Due to its claimed use in terrorism, possession of the Casio F91W watch was listed in Combatant Status Review Tribunal reports and other government documents as a reason for these detainees’ continued detention. The watch was popular all over the Moslem world because it had great prayer alert features. Among those listed:
Abdullah Kamel Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari
* Told his Tribunal he had no idea that the watch was associated with terrorism
* Told his Tribunal that the four Muslim chaplains at Guantanamo all wore this model of watch.
* Described the features of his watch that signal the call to prayers to a devout Muslim.
* Told his Tribunal if he had known Casio watches were tied to terrorism: “I would have thrown (the watch) away.”
Read the rest: List of detainees accused of possessing Casio F91W watches – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The admission by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair that the United States intelligence community is authorized to assassinate Americans working with terrorists overseas has raised serious questions of constitutionality.
“It’s troubling, Keith, because it’s not on the books,” constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Thursday.
via Law professor: Assassinating US citizens raises ‘troubling’ issues | Raw Story.
By Jeff Stein
(FP) Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.
“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”
“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”
“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”
Indeed. But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”
via CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding | Foreign Policy.
