Al Qaeda leader held by CIA since fall

NY Times:

The Central Intelligence Agency held a captured Qaeda leader in a secret prison since last fall and transferred him last week to the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Friday.

Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd who is said to have joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and ascended to become a top aide to Osama bin Laden, is the first terrorism suspect known to have been held in secret C.I.A. jails since President Bush announced the transfer of 14 captives to Guantánamo Bay last September.

The Pentagon announced the transfer, giving few details about his arrest or confinement.

Mr. Iraqi’s case suggests that the C.I.A. may have adopted a new model for handling prisoners held secretly — a practice that Mr. Bush said could resume and that Congress permitted when it passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Unlike past C.I.A. detainees, including the Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was held by the agency for several years after being seized in Pakistan in 2003, Mr. Iraqi was turned over to the Pentagon after a few months of interrogation. He appears to have been taken into C.I.A. custody just weeks after Mr. Bush declared C.I.A. jails empty.

Last fall, Mr. Bush declared the agency’s interrogations “one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American history.” But its secret detention of terrorism suspects has been widely criticized by human rights organizations and foreign governments as a violation of international law that relied on interrogation methods verging on torture.

Intelligence officials said that under questioning Mr. Iraqi had provided valuable intelligence about Qaeda hierarchy and operations. It appears he gave up this information after being subjected to standard interrogation methods approved for the Defense Department — not harsher methods that the C.I.A. is awaiting approval to use.

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In a message to agency employees on Friday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, called the capture “a significant victory.” He said C.I.A. operatives had played “a key role in efforts to locate” Mr. Iraqi. Though American officials would not say where or when he had been captured, they said it was not in Pakistan or Iran, countries where he was known to have operated in recent years.

Human rights advocates expressed anger that the United States continued a program of secret detention, and some wondered why the C.I.A. claimed it needed harsh interrogation methods to extract information from detainees when it appeared that Mr. Iraqi had given up information using Pentagon interrogation practices.

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The human rights wackos ca not really be as dense as they are acting in this criticism. Different suspects react differently to interrogation. KSM was tough, Ramzi bin al Sheib broke down on just seeing KSM in custody.

Other reports have indicated that "Mr. Iraqi" was captured as he entered Iraq from Iran. It is interesting that the NY Times plays up his Kurdish origin and not the fact that he was a major in the Iraqi army under Saddam. This is a non to subtle attempt to stay with their theme that Iraq had no prewar ties to al Qaeda. It is a matter that they wish to remain willfully ignorant on.

They cannot escape the fact that al Qaeda was sending their man to run their war in Iraq which has to be deeply embarrassing to the NY Times and the Democrats who still claim that al Qaeda has nothing to do with the war in Iraq.