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Hatttip: Seeing the Forest

A Classic Case of Torture Not Working

From Think Progress we get a sneak peak at Ron Suskind's new book, "“The One Percent Doctrine." He tells the story of Abu Zubaydah. A crazy man, literally, who was tortured for information when he had none. Of course, he told them whatever they wanted (he had quite the imagination) and the American government ran around chasing bad leads.

From the Washington Post'’s review of the book:

Bush "“was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,"” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "“Do some of these harsh methods really work?"

Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep.

Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety - —against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "“thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each... target."” And so, Suskind writes, "“the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."”

Update: From TPM we learn more.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

After finding out from the CIA that Abu Zubaydah was a crazy man who was nothing more than a glorified chaeffeur for al-Qaeda wives, the President makes a major speech highling Abu Zubaydah as a high level agent for al-Qaeda.

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied.

So we tortured him.

UPDATE II: Matt Yglesias provides a timeline.

How Bad Is It Really In Iraq?

Below is a Baghdad Embassy cable regarding the current conditions in Iraq. PDF Link

Iraq is slowly transforming into a radical Islamic Republic in the image of Iran, or it may devolve into a Afghanistan/ Taliban model. These are bad omens.

Hattip The Agonist.

“You did not stutter . . .”

Raymond James explains what they see going forward. "Trading Lows"

Last Monday I was on the Nightly Business Report (NPR), again on Tuesday morning I did CNBC. On both of those venues I stated a “trading low” was likely at hand that would hopefully begin the bottoming sequence seen at most of the tradable “lows” of the past five years. That sequence typically begins with a trading low, followed by a sharp “throwback rally,” and then a subsequent pullback to those recent trading lows for a successful retest before the bottoming sequence is complete. And “You did not stutter,” was the comment from one portfolio manager shortly after our interview where I flatly stated that a “trading low” was at hand and recommended a scale-in buying approach for “trading positions” using the various indexes. That strategy was reprised repeatedly in our comments last week where we recommended buying a one-third trading position on Tuesday, another one-third position on Wednesday, and the final one-third on Thursday. While we recommended buying the first two tranches on Tuesday and Wednesday’s opening prices, we did not “buy” the final one-third position due to Wednesday’s outsized rally (DJIA +110 points). Plainly, our “buy ‘em” recommendation has played in spades even though we “flinched” on the final tranche of our buying program during Thursday’s upside explosion, refusing to “pay up” for a complete “trifecta.”

Read the whole thing from Raymond James.

while this current “throwback rally” in the U.S. equity markets has been impressive and may last another few sessions, we are worried about the subsequent downside retest . . . and continue to defensively position accounts accordingly.

Hoping for the best, but preparing for the worse. Bear market here we come.

Hattip The Agonist