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Gerald Posner

Gerald Posner

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Chief investigative reporter at The Daily Beast and author of Miami Babylon

FOREIGN AFFAIRS
POLITICS

Thomas Joscelyn, in the Weekly Standard, has the best piece of journalism—“The Zubaydah Dossier”—I’ve read in years about the controversy over whether or not the terrorist Abu Zubaydah was a high-value terror suspect. Zubaydah was described by the Bush administration as one of al Qaeda's top operatives when he was captured in March 2002. Since then, after disclosures that the CIA destroyed many of his key interrogations, the government has downplayed Zubaydah's importance. He was a key figure about possible Saudi and Pakistani links to the 9/11 attacks, in two books I authored, Why America Slept and Secrets of the Kingdom.

11:01 pm, Aug 12, 2009
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opedanderson

So Gerald. What is the message here?

As long as we have the right guy, torture is ok?

Nazis and Imperial Japanese didn't get away with that. Nor should we......

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1:13 pm, Aug 13, 2009
MarkEichenlaub

Nice find Gerald.

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3:37 pm, Aug 13, 2009
bkeefer

I agree. Great find.

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10:54 am, Sep 16, 2009
KarenF444

The big news in Afghanistan thiis week is that the US did an airstrike because of information that German NATO troops got from a lone informant. Dozens of innocent civilians may have died horrible deaths. There is going to be an investigation, Gen. MacChrystal says, that will be very open and transparent. That hasn't been the case in previous airstrike incidents where the US commanders simply decide they were justified and case closed.

Its relevant to this "Was Zubaydah a mastermind" article. Reading the Joscelyn piece, the information that Zubaydah was a mastermind comes from people who were themselves in custody. If we never get trials in open court - trials, not processes like the Moussaoui one where the government didn't have to prove anything, it was just accepted as fact on the government's say-so - people will be debating this for centuries, just like that Supreme Court Justice (Stevens, I think) who is convinced that Shakespeare didn't write the plays.

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2:22 pm, Sep 11, 2009
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