NBC News called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” & in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark 30.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous. The person described by both NBC & The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors & malfeasance, her competence & integrity are doubted — even by some in the agency. The Intercepts naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, & her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of @ least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts. The exec summary of the torture report released by the Sen last wk provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly & deliberately misled Congress about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News reported that one sr CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as “a top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position @ the CIA.” NBC, while withholding her identity, noted that the same unnamed officer “also participated in ‘enhanced interrogations’ of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah & ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.” The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, writing yesterday about the NBC article, added that the officer “is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism @ the CIA” This officer, Mayer noted, is the same one who “dropped the ball when the CIA was given info that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the CIA on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana & then falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.” Mayer also wrote the officer is “the same woman” identified in the Sen report who oversaw “the months-long rendition & gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity.”
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 22:35:50 +0000