in arranging their flights for the CIA. A Council of Europe report in 2007 described Jeppesen as the CIA's aviation services provider. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated the suit in April, rejecting arguments originally made by the Bush administration that the case posed grave risks to national security. Obama administration lawyers endorsed those arguments at a hearing in February and have asked the court for a rehearing. Mohamed's lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith and Ahmad Ghappour of the British human-rights group Reprieve, were threatened with jail after drafting a letter to Obama in February urging him to release the evidence of their client's treatment in U.S. custody or to authorize Britain to do so.

Note: For many illuminating reports from major media sources on government secrecy, click here.

Perhaps we protest too much. Torture, after all, is a venerable American tradition. If not quite as homespun as apple pie or lynching, it is at least as old as our imperial aspirations. We were waterboarding captives in one of our earliest wars of occupation, the Philippine-American War, which cost as many as 1 million civilian lives. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote with laconic praise of "the old Filipino method." Other techniques, crude or sophisticated, have filled the war bag since. CIA interrogation manuals from the 1960s, which lay out the basic stress-position and sleep- and sensory-deprivation techniques later applied at Bagram and Guantanamo, have been public since 1997. Despite our protestations, we have little to be surprised about. Now, when President Obama vows that "the United States does not torture" and spars with the former vice president over details, he crosses his fingers behind his back and saves himself a loophole. Via "extraordinary rendition" -- a Clinton administration innovation -- our government is still free to outsource torture and claim it doesn't know. The Obama administration has been relying increasingly on foreign intelligence services to detain and interrogate our suspects for us. Despite hundreds of front-page stories, we pretend we didn't know, that it was all somehow kept secret from us. This blindness serves a function. By declaring torture anomalous, by pushing it once again to the margins of legality, we can preserve a vision of U.S. military power -- and of American empire -- that is essentially benevolent. [But] maintaining military and economic hegemony over the planet remains an inherently bloody affair. Empire is a synonym for subjugation, and hence for violence on a massive scale.

Note: For a retired Marine Corps general's understanding of the real reasons behind both torture and mass slaughter of civilian populations by the US military, click here.

Everyone called the stranger with all the money "Maqsood." He would sit in his Mercedes, waiting in the parking lot of the mosque in Newburgh, N.Y., until the Friday prayer was over. Then, according to members of the mosque, the Masjid al-Ikhlas, he approached the young men. The man, a Pakistani, occasionally approached the assistant imam of the mosque. In time, many of the mosque's older members had made the man for a government informant, according to mosque leaders. They said that he seemed to focus most of his attention on younger black members and visitors. "It's easy to influence someone with the dollar," said Mr. Muhammed, a longtime member of the mosque. "Especially these guys coming out of prison." The members of the mosque now believe that Maqsood was the government informant at the center of the case involving four men from Newburgh arrested and charged this week with having plotted to explode bombs at Jewish centers in New York City. The government case revolves significantly around the work of an informant who facilitated the men's desire to mount a terrorist attack. The role of informants has been a constant in the terror cases made by federal and local authorities since 9/11. And just as constant have been the attempts by lawyers for those charged to portray their clients as dupes, people who would not have committed to do harm without the provocation of the informants. The informant was not identified in court papers unsealed on Wednesday in Manhattan. But according to a person briefed on the case, the informant is Shahed Hussain, the central prosecution witness in a 2004 federal sting focusing on a pizzeria owner and an imam at an Albany mosque.

Note: For lots more on the "war on terror" from reliable sources, click here.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has incorrectly kept nearly 24,000 people on a terrorist watch list on the basis of outdated or sometimes irrelevant information. By the beginning of 2009, the report said, this consolidated government watch list comprised about 400,000 people, recorded as 1.1 million names and aliases, an exponential growth from the days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The new report, by the office of the Justice Department’s inspector general, provides the most authoritative statistical account to date of the problems connected with the list. An earlier report by the inspector general, released in March 2008, looked mainly at flaws in the system, without an emphasis on the number of people caught up in it. The list has long been a target of public criticism, particularly after well-publicized errors in which politicians including Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative John Lewis showed up on it. People with names similar to actual terrorists have complained that it can take months to be removed from the list, and civil liberties advocates charge that antiwar protesters, Muslim activists and others have been listed for political reasons. One of the biggest problems identified in the report was the use of outdated information, or material unconnected to terrorism, to keep people on the bureau’s own terror watch list, which is incorporated in the consolidated list. The report, examining nearly 69,000 referrals to the F.B.I. list that were either brought or processed by the bureau, found that 35 percent of those people, both Americans and foreigners, remained on the list despite inadequate justification.

Note: For many detailed reports from reliable sources indicating the "war on terror" isn't really what it's claimed to be, click here.

As many as 100 detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could end up held without trial on American soil, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates suggested Thursday, a situation that he acknowledged would create widespread if not unanimous opposition in Congress. The estimate was the most specific yet from the Obama administration about how many of the 241 prisoners at Guantánamo could not be safely released, sent to other countries or appropriately tried in American courts. Mr. Gates said discussions had started this week with the Justice Department about determining how many of the Guantánamo detainees could not be sent to other countries or tried in courts. He did not say which detainees might be in that group, but independent experts have said it probably would include terrorism suspects whom the military has not yet brought charges against, among them detainees from Yemen and the Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to brutal interrogation in secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency. He did not say ... under what law they would be held. The Obama administration is debating how to establish a legal basis for incarcerating detainees deemed too dangerous to be released but not appropriate to be tried because of potential problems posed by their harsh interrogations, the evidence against them or other issues. Mr. Gates said he had asked for $50 million in supplemental financing in case a facility needed to be built quickly for the detainees.

Note: Ironically, it would seem from these plans revealed by Gates that closing the prison in Guantanamo is going to be used as the pretext to establish indefinite detention, without the right of habeas corpus, on American soil. But the reason for the widespread demand to close the prison is precisely to end such detentions! Do they think no one will notice? For many revealing reports from reliable sources on government attempts to erode civil liberties, click here.

According to current and former government officials, the CIA's secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington. Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates. Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure agreements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA's interrogation program. "It's clear that these psychologists had an important role in developing what became the CIA's torture program," said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. Former U.S. officials say the two men were essentially the architects of the CIA's 10-step interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding. Associates say the two made good money doing it, boasting of being paid a $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques on top al Qaeda suspects at CIA secret sites. Both Mitchell and Jessen were previously involved in the U.S. military program to train pilots how to survive behind enemy lines and resist brutal tactics if captured. But it turns out neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them. The new documents show the CIA later came to learn that the two psychologists' waterboarding "expertise" was probably "misrepresented" and thus, there was no reason to believe it was "medically safe" or effective. The waterboarding used on al Qaeda detainees was far more intense than the brief sessions used on U.S. military personnel in the training classes.

Note: For lots more on CIA torture and other recent government attacks on civil liberties, click here.

The Pentagon has agreed to release dozens of previously undisclosed photographs depicting the abuse by American military personnel of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The pictures, showing incidents at a half-dozen prisons in addition to the notorious Abu Ghraib installation in Iraq, will be made available by May 28, the Defense Department and the American Civil Liberties Union said. “These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the A.C.L.U., which sued for release of the pictures under the Freedom of Information Act. There were early reports that at least some of the new pictures show detainees being intimidated by American soldiers, sometimes at gunpoint, but Ms. Singh said it is not yet clear what kinds of scenes were captured, and by whose cameras. Disclosure of the latest pictures “is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse,” said Ms. Singh, who argued the case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. The Pentagon’s decision to release the pictures came after the A.C.L.U. prevailed at the Federal District Court level and before a panel of the Second Circuit. The Pentagon had fought the release of the photographs, connected with investigations between 2003 and 2006, on the grounds that the release could endanger American military personnel overseas and that the privacy of detainees would be violated.

Note: For many revealing reports on the horrific realities of the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo's first shackled detainees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement -- the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business. Neely has now come forward in this final year of the detention center's existence, saying he wants to publicly air his feelings of guilt and shame about how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first alleged al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the isolated U.S. Navy base. His account, one of the first by a former guard describing abuses at Guantanamo, describes a chaotic time when soldiers lacked clear rules for dealing with detainees who were denied many basic comforts. He says the circumstances changed quickly once monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived. As Neely put it in an interview with The Associated Press this week, "The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong." Neely, a ... Texan who served for a year in Iraq after his six months at Guantanamo, received an honorable discharge last year ... and now works as a law enforcement officer in the Houston area. He is also president of the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. An urge to tell his story led him to the University of California at Davis' Guantanamo Testimonials Project, an effort to document accounts of prisoner abuse.

Note: For lots more on the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool. Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street. The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured. The European Parliament condemned renditions as "an illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights. But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard. The decision underscores the fact that the [War on Terror] is far from over.

Note: For key reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of the War on Terror, click here.

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today. I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them.These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse. I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified ... but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work.

Note: For revealing reports from reliable and verifiable sources on the realities of the Iraq and Afghan wars, click here.

Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of masterminding the 2001 anthrax attacks, e-mailed himself last year saying he knew who the killer was, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday. "Yes! Yes! Yes!!!!!!! I finally know who mailed the anthrax letters in the fall of 2001. I've pieced it together!" Ivins wrote in the e-mail dated Sept. 7, 2007, according to an FBI affidavit. "I'm not looking forward to everybody getting dragged through the mud, but at least it will all be over," Ivins allegedly wrote. "Finally! I should have it TOTALLY nailed down within the month. I should have been a private eye!!!!" The e-mail did not say who Ivins thought was the anthrax killer. Ivins committed suicide in July as prosecutors prepared to charge him in the mailings that killed five people and sickened 17 others. The e-mail was signed "bruce" and sent from an America Online address by the name of "KingBadger7." Authorities said it was one of at least six e-mail addresses registered to Ivins. The FBI affidavit was included in the final batch of court documents to be released by the government that shows how prosecutors built their case against Ivins. Ivins' lawyer, Paul Kemp, has maintained that Ivins was innocent and has predicted the scientist would have been cleared if the case had gone to trial. It was not unusual for Ivins to e-mail himself, according to the FBI document. "In addition, Ivins has sent at least one other e-mail to himself that details his opinion of who may have been the anthrax mailer," the affidavit states.

Note: Isn't it strange that the man the FBI accused of being the anthrax killer would send himself an e-mail saying he knew who the killer was? For many strange deaths of microbiologists that occurred shortly after the anthrax scare, click here.

Scottish police had information that might have changed the outcome of the Lockerbie bombing trial, a BBC TV programme has learned. The information could have affected the credibility of key evidence, but was not passed to the defence team. Libyan national Abdelbaset ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is serving life for killing 270 people in the 1988 bombing. A prosecution witness had seen a picture linking al-Megrahi to the bombing before he identified him. Al-Megrahi, 56, who maintains he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice, has been granted leave to appeal against his conviction for a second time. Tony Gauci, who picked al-Megrahi out in a line-up, had looked at a magazine photograph of him just four days before he made the identification. BBC TV programme The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie has now seen documentary evidence that Scottish police knew this was the case. That information should have been passed to the defence, but the disclosure did not take place. There have always been doubts expressed about who was behind the bombing and what was their motivation. In June last year the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which has been investigating the case, concluded that al-Megrahi could have suffered a miscarriage of justice and recommended that he should be granted a second appeal.

Note: For a revealing documentary showing a major cover-up involving the Lockerbie bombing, click here.

Government lawyers say the ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks could be compromised if the airline industry is allowed to seek more information from the FBI to defend itself against lawsuits brought by terrorism victims. The government urged a judge to block aviation companies from interviewing five FBI employees who the companies say will help them prove the government withheld key information before the 2001 attacks. The lawyers said it would be impossible to interview the employees without disclosing classified or privileged material that could "cause serious damage to national security and interfere with pending law enforcement proceedings." The largest investigation in FBI history has resulted in 167,000 interviews and more than 155,000 pieces of evidence and involved the pursuit of 500,000 investigative leads, the lawyers wrote. The airlines and aviation companies are defending themselves against lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for injuries, fatalities, property damage and business losses related to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The companies filed separate lawsuits against the CIA and the FBI last August to force terrorism investigators to tell whether the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. Meanwhile, lawyers for the victims of the attacks ... recounted in court papers numerous hijackings and attacks aboard planes before Sept. 11 that they said should have put the airline industry on notice that a disastrous attack could occur.

Note: For a two-page overview of many unanswered questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here.

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people," Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." As first reported by ABC News, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA. The president had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before [ABC's original] report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans -- down to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner -- had never been disclosed. Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. In the interview with ABC News, Bush defended the waterboarding technique used against KSM. "We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it," Bush said. "And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew." The president said, "I think it's very important for the American people to understand who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was. He was the person who ordered the suicide attack -- I mean, the 9/11 attacks."

Note: For a transcript of the interview with President Bush on the Washington Post website, click here. For a powerful two-page summary of many unanswered questions about who really ordered the 9/11 attacks, click here.

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against [captives] after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned. The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, ... were discussed and ultimately approved. A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings ... spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue. Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture. "If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intelligence official said. The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to investigate. "With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House," ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. "This is what we suspected all along." The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA's interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when."

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