Interrogating MSK

The IHT has a fasciniating article about the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. It decribes how torture was used 'In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland'... 'A paramilitary team put on the pressure, using cold temperatures, sleeplessness, pain and fear to force a prisoner to talk. When the prisoner signaled assent, the tormenters stepped aside.'

'the agency made the momentous decision to use harsh methods the United States had long condemned. With little research or reflection, it borrowed its techniques from an American military training program modeled on the torture repertories of the Soviet Union and other cold-war adversaries, a lineage that would come to haunt the agency.'

"Poland is the 51st state," one former CIA official recalls James Pavitt, then director of the agency's clandestine service, declaring. "Americans have no idea."