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A story by Jason Leopold and me, currently up at Truthout, reports that a Department of Defense Office of Inspector General investigation into allegations of drugging of detainees, completed almost exactly a year ago, was nevertheless hidden from public knowledge for months. Its results remain hidden, labeled classified. This is especially strange as this document was publicly requested by no less than now-Vice President (then Senator) Joe Biden, along with Senators Carl Levin and Chuck Hagel, after a couple of articles in 2008 — one by Jeff Stein and one by Joby Warrick at the Washington Post — blew the whistle on dozens of reports of alleged drugging of detainees.
The finished report, entitled "Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees," had been published on September 23, 2009. It was recently posted as finished at the OIG’s website (see 09-INTEL-13). I know that when I was looking for the progress of the report as recently as last February, for an article I was writing at the time, the investigation was still listed as "in progress." It also went under another title: "Possible Use of Mind Altering Substances by DoD Personnel during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the War on Terror" (Project No. D2007-DINT01-0092.005). That listing has since expired.
Today I asked Vice President Biden’s office for comment, and am awaiting reply. But on the face of it, no one seems to want to talk about this report. Human rights workers and attorneys who were familiar with the fact of the investigation were quite surprised when I informed them the report had been finished twelve months ago! Multiple FOIA requests have now been made, but I don’t hold out much hope for getting answers to the basic questions around the many charges of drugging of detainees. This administration’s claims about greater transparency seem quite thin, especially when it means investigating their "war on terror" and detainee prison system.
As the Truthout article reports:
More recent accounts of drugging by detainees include charges by Abdul Aziz Naji, who was forcibly repatriated to Algeria from Guantanamo July 2010. Naji told an Algerian newspaper that detainees at Guantanamo were forced "to take some medicines for three months to drive them crazy, loosing [sic] memory and committing suicide." According to an important exposé by Scott Horton at Harpers last winter, at least one of the three Guantanamo prisoners that DoD claimed committed suicide in 2006 had needle marks on both of his arms. According to Horton, the Obama administration has refused to open an investigation into these mysterious deaths, which allegedly took place at a previously unreported black site at Guantanamo, known informally as Camp No.
What could drugs have been used for? It’s fairly well accepted and documented that the CIA (at least) used drugs for sedation of prisoners during rendition. Drugs could also be used to enforce compliance in prison, or to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation. Of course, the never-ending search for a "truth drug" may be in play here, as well as sinister kinds of experiments, akin to the MKULTRA or Edgewood Arsenal drug experiments of old. The U.S. veterans who were used as guinea pigs by the Army at Edgewood have been fighting a lawsuit for damages against the government for some time, with some recent successes in moving the case forward. See this website for more details and links to the filings.
And the drugs used? Jose Padilla’s chief federal defender asserted in a 2007 legal motion that Padilla was "was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations." Hank Albarelli suggested what some of them could be in an article (which I also co-authored) last June:
Recent reports concerning the CIA and Army have both organizations experimenting on a selected basis with a new mind altering drug whose effects are described as "incredibly mind altering yet at the same time allowing subjects to adhere to a sufficient sense of sanity thus allowing better opportunity for truth inducing techniques…" The drug, described by one former intelligence official as "ETX," is said to last for "about 48-hours."
We can’t really know what’s being given. Probably because doping up prisoners is supposed to be illegal, they are keeping whatever came up in the Inspector General’s investigation secret. Use of drugs on prisoners is a war crime — even though the Army Field Manual allows giving drugs for interrogations as long as they don’t cause "permanent" or "lasting" harm or damage. An older ban against "chemically induced psychosis" was dropped when the new AFM was adopted in September 2006. Given the AFM usage, it would appear that drugs could be used abusively, as torture, and still not meet the "legal" criteria of same. No wonder a Senate Armed Service Committee staff person told their press person "that the OIG investigation ‘did not substantiate allegations’ that mind altering drugs ‘were used for interrogation purposes’ on detainees." That would leave use of hallucinogenic drugs to disorient prisoners and produce compliance prior to interrogations to be considered legal.
So the Obama administration doesn’t want pot to be legalized, but they’re okay with giving mind-altering drugs to prisoners (on some level), and keep top-secret any information about government investigations into abuses. What a damaged and insane society we live in!
Only protests from an outraged citizenry will change such criminal actions — done in your name, by the way — to make the world safe for democracy U.S. corporate profits.
63 Comments
tweeted and recommended jeff.
In actuality, the Truthout article is about a lot more than just the drugging, but covers associated material having to do with the torture/interrogations issue, including misuse of medical information for detainee interrogation, and attempts by the Obama team assembled to “reform” the interrogations post-Bush to sugar-coat the fact they are still recommending and using psychological torture on detainees.
Not light reading, to be sure. But remember: They Want You To Look Away!
So what you are saying here is that our government is just saying Camp No to drugs.
I think that the opposition to legal pot is that by having marijuana use be a crime, it can be made to work as a tool in suppressing a lot of free thinkers who happen to prefer pot to alcohol–and for good reason. Also, pot use can lead to reflective thinking during which it might occur to an individual that killing is wrong and that in a just society resources would be more fairly distributed and the weaker among us would be allowed for in respectful ways.
So yes, the corpo-facists don’t like people having pot.
The abuse you describe in this post damn sure is torture and that the actors are hiding it shows they know it too and they are ashamed of themselves for doing it. The lie that it is all being done in the name of keeping America safe doesn’t cover the stink of torture. These are some really messed up people.
Thank you for your good work.
On your title, I think that Obama has proven himself to be quite transparent, that is, you can see right through him. In fact, his lies are now so apparent that even some of the kosbot people are starting to figure it out.
Can’t get over that picture of Obama swimming with his daughter in the gulf–what a shill.
I would just love to see a CMM outlet do some story on how the U.S. WILL NOT honor it’s treaty commitments regards torture but I’ll have to wait til pigs fly for that to occur.
Hey now, hey now… we’re all being post partisan here. Forgive and forget, right? What’s a little torture on a few brown foreigners? It’s not like they’re real people after all. /Gibbs
every day my stomach turns …..my country??? feh!
If people really knew how Nazi-like what went on, or still goes on…
As an example, consider the quote in the Truthout article by Brent Mickum, Zubaydah’s attorney. Mickum says “that since Zubaydah was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, he ‘has suffered upwards of 250 seizures due to the fact that he was treated and overdosed with Haldol. On two occasions I went down there to meet with him he was in no position to talk to me.’
I didn’t use the portion of the quote that says, something to the effect, I can’t tell you about this, I can’t go into that, etc. The government has the attorneys hog-tied, and hold the threat of jail over them if they talk about what detainees have told them, as that’s “classified.”
More transparency, therefore. So, if a detainee tells his attorney he’s been tortured, the attorney can’t say anything. Same with being drugged, experimented upon, etc.
Let’s just say that more is known out there than has been reported. The Lynne Stewart case sealed the deal, with the government making it clear that if any attorney slipped, the government would come down on them like a house of bricks, and with relish if the lawyer were a 70-ish woman with cancer.
I have never seen anyone take anything and get suicidal after 3 months. What or what kind of dose were they on a few beers a few good joint I’ll tell you more than you want to know about everything. I tend to get quiet though when I’m depressed the goal is to get them to talk?
Plus why give anyone you interrogate a drug that makes them lose their memory? Even by Bushian Logic this is extreme.
The Hague ever going to start their own investigation I’ve given up on American justice.
You must not have followed the claims about the drugging of Jose Padilla. You are assuming the drugs are about interrogation. I noted that there is more than one reason for using drugs, e.g., sedating prisoners, facility control, “softening up” prisoners to make them compliant, and experimentation.
As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. government openly experiments with mind control. They deny they do that to prisoners. But the strange legal limbo of the detainees leaves a hell of an opening for abuses, and then there’s the question of who is doing the oversight.
There are lots of drugs that will make you want to kill yourself. I work in a psychiatric setting, and can verify that to you, and this is true even after many months, even years.
If you wonder why they’d want them to lose their memory, google the term “psychic driving” or read about Ewen Cameron in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine.
it could happen in a week or 2,everybodys tolerance to drugs is different
a must read:
Darkness Visible (memoir)
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1st edition coverDarkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is U.S. writer William Styron’s memoir about his descent into depression, and the triumph of recovery.
First published in December 1989 in Vanity Fair, the book grew out of a lecture that Styron originally delivered at a symposium on affective disorders at the Department of Psychiatry of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.[1]
The title of the work comes from John Milton’s description of Hell in Paradise Lost:
i think he was given Haldol;
Again, think very carefully about the statement the Armed Services Committee gave us:
“The OIG investigation ‘did not substantiate allegations’ that mind altering drugs ‘were used for interrogation purposes’ on detainees.”
We didn’t ask them if the report substantiated allegations of use of drugs for interrogation purposes, just what did the report say. They added in the clause “for interrogation purposes.” It’s almost a foregone conclusion drugs were used for sedation, that RX drugs were used without informed consent for supposed psychiatric reasons, and many have a strong — a very strong — suspicion that drugs were used to run experiments on prisoners, either to facilitate the experiment, or a central focus of the experiment.
Way too many horrific crimes have been committed in our names… and yet our hands are tied, at least the hands of the lawyers are, and they should be the ones representing the victims AND the Constitution.
Hey Jeff Kaye send over your post to MSNBC,lets see those who were so outraged by Bush’s disregard for the constitution, that almost every week there was a special comment… yeah! you know those who call emselves progressives…er those touting on behalf of the WH.
Lets see ‘em cover this on their TV program……well they won’t cuz eventhough this happened under Bush…the Obama WH is probably still allowing this crime to continue….remember he bought into Bush’s war on terror policies…..The WH’s sycophants in the media particularly on MSNBC won’t go near this cuz it would illustrate how just how Bush like Obama is.
Yes, I agree. Styron’s book is a great read.
From Milton, describing Hell:
One last on effects of drugs. I’ve seen the effects of too high a dose of Cogentin (often used to counter side-effects of those taking psychotic medications) bring about after many weeks an increasing agitation up to a final suicide attempt. I’ve seen undiagnosed akathisia (a terrible inner restless and agitation, a side effect of some anti-psychotic drugs) bring about a dire suicidal crisis, more than once.
I’ve given up trying to get them to pay attention. I still remember when K.O. had Scott Horton on. I was glad he did it, but seemed to not understand the story, and treated Horton as if he were infected with smallpox. They are very frightened of doing anything that would really challenge the government, unless they’ve been given the go-ahead by some big Establishment figure.
If you or someone else wishes to try with them, I have no objection.
No torture for the fun of it fits! Pot can sedate quite nice without suicide. Facility control I assume you mean mind control if you want loss of memory get some date rape drugs? Prisoners with no memory or who are dead are not much use as experiments although I will concede someone very twisted might think of an experiment where those conditions are assets.
Agreed but I’m working on the theory we capture prisoners to interrogate them suicidal people with memory loss are not reliable.
I am staying that this was forced way beyond what even the craziest new junkie would do to themselves.
But why the reasoning is not important I’m hiding behind logic this is EVIL.
Its a WarCrime. Bush and Obama should not be buried on Church Ground.
I’ve given up trying to get them to pay attention. I still remember when K.O. had Scott Horton on. I was glad he did it, but seemed to not understand the story, and treated Horton as if he were infected with smallpox. They are very frightened of doing anything that would really challenge the government, unless they’ve been given the go-ahead by some big Establishment figure.
If you or someone else wishes to try with them, I have no objection.
To ThingsComeUndone @19: You’re not considering the full picture (but then who would want to. I’d rather be sedated right now myself). It’s not just psychological things they want to measure. They have new measurement toys, e.g., functional MRI, wireless heart variability monitors, and these are supposed to measure extreme mental and emotional states via biological measurements. For that, you have to put your “subject” into some kind of extreme mental or behavioral state.
Don’t forget, the experiments on “learned helplessness” were done by subjecting dogs to inescapable shock until they organismically shut down.
remember the 2 shrinks,who started all this,they may just be Mengle-type sociopaths
Good to see your article for Truthout also Jeff.
I can only say it sickens me beyond description to read of these abuses of materials hoped to relieve misery.
I applaud your tenacity in exposing these crimes. One wonders if they will ever be addressed and those responsible punished. But we know for certain without exposure they will never be addressed.
Don’t forget, the experiments on “learned helplessness” were done by subjecting dogs to inescapable shock until they organismically shut down
OH FFING GOD,cant hear anymore!
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/guantanamo-psychologists-complaint-john-leso-larry-james
what happened to these creeps?
I think the James case is still being considered. The Leso case was dismissed (see my story on it here). As for James Mitchell and the complaint against him in Texas, I’m not sure what happened. It looks like the copy of the complaint online is gone. But maybe it’s just a broken link.
In any case, the news isn’t that hot, and sadly outside, really, the stories I’ve written on it, the whole issue appears to have died since the Mother Jones story.
I read so many things but forget where. I saw an update note on a female translator for the Army Intelligence that committed suicide after discovering the torture techniques in Iraq. She had been assigned to participate and refused. Did anyone else see it and can point me back to it? It is an interesting revealing read for anyone interested in all this.
By Greg Mitchell at The Nation:
Remembering the US Soldier Who Committed Suicide After She Refused to Take Part in Torture
Good on you, Jeff. Recommended.
I noticed that yesterday Amnesty International and eight other NGOs issued the following: “Joint letter from the AIRE Centre, Amnesty International, British Irish RIGHTS WATCH, Cageprisoners, Justice, Liberty, Redress, Reprieve, and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture regarding the inquiry into alleged UK involvement in the mistreatment of detainees held abroad” (click here for the PDF)
ETX has effects lasting 48 hours? i’m guessing it’s some variant of ecstacy, but perhaps the victim feels that demons are inside his mind. 48 hours of that could break anyone’s will to resist giving information. ‘terrorize the terrorists’ sounds like a plausible technique, providing he / she has anything to tell you. if they are in fact terrorists.
on the other hand, given the apparent delight some of these jr. torquemadas take in exerting total control over the subject’s life and death, this description of the effects of erabutoxin on respiration seems right up their alley. you can’t breathe for 48 hours. the only thing that can keep you breathing (and therefore still alive) is artificial respiration by your interrogator or his staff.
48 hours of knowing you have paralyzed lungs and just minutes to live if no one helps you. somehow this is so sick and so sadistic that it’s probably exactly what they’re doing to victims.
Yess! Thank you so much Jeff.
Agreed
One of the things I find irritating about this is this portion of EO 13526, which governs treatment of classified information:
Of course, proving someone has classified information in order to cover up a crime, particularly when the information is made inaccessible, is problematic. But there is a clear recognition that this sort of abuse is possible. Yet both the Executive and the courts seem to have treated this issue very lightly.
Don’t quickly write off these medical professionals involved in all this as just people on the fringe with serious mental quirks. They are the result of government developed systems recruiting participants in torture and many, even Mengle, become convinced they are only sacrificing the individual for the sake of the greater good.. Mengle’s diaries expressing his principles are almost poetic.
And don’t forget the American Psychological Association has given its approval to professional participation.
I am not defending them. I am noting that many, probably most, of us can become seduced into participation. This is why there must be clear international laws and prosecutions if these crimes are to be diminished.
It is also why those in the care taking professions must take seriously to never put any interest above that of a patient or any individual dependent on them.
There’s more here according to Scott Horton in “To the Memory of Alyssa Peterson,” Saturday, November 04, 2006:
Thank you! Bookmarked.
Yep.
Thanks for this link!
Blogged this at Invictus:
For a Fair, Just UK Torture Inquiry
NOTE: Readers should be interested in this –
Andy Worthington is publishing an eight-part series of articles (in conjunction with Cageprisoners), telling, for the first time, the stories of the remaining 176 prisoners in Guantanamo. The introduction is here.
And the first part is here. Part Two will be published on Friday, Parts Three and Four next week, and so on…
Andy is hoping the series demonstrate how few of the remaining prisoners have any connection to terrorism, how some are civilians, and how others were foot soldiers for the Taliban, in an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that had nothing to do with 9/11, and very little to do with al-Qaeda.
Andy says, “I also hopes that it may contribute to the almost non-existent debate regarding the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and the administration’s misplaced use of it to hold foot soldiers in Guantanamo, as well as highlighting other aspects of the habeas litigation, the military commissions, the moratorium on releasing Yemenis, and the decision to hold 48 of the prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial.”
Hi Jeff, I asked a question in another diary: We bombed Kabul on the night of 9/11/01 — it was on CNN and I saw it, wrote an e-mail about it, printed it out, still have it, so I know it happened. But you never hear about it and I think it’s like it didn’t happen. Pre AUMF, what authority?
Hm. I haven’t heard that before. But if you like 9/11 facts, the coup against Allende in Chile began on 9/11/1973.
Could be used to control citizens too, for example if a woman was an activist blogger and they wanted to get her husband to assault her, all they would have to do is dose him up with the right combination of stuff. It could even be slipped into his food at a theme park and no one would be the wiser.
This is such an important point, with regard to why there’s long seemed to be comparative silence from informed parties in opposition to the Congressional/Pentagon/commercial media demonization campaign against our non-citizen Guantanamo detainees. Obviously the detainees themselves are helpless to reach the outside world to speak on their own behalf. But most of them have pro bono civilian attorneys, members of firms located all over the nation – and yet, those English-speaking American attorneys are also muzzled by the Executive Branch (to indifference from Congress), and prevented from publicly explaining what they are doing and hearing from their clients at Guantanamo.
Abdul Naji’s attorneys (they first met him in February, 2007) pointed out that they, like all the other attorneys, were forbidden to tell their client any news from the outside world in response to questions he asked them during their visits with him at Guantanamo:
Small wonder that Omar Khadr was apparently devouring a magazine reporting on the recent world cup soccer matches during the last day of his August pre-trial hearings and/or jury selection. Most Americans would consider it “torture” just to be deprived of internet, TV, and phone access for more than a month – our Guantanamo prisoners have been deprived of all news of the world for more than eight years…
“Classifying” the detainee’s own statements is particularly insidious and abusive – especially given that the government has no problem publicly releasing such statements when it serves their (PR) purposes.
Keep looking the other way, Members of Congress – maybe accountability for your unconscionable, inexcusable abdication of duty, and disgraceful, dishonorable conduct in office, won’t keep gaining on you, so long as you keep your eyes averted from the horrifying consequences of your failures to act…
I look forward to reading the new Truthout article, Jeff. Meanwhile, in case you didn’t catch this report, important new research has apparently unearthed some pretty profound conclusions about the power of suggestion on confessions in custody by innocent subjects of interrogation (no drugs needed) – research suggesting that serious questions ought to be raised, at minimum, about the validity of slowly-developed “voluntary” confessions obtained from people held in both police and military custody:
The full April, 2010 Stanford Law Review article by Brandon Garrett is available here.
Also, fwiw, it seems likely to me that the whole point of the drugs and the torture is to manipulate people to perform the way you want them to. As in what Cheney does. Ron Suskind said the CIA’s name for Cheney was Edgar, as in Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist. It doesn’t matter what prisoners confess, the point isn’t to get information or stop attacks, it’s to get them to say your script. The question has to be, who wrote the interrogation scripts?
Jim White wrote a diary here once about an Army thing whose whole purpose was to make their spin or fiction be what’s taken for the truth. I think it even had an Orwellian name, Department of ________. Wasn’t perception management per se, but something like, iirc.
Also Lawrence Wilkerson said in an interview on Antiwar Radio kinda recently that Rove was the one who stage managed the whole orange terrorist prisoner thing. The Bush bench was pretty deep in creepiness.
Scripts and stage management. And Julian Assange said the thing the Army was trying to stop re Wikileaks wasn’t, in their own words, leakers but “whistleblowers,” people who would expose abuse, truth. Nothing is more important than paying no attention to whatever’s behind the curtain. Nothing is more important than the power to have national secrets.
That came up in the Fein Book Salon this weekend. And it was noted that Allende was overthrown to keep the Anaconda copper mines from being nationalized and I wondered…
Plus, when I was trying to find the comment again, I see that there’s a Firebase Anaconda in Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan (same place as Balad/Camp Anaconda?)
Again, who names these things? Why Anaconda? I mean, Cheney as Edgar is perfect. So, what’s up with Anaconda?
Is there a way to get the video of that broadcast from CNN? I mean the specific information — 9/11 night, Kabul, Nic Robertson — seems, well, specific enough to make it easily retrievable.
Makes me think of two things I heard on Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton (not the Harper’s Scott Horton, the other one):
and the interview he did with Will Potter on the astounding way eco activists, called “domestic terrorists” with “inspirational significance” are treated — kept almost totally isolated and incommunicable and untouchable, in CMUs, Communication Management Units, of special prisons that had been secret. Long comment here; BP faces nothing like this for any of the property damage they’ve caused. So who’s the environmental terrorist?
Per the podcast interview at the link above (at 5:55), apparently it’s not even known who assigns prisoners to these units — it’s not a judge; maybe a warden, maybe higher up? There’s no due process to challenge their placement.
Corporations were crazy for personhood so they could get 14th amendment rights to equal protection under the law as other persons, we the people persons, including the right to due process. Wow, nothing like upside down.
Call CNN and tell them you’re writing a story and would like access to the tape of that night. Become a citizen journalist.
To Powwow, great comment. The research on false confessions goes back aways. I’ll try and look it up.
As for “Anaconda”, it’s an intriguing thought. I assumed it had something to do with being a snake, but perhaps I have the meaning wrong. The Oaklahoma date & Waco happened iirc on Hitler’ s birthday, April 19.
You are a real journalist — you wouldn’t like to do it, would you? I think I’d fail, and I’d actually love to see Nic Robertson say “If I listen, you can hear” again. Best thing I ever heard a journalist say.
(Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday — there’s a lot of Catholic connections to his death that you don’t hear much about.)
Is this 21st century America or 20th century Germany ?
I’ll take a look.
Great post. Great link to a great post.
Great comments and questions.
Thank you.
I found it, it was McChrystal’s Employment of Military Deception By: Jim White Monday April 5, 2010 — and the names were IO, information operations warfare (with a 435-person lead unit at Lackland AFB in TX), and PSYOP and MILDEC, military deception.
I totally wish I could embed the illustration.
Jim also points out that McChrystal was involved with the Tillman coverup.
This is not my grandfather’s military industrial complex anymore — it really (ha ha) is a military industrial Matrix. They want to be God. They want to create reality. They want us to be under them. I wonder if they can tell the difference? I wonder if God blows back?
Thank you
Reposting the Amnesty et al letter is only a good thing. One of reasons is that there are questions about the facts surrounding the death of the Irish citizen, Ciara Durkin, a US National Guard Finance Unit Specialist. There’s this from her Facebook page:
{ snip }
{ snip }
Her death sounds awful, and suspicious. But I’m not sure I understand the link you are making to the Amnesty letter.
I haven’t looked deep into it b/c at work til late today, but I did find this: September 11 Television Archive, run by Internet Archive. There are links there for all networks for coverage in 24-hr period, including CNN. You may want to look there yourself. I’ll be checking out later.
If that bombing occurred, it should show up in these videos.
This is just my assessment based on reading in part here at FDL … the sooner the delayed UK investigation gets going the sooner more information inevitably comes to light with respect to the US and the questions it is not answering as the US and UK operations are linked.
I can’t see videos here but from the thumbnails (genius! second row) it looks like it’s in this segment:
http://www.archive.org/movies/thumbnails.php?identifier=cnn200109111421-1503
(So, full circle, what authority?)
Strange… The video I linked to was Thumbnails for CNN Sept. 11, 2001 2:21 pm – 3:03 pm, which would be EST, no doubt, and Nic Robertson is talking to Judy Woodruff and nighttime Kabul is in the background, as I remembered, but the bombing I recall hasn’t happened yet. I sent my e-mail at 7:48 PM PST, which would have been 4:48 PM EST, no? So it has to be in that time span. http://www.archive.org has every minute of CNN broadcast up, yet I don’t see Nic Robertson come up again, just clicking through the thumbnail screens for this video and the next few till the time I sent my email. Like I dreamed this?
Again, I have not watched all the videos, just flipped through thumbnail screens.
Plus I just hit loop hell when I tried to make a screenshot.
Doh, I’m an idiot. 7:48 PST would be 10:48 EST, and God knows what it is in Atlanta where CNN is broadcast from.
The bombing of Kabul starts here. Of note, as far as I’ve listened, which is actually quite a ways, the US does NOT claim responsibility for it (at least not right away?). There’s actually a bit of discussion about WHO is bombing Kabul, maybe the Northern Alliance? I’ll listen some more, but in case comments close I thought I’d say I’m an idiot. And as I’m watching, Kabul is being bombed, we’re denying it or whoever’s being asked knows nothing, nothing, the biggest of wigs are meeting in the Pentagon, and the Taliban is denying responsibility for 9/11 so whoever’s bombing Kabul–well, hasty? Or they know more than the US Congress does, since the I think I saw that the Congress and State Dept have been evacuated.