Terrance Heath's List: Torture

• On the morning of 9/11, after the evacuation of the White House, Dick Cheney summoned his legal counsel, David Addington, to return to work.
• Now, on the morning of 9/11, they worked together to plot an expansive grab of executive power that they claimed was the correct response to the terrorist threat. Within two weeks, they had gotten a memo asserting almost unlimited power for the president as "the sole organ of the Nation in its foreign relations," to respond to the terrorist attacks. As part of that expansive view of executive power, Cheney and Addington would argue that domestic and international laws prohibiting torture and abuse could not prevent the president from authorizing harsh treatment of detainees in the war against terror.
• David Addington championed the fight to argue that the president -- in his role as commander in chief -- could not be bound by any law, including those prohibiting torture.
• In particular, he ran a "War Council" with Jim Haynes, John Yoo, John Rizzo and Alberto Gonzales (see all four below) and other trusted lawyers, which crafted and executed many of the legal approaches to the war on terror together.
• As White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales was nominally in charge of representing the president's views on legal issues, including national security issues. In that role, Gonzales wrote and reviewed a number of the legal opinions that attempted to immunize torture.
• Most important, in a Jan. 25, 2002, opinion reportedly written with David Addington, Gonzales paved the way for exempting al-Qaida detainees from the Geneva Conventions. His memo claimed the "new kind of war" represented by the war against al-Qaida "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."
• James Mitchell, a retired military psychologist, had been a leading expert in the military's SERE program. In December 2001, with his partner, Bruce Jessen, Mitchell reverse-engineered SERE techniques to be used to interrogate detainees. Then, in the spring of 2002, before OLC gave official legal approval to torture, Mitchell oversaw Abu Zubaydah's interrogation. An FBI agent on the scene describes Mitchell overseeing the use of "borderline torture." And after OLC approved waterboarding, Mitchell oversaw its use in ways that exceeded the guidelines in the OLC memo. Under Mitchell's guidance, interrogators used the waterboard with "far greater frequency than initially indicated" -- a total of 183 times in a month for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times in a month for Abu Zubaydah. 
• As director of the CIA during the early years of the war against al-Qaida, Tenet had ultimate management responsibility for the CIA's program of capturing, detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qaida members and briefed top Cabinet members on those techniques. Published reports say Tenet approved every detail of the interrogation plans: "Any change in the plan -- even if an extra day of a certain treatment was added -- was signed off on by the Director."
• After approval of the harsh techniques, CIA headquarters ordered Abu Zubaydah to be waterboarded even though onsite interrogators believed Zubaydah was "compliant." Since the Bybee Two memo authorizing torture required that interrogators believe the detainee had further information that could only be gained by using torture, this additional use of the waterboard was clearly illegal according to the memo.
• She approved (she now says she "conveyed the authorization") for the first known officially sanctioned use of torture -- the CIA's interrogation of Abu Zubaydah -- on July 17, 2002. This approval was given after the torture of Zubaydah had begun, and before receiving a legal OK from the OLC. The approval from the OLC was given orally in late July and in written form on Aug. 1, 2002. Rice's approval or "convey[ance] of authorization" led directly to the intensified torture of Zubaydah.
• In the early months of 2002, he started working with Addington and others to draft two key memos authorizing torture: Bybee One (providing legal cover for torture) and Bybee Two (describing the techniques that could be used), both dated Aug. 1, 2002. He also helped draft a similar memo approving harsh techniques for the military completed on March 14, 2003, and even a memo eviscerating Fourth Amendment protections in the United States.
• For example, the memo presumed that Abu Zubaydah was uncooperative, and had actionable intelligence that could only be gotten through harsh techniques. Yet Zubaydah had already cooperated with the FBI. The memo claimed Zubaydah was mentally and physically fit to be waterboarded, even though Zubaydah had had head and recent gunshot injuries. As Jack Goldsmith described Yoo's opinions, they "could be interpreted as if they were designed to confer immunity for bad acts." In all of his torture memos, Yoo ignored key precedents relating both specifically to waterboarding and to separation of powers.

10 more annotations...

• "No good purpose is served by allowing known terrorists, who trained at terrorist training camps, to come to the U.S. to live among us," said  Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.). 

   

    Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said Tuesday, before saying he was open to changing his position, "Part of what we don't want is them be put in prisons in the United States." 

   

   But the apocalyptic rhetoric rarely addresses this: Thirty-three international terrorists, many with ties to al-Qaeda, reside in a single federal prison in Florence, Colo., with little public notice. 

   

  • These are terrorists with known ties to Al Qaeda. If we can hosue them, surely we can handle people who likely aren't terrorists and against whom we have very little reliable evidence in the first place?

• Detained in the supermax facility in Colorado are Ramzi Yousef, who headed the group that carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993; Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Ahmed Ressam, of the Dec. 31, 1999, Los Angeles airport millennium attack plots; Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, conspirator in several plots, including one to assassinate President George W. Bush; and Wadih el-Hage, convicted of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. 

   

   Inmates in Florence and those at the maximum-security disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., rarely see other prisoners. At Leavenworth, the toughest prisoners are allowed outside their cells only one hour a day when they are moved with their legs shackled and accompanied by three guards. 

   

   "We have a vast amount of experience in how to judge the continued incarceration of highly dangerous prisoners, since we do this with thousands of prisoners every month, all over the United States, including some really quite dangerous people," Philip D. Zelikow, who was counselor to Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. 

   

   For many of the most serious terrorists and violent criminals, Justice Department and prison officials impose special restrictions, allowing few visitors, for example, and closely monitoring mail. The inmates also are kept in solitary confinement. 

• Still, one economically pressed community in Montana is bucking the trend of "not in my back yard." Some residents in Hardin are volunteering to open their unused, 464-bed Two Rivers Regional Detention Facility to the detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The City Council recently passed a resolution in support. 

   

   But  Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) put his foot down. "We're not going to bring al-Qaeda to Big Sky Country -- no way, not on my watch," he told Time magazine this month. 

1 more annotation...

• The "torture memos" are legal opinions, requested by the Central Intelligence  Agency, about methods the agency wanted to use – and did use, even before the legal opinions were issued – to interrogate  terrorism suspects in its custody
• "The absence of control, the absence of any kind of ... mutual agreement about what is respected ... all of that is stripped  away," says Uwe Jacobs, the clinical director of Survivors International, an outreach organization for torture survivors living  in the US. "It's the same thing you see in rape. What is it, precisely, that makes rape in many cases so traumatic for people?  It's not the physical pain they experience.... It is the total invasion of a space that has to remain private."

  • It renegs on the mutual agreement of civilization -- that there are somethings we must not to do each other under even the most extreme circumstances.
• UNTIL THE 9/11 ATTACKS, no one would have thought it controversial to call waterboarding "torture," Mr. Jacobs and others  say. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists have written libraries about the characteristics of torture – the  powerlessness of the tortured and the absolute power of the torturer; the firm – at times, religiously sanctioned – belief  in the utility of pain to extract truth.

• Before the Bush administration's pursuit of "enhanced interrogation," the definition of torture was clear, says Darius Rejali,  a political science professor at Reed College, in Portland, Ore. "Everybody understood it.... There has never been a debate  over the meaning of torture in the international sense."  

   

  So why the need for these memos? The CIA felt compelled to ask for the Justice Department's opinion on whether its methods  violated national laws prohibiting torture. Long-winded and detached, the memos are the quintessence of legal writing. And  yet they're worth a read, if for no other reason than that a layman's standard is sometimes so different from a lawyer's. 

• What would the average American make of these 100-something pages? In some cases, nothing at all. Two of the milder techniques  outlined by Bush Justice lawyer Jay Bybee's August 2002 memo are the "facial slap" and the "facial hold." Setting aside the  legal standard, neither seems tough enough to call torture. After all, mothers have been known to command a child's attention  this way.  

   

  But other techniques raise the average reader's eyebrow. The effects of sleep deprivation, Mr. Bybee writes, get worse the  longer it's used. Cramped confinement requires careful logistics to be practiced "humanely." Stress positions, which induce  muscle fatigue and ankle and foot swelling, are also dubious. Waterboarding demands particular attention. 
• All these techniques must pass a litmus test set by US law: They can't be "intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain  or suffering," otherwise they're torture. The memos easily parse the physical. None of the pain these methods inflict, Bybee  concludes, legally counts.

  • Why do them if the intention is not to cause phyican or mental pain or suffering? The infliction of isolation and sleep deprivation is something the sufferer wants it to stop. And he will become compliant to make it stop.
    
    So, it must inflict physical and mental pain and suffering in order to work. Otherwise, why do it. Even if the desired effect is to get information from the detainee, the detainee is motivted by thte pain of his isolation or sensory deprivation, or a stress position.

• On cramped confinement, he concludes: "[A]lthough confinement boxes (both small and large) are physically uncomfortable because  their size restricts movement ... we do not think that the use of these boxes can be said to cause pain that is of the intensity  associated with serious physical injury." It hurts – but it doesn't hurt badly enough. 

   

  On sleep deprivation: "While [it] may involve some physical discomfort, such as the fatigue or the discomfort experienced  in the difficulty of keeping one's eyes open, those effects remit after the individual is permitted to sleep." Once they let  you close your eyes, it's as if the sleep deprivation were, say, just a bad dream. 

• On waterboarding: "You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm. Thus, although the subject  may experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain."   

   

  But mental harm is murkier. Bybee argues something is torture only if it produces "prolonged" mental harm, and only if it  meets conditions set by that US law. One of those conditions is that an act implies "the threat of imminent death." There  is, Bybee concedes, no getting around this one: "We find that the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death....  [I]t creates in the subject the uncontrollable physiological sensation that the subject is drowning." 

  • The mental state of detainees is something that officials seem to desire kept under wraps. Zubayah's mental state -- which was unstable to begin with -- has reportedly worsened as a result of his interrogation (he was waterboarded nearly or more than 100 times, and kept in isolation, etc.).
    
    The immediate mental anquish of the interrogation/torture may be relieved when the conditions are removed, but the powerlessness against the brutality experienced.impacts the mind far beyond the present moment. Much like the victims of rape or child abuse, or veterans in war time, torture victims may experience PTSD.
    
    The intent of the torturer is to inspire such extreme terror in the victim that he/she betrays treasured values, beliefs, family, and friends -- either by what is done or the anticipation of what may be done next. Even after torture ends, the memory of the brutality and terror surely lives with the victim afterwards.
• He notes that even though doctors and others monitor the subject, their presence doesn't lessen the fear because "the subject  is not aware of any of these precautions." And yet: "Although the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death, prolonged  mental harm must nonetheless result to violate the statutory prohibition on infliction of severe mental pain or suffering."  More plainly, the imminent death threat is secondary.
• Bybee concludes that there's no long-lasting mental harm from waterboarding because the US military waterboards its service  men and women during high-intensity Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, designed to toughen them against  techniques they might experience at the hands of an enemy. The CIA informed Bybee that no SERE students suffered lasting psychological  effects. Only two dropped out, and only "on rare occasions some students temporarily postponed the remainder of their training  and received psychological counseling." In other words, if US soldiers can handle the waterboard, so can Al Qaeda suspects.

  • However, the U.S. soldiers are not waterboarded in the same context. They do not have the added context of utter helplessness before and after the waterboarding. They do not have the context of indefinite detention, not knowing the charges, not knowing if they will live or die, or if their families are being tortured.
• Politics aside, no reasonable person  likes torture. No such person believes that beating the soles of someone's feet, or hanging someone by their wrists, or pulling  off someone's fingernails, is anything but reprehensible. It's probable that these are the gruesome practices President Bush  had in mind when he insisted, "We don't torture."

  • Some people do like torture, I think. They like the idea of it. They like the powerful feeling of being the on to mete it out. I daresay some people even felt a twinge of pleasure at the thought of "high value" members of al Qaeda being tortured.

  • We have hung people from their writst.

• Professor Horton says, "You could just add to the list of examples, 'enhanced interrogation techniques' for torture. 'Enhanced'  – stronger! Better! Brighter! – who could object to that? Language is a weapon that's used by the administration in their  campaign for support for what they're doing." 

   

  So have we just been duping ourselves? If so, and we're willing to ask why we perpetuate – by another name – practices we'd  have decried as torture years ago, what could we say? That this is how it always happens, according to Professor Rejali.  

   

  Two years ago, he published "Torture and Democracy," a history of modern torture. "Every time a country engages in these techniques,"  he says, they reevaluate the definition of torture. "When France used their techniques, all of a sudden they were 'pushed  interrogation.' The Germans called it 'sharpened interrogation.' " So what does our use of, and argument over, "enhanced interrogation"  mean?  

   

  "Our debate," Rejali says, "is no different than [that in] any other country."

10 more annotations...

• 
   “She’s made some serious charges and should step aside until she proves them,” King told POLITICO.
   
   Former Clinton adviser James Carville laughed off the suggestion. “People really like her, so the idea that they would dump Nancy Pelosi over a bad press conference is just ridiculous,” he said, adding, “I’m sure if she could have it back, she would have done the whole thing over.”

  People close to Pelosi aren’t surprised by her unwillingness to give ground — even at the expense of her own image — saying she remains incensed at the Bush administration for misleading Congress on pre-Iraq war intelligence and its interrogation policy.
   
   The CIA confirmed Wednesday that Pelosi has requested declassification of the notes from the 2002 briefing.
• But Pelosi’s No. 2, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, wandered briefly off script last week during a colloquy on the House floor, when he took issue with Pelosi’s charge that the CIA had lied to her.
   
   “I have no idea of that, don’t have a belief of that nature, because I have no basis on which to base such a belief. And I certainly hope that’s not the case. I don’t draw that conclusion,” he said.

  • Well, we know that the president lied about Zubayah's importance and the information gained from his interrogation, which included "enhanced teghniques" long before they were "legalized" by the OLC memos, etc.

• Al Qaeda leaders like Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed strike fear into the hearts of many Americans – but pretty much everyone agrees those guys should stay locked up forever.
• It’s the in-between guys that are the more challenging problem – rank-and-file prisoners who may have played some role in Al Qaeda or Taliban activity, but aren’t suspected of taking part in any major attacks.
• “The big problem is not KSM. It’s Mohammed Mohammed,” said laywer David Remes, who represents clients at the prison, alluding to a metaphorical Guantanamo everyman. “The big problem is not going to be with potential defendants…We’re going to do something with them. It’s the indefinite detention guys.”
• But even Obama doesn’t envision sending everyone left at Gitmo through a trial. So disposing of these lesser figures could simply mean bringing them to U.S. prisons – which members of Congress from both parties strenuously resist — or even seeing them someday released.
• “Maybe 30 of 241 are going to face some kind of criminal tribunal or revised military commission or Article III court,” Duke law professor and former military lawyer Scott Silliman said. “What do you do with the rest of them where there’s no evidence of criminality—or no usable evidence?”
• It’s one of the thorniest issues in figuring out how to put these terror suspects on trial – what if one of them beats the rap?
   
   In other words, if Obama puts detainees on trial in federal court, or devises a new military commissions procedure for Gitmo that is so much like American-style justice that someone gets acquitted, is Obama prepared to let a “suspected terrorist” walk out the door?
   
   Some lawyers tracking Gitmo proceedings always feared the Bush administration stacked the deck to all but guarantee convictions – and they’re waiting to see more details of Obama’s plans for military-run trials to see how fair his process will be.
   
   “If you’re not willing to have an acquittal, and you set up a system that will guarantee there will not be an acquittal, it’s not a system of justice. It’s something else,” said John Hutson, a former Navy Judge advocate general who’s now dean of Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire.
  

  • That is what the Bush administration set up. And for those detainees who are not members of Al Qaeda, nor have any information about or have participated in plans to attack the U.S. that means almost no hope of defending themselves to a military tribunal. The tribunals are part of a system that from the moment of detainment though interrogatioin is geared not so much at finding the truth as it is as getting a confession to something resembling the original charge.
    
    Even Bush forged ahead with the falsehoods after knowing that one detainee was ot as important as he had told americans.
• “Frankly, you ought to have the moral courage then to say, ‘We’re just going to hold them forever,’ rather than going through this charade of appearing to give them justice when we’re not.”
• Politicians on both sides of the aisle are making vows never to release Guantanamo prisoners or “terrorists” into the U.S. But such a release can’t be ruled out altogether if the prisoners are brought to American soil. Obama may seek legislation to reduce the chance of such a release, lawyers said

  • The Bush tribunals made no attempt to appear geared towards truth or justicee. The deck is stacked for conviction. The Obama tribunal are an attempt to find a baance between them.
• The first choice for the U.S. whenever possible is to return prisoners to their home countries. But Yemen is a “huge problem,” one lawyer said.
   
   Almost 100 of the roughly 240 prisoners left at Guantanamo hail from Yemen – the site of the USS Cole bombing in 2000. But the country’s checkered record when it comes to restraining and “rehabilitating” other Islamic militants has made U.S. officials leery about returning anywhere near 100 prisoners there.
   
   Some militants that Yemen tried to retrain “went to Iraq and carried out suicide attacks on U.S. forces,” while other prisoners broke out of jail, said Greg Johnsen, a foreign policy scholar at Princeton. The Yemeni government is barely in control of its own territory.
  
• Courts have held that evidence obtained under harsh interrogations – torture, to the critics – isn’t admissible in court. The Bush administration tried to get around this by sending in “clean teams” to re-interview detainees without the use of sleep deprivation, water-boarding and other methods.
   
   But it’s far from clear that courts will consider evidence gathered by these “clean teams” to be truly clean.
   That could mean there is a significant number of prisoners who judges might rule simply cannot be given a fair trial, even under the new rules being set up by Obama. What then?
   
   In another twist, the so-called clean teams, apparently at the instruction of the Bush administration, did not give Miranda rights warnings to Guantanamo prisoners, according to lawyers tracking the situation. That fact alone could complicate efforts to bring cases to federal courts in the United States.
   
   “That has created a lingering problem, which I think was somewhat intentional,” said Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch.

8 more annotations...

• President Barack Obama declared defiantly Thursday that the U.S. "went off course" in fighting terrorism over the past eight years, and said his policies will "better protect" the country against al Qaeda.

   

  In a remarkable split-screen presentation of opposing worldviews, former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke across town moments later, saying he supported the controversial policies "when they were made, and without hesitation would do so again in the same circumstances."

   

  "The point is not to look backward," Cheney said. "A lot rides on our President’s understanding of the security policies that preceded him. And whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of this country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history." 
• Obama, in a major address at the National Archives, argued that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods "did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts – they undermined them."
• The president unblinkingly, methodically confronted a string of national-security decisions that have drawn criticism from the political left or right. He called the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay an inherited "mess" that "has weakened American national security" by providing a rallying cry for enemies.

  • The records on the Guantanamo detainees are disorganized to the point of being non-existant. Almost certainly, this would mean the evidence is not in any shape to pass muster in a U.S. Courtroom.

• Seeking to defuse one of Republican's most potent arguments, the president added: "Let me begin by disposing of one argument as plainly as I can: we are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people." 
   
   Obama rejected calls for a "truth commission" about the Bush administration's handling of the war on terror, saying he has "no interest in spending our time re-litigating the policies of the last eight years."

   

  "I want to solve these problems, and I want to solve them together as Americans," he said. "In all of the areas that I have discussed today, the policies that I have proposed represent a new direction from the last eight years. ... If we cannot stand for those core values, then we are not keeping faith with the documents that are enshrined in this hall."
• "Decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable – a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions; that failed to use our values as a compass," Obama said. "And that is why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people."

3 more annotations...

• Republicans were given fresh ammunition to attack the planned closure on Wednesday when Robert Mueller, the FBI director, voiced “concerns” about the prospect of detainees being brought to the US. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that the FBI had opposed a recommendation by Mr Obama’s Guantánamo task force to release two Chinese Uighurs in the US.

  “The concerns we have about individuals who may support terrorism being in the US run from ... providing financing, radicalising others ... [to] the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the US,” Mr Mueller told Congress.

• A top al-Qaeda suspect held at Guantanamo Bay will be sent to New York for trial, an Obama administration official said Wednesday. Ahmed Ghailani would be the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the U.S. and the first to face trial in a civilian criminal court.

   

  An official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to disclose the decision, told The Associated Press the administration has decided to bring Ghailani to trial in New York. He was indicted there for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa— attacks that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. It was not immediately clear when the transfer would occur.

• Ghailani, a Tanzanian, has been categorized as a high-value detainee by U.S. authorities after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004 and transferred to the U.S. detention at the U.S. naval base in Cuba two years later.

   

  The official said the administration plans to announce Thursday morning that Ghailani will be brought to trial for the embassy attacks. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment.

• The president had not decided where some of the detainees would be sent and a presidential commission was studying the issue, press secretary Robert Gibbs added.

  In other developments

  • FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress detainees might "support terrorism" in the US if allowed to go free

  • A federal judge said the US could continue to hold some prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely without any charges

• Obama administration officials insist the deadline for closing the camp will be met but many legislators say they need further convincing of White House plans to move many of the detainees on to the US mainland.

  "The American people don't want these men walking the streets of America's neighbourhoods," Republican Senator John Thune said.

  "The American people don't want these detainees held at a military base or federal prison in their backyard, either."

  • It there is enough evidence against them to detain them, then why should they be walking the streets of any neighborhood? Do we not have prisons secure enough to hold them? What about the maximum security prisons that are already holding convicted terrorists on the U.S. mainland?
    
    Or is the evidence against them so flimsy (consiting of little more than the assertions of Afghan Forces or civilians who were paid $5,000 or more for turning them in, with nothing more than an accusation) or tainted (confesions obtained while the detainee was tortured) that it would never stand up in an American court of law? Is the danger, then, in bringing them to the mainland that they mighht end up in United States courts, where the standards of evidence and proof are higher.

• Most Democrats support Mr Obama's commitment to close Guantanamo Bay, but realise that agreeing to fund an ill-prepared process would provide fodder for the Republican opposition, says the BBC's James Coomarasamy in Washington.

  The new setback follows Mr Obama's decision to revive the military tribunal system for some Guantanamo detainees.

  In one of his first acts on taking office, he halted the Bush-era military commissions, saying the US was entering a new era of respecting human rights.
• • A ban on evidence obtained by harsh interrogation
  • Restrictions on hearsay evidence
  • More leeway for detainees to choose their own lawyers

2 more annotations...

• Still, it would be reassuring if someone on Capitol Hill stood up and said, “Hey, we blew it.

  “We knew – or should have known – that inexcusable things were being done behind closed doors, and we didn’t speak up. The whole country was enraged after 9/11 and terrified of al-Qaida, and we were, too. We lost sight of our values. No excuses.”

  Too much to ask, we suppose

• Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the Obama administration had no choice but to order the shutdown of the prison at Guantanamo because "the name itself is a condemnation" of U.S. anti-terrorism strategy. In an interview broadcast Friday on NBC's "Today" show, Gates called the facility on the island of Cuba "probably one of the finest prisons in the world today." But at the same time, he said it had become "a taint" on the reputation of America.

  Gates has served both President George W. Bush and now Barack Obama at the Pentagon. In an interview taped Thursday aboard the retired World War II-era aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, the defense secretary said that once the decision was made to close Guantanamo, "the question is, where do you put them?" He said Obama would do nothing to endanger the public and said there has never been an escape from a "super-max" prison in this country.

  Of criticism the president's plan would jeopardize people's safety, Gates said: "I think that one of the points ... was that he had no interest whatsoever in releasing publicly detainees who might come back to harm Americans."
• "There are no neat or easy answers here," Obama said in a speech in which he pledged anew to clean up what he said was "quite simply a mess" at Guantanamo that he had inherited from the Bush administration.

• US Army soldiers in Afghanistan took dozens of pictures of their colleagues   pointing assault rifles and pistols at the heads and backs of hooded and bound   detainees and another photograph showed two male soldiers and one female soldier   pointing a broom to one detainee "as if I was sticking the end of a broom   stick into [his] rectum," according to the female soldier's account as   told to an Army criminal investigator.
•  Documents found on the ACLU web site describe many of the photographs that   were set for release at the end of the month. The ACLU has been trying to gain   access to the photographs for nearly six years. The ACLU obtained the files   describing the pictures in 2005 as part of the organization's wide-ranging Freedom   of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Bush administration, seeking documents   related to the treatment of "war on terror" prisoners in US custody.
•     Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, confirmed that the photographs described   in documents posted on the group's web site were those that President Obama   has decided to withhold, fearing the disclosure would stoke anti-American sentiment   and endanger US troops.

• Last September, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the   prisoner abuse photographs released. The Bush administration challenged the   ruling, and in March the court denied that petition. The appeals court also   shot down the Bush administration's attempt to radically expand FOIA exemptions   for withholding the photos, stating that the Bush administration had attempted   to use the FOIA exemptions as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy."

   

      In April, the Obama administration had agreed to release the photos because   the Justice Department said it did not believe it could convince the Supreme   Court to review the case.
•     The appeals court panel ordered the 21 photographs taken in Afghanistan and   in Iraq that depict detainees being abused to be released. About 23 other pictures   taken at undisclosed locations in Iraq and Afghanistan were also subject to   release.
•     About 31 digital photographs contained on a compact disc discovered in June   2004, during an office clean-up at Bagram Airfield, also depicted the corpse   of a "local national," who died from "apparent gunshot wounds,"   and uniformed US soldiers from the Second Platoon of the 22nd Infantry Battalion   stationed at Fire Base Tycze and Dae Rah Wod (DRW) kicking and punching prisoners   whose heads were covered with "sand bags" and blindfolds and hands   were "zipped-tied," according to a US Army criminal investigation.
•     The soldiers said they intended to keep the prisoner abuse photographs as "mementos"   to recall their deployment in Afghanistan, according to an Army criminal investigation.
•     Another photograph that was set for release at the end of month that is now   being withheld was taken in December 2003 and was found on a government computer.   The image shows three soldiers at the St. Mere Forward Operating Base posing   with three Iraqi detainees "zip-tied to bars in a stress position, fully   clothed, with hoods over their heads."
•     One female soldier in the photo is pointing a broom "as if I was sticking   the end of a broom stick into the rectum of a restrained detainee," she   testified to Army investigators in April 2004.

• On March 27, 2004, this soldier sent an email to an undisclosed number of her   colleagues. She discovered that the photograph she appeared in had been widely   disseminated and that she was under investigation.

   

  You guys have a picture of me holding a broom near a detainee.   I don't have a copy of this picture anywhere ... but some Marine got a hold   of it and now I'm being investigated for detainee abuse. I guess one of you   share (sic) the photos with the Marines ... but either way, they have a copy of that   picture.
  
   Anyway, this email serves two purposes. First, I know that at least one more   of you guys is in the picture, but I cannot remember who. If I'm being investigated   ... I'm sure that the other individuals in this picture will be investigated   as well, so heads up! Secondly, can I please have a copy of this picture ASAP!!!   I can't stress how badly I need this picture so I can show people that it was   just a posed shot, and that I wasn't physically beating anyone with a broom.
•     One of the recipients of the soldier's email replied the same day with a copy   of the photograph and a note that said, "I can't see how they think this   is anything but fun."
•     Soldiers admitted that dozens of other photographs of prisoner abuse were destroyed   after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke in May 2004. A separate Army criminal   investigative report prepared that month also found that a soldier "possessed   a photograph of himself pointing what appears to be a pistol at an unidentified   [prisoner], whose hands were tied and his head covered laying down."

• The soldiers interviewed said Special Forces out of Fort Bragg were in charge   of operating the military facilities where the photographs were taken and had   never provided soldiers with any written guidelines on how to handle detainees.

   

      In addition, soldiers interviewed said Special Forces Psyops and military interrogation   teams authorized them to "play loud music and keep detainees awake if the   interrogators wanted them to."

   

      One soldier said they "kept the detainees awake by holding them up or   by playing the loud music," the report noted. The soldier said Special   Forces instructed soldiers that prisoners who were "violent or had information"   were "flex-cuffed on their hands, heads covered and not allowed to sleep."

   

      Sleep deprivation, which is what the soldier appeared to be describing, would   be a violation of the Geneva Conventions ban on cruel and inhumane treatment   and underscores how the Bush administration's interrogation policies trickled   down to low-level soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
•     One soldier admitted during a July 2004 interview with an Army investigator   that he took "bad photographs" before "the incident in Iraq,"   which is likely a reference to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The soldier characterized   the "bad photographs" as those in which the "public would be   outraged" if they were released. He went on to state "that he was   standing behind a prisoner with a weapon holding it at their head" in one   of the two photographs he appeared in.
•     The corpse of the dead Afghanistan national was photographed sometime in January   2004 after he was shot to death by US soldiers, who believed he was responsible   for a rocket-propelled grenade attack on Fire Base Tycze that seriously wounded   three US soldiers. However, an investigation into the incident was never conducted.

• On Wednesday, Obama told reporters that the photographs "are not particularly   sensational."

   

      Obama said that his decision to withhold the photographs stemmed from his personal   review of the photos and his concern that their release would endanger American   soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. But pressure from Bush administration holdovers,   the media and two senators also played a role.

   

      Obama's reversal marks a renewal of US hypocrisy regarding the abuse of detainees   and the hiding of evidence about such crimes.
•     For instance, last September in upholding a lower court ruling ordering the   release of the photos, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit noted   that past US administrations had championed the release of photos that showed   prisoners of war being abused and tortured.
•     Notably, after World War II, the US government publicized photos of prisoners   in Japanese and German prisons and concentration camps, which the court noted,   "showed emaciated prisoners, subjugated detainees, and even corpses. But   the United States championed the use of the photos as a means of holding the   perpetrators accountable."

  • The same standards do not apply to us.
•     The Bush administration's legal arguments were rife with other examples of   hypocrisy, including an argument that release of the photos - even with the   personal characteristics of detainees obscured - would violate their privacy   rights under the Geneva Conventions.
•     The irony was that the Bush administration - with the help of legal opinions   drafted by Justice Department lawyers - had maintained that detainees from the   war in Afghanistan and the larger "war on terror" were not entitled   to prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions.

18 more annotations...

• Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican lawmaker who represents some of the Virginia suburbs outside Washington, is fighting the possibility that Obama will resettle 17 Uighurs - Turkic Muslims from western China - in or near his district. That resistance comes despite Wolf's history of supporting Uighurs (pronounced WEE'-gurz). Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently acknowledged that some of the Uighurs are likely to be released in the United States, but the administration has not announced plans to move them.
• Wolf's efforts, and those of other lawmakers, could derail Obama's attempts to resettle detainees in other nations, especially those in Europe, which have cheered Obama's plans to close Guantanamo Bay next year.
• Obama hopes Europeans and other allies will back up their words of support by accepting some of the prisoners. Last week, a Guantanamo detainee, Lakhdar Boumediene, was released to live in France, which accepted the Algerian as a gesture to the Obama administration.
• But U.S. officials say they will be hard-pressed to persuade other countries to accept released detainees when the United States has not done so. Attorney General Eric Holder said as much last month, telling an audience in Berlin that to close Guantanamo, "we must all make sacrifices and we must all be willing to make unpopular choices."

2 more annotations...

• While this entire report fills in some rather large gaps in al-Hubayshi’s testimony in Guantánamo — and also provides some apposite insight into his opinion of bin Laden — what was missing from Faiza Saleh Ambah’s interview was any mention whatsoever of another allegedly pivotal figure in al-Qaeda: Abu Zubaydah, the Palestinian-born facilitator of the Khaldan camp, and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006.
• Contrary to claims made by the administration and the CIA — which, as described in Time magazine shortly after his capture, indicated that he was “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit” — the story that emerged in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine, was that Zubaydah was nothing like the pivotal figure that the CIA had supposed him to be, and had actually turned out to be mentally ill.
• Speaking of his status as a “high-value detainee,” he said that his only role was to operate a guest house used by those who were training at Khaldan, and confirmed al-Hubayshi’s analysis of his relationship with bin Laden, saying, “Bin Laden wanted al-Qaeda to have control of Khaldan, but we refused since we had different ideas.” He explained that he opposed attacks on civilian targets, which brought him into conflict with bin Laden, and although he admitted that he had been an enemy of the US since childhood, because of its support for Israel, pointed out that his enmity was towards the government and the military, and not the American people.

1 more annotation...

• While CIA officials have described him as an important insider whose disclosures under intense pressure saved lives, some FBI agents and analysts say he is largely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures.

  The question of whether Abu Zubaida -- whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein -- was an unstable source who provided limited intelligence under gentle questioning, or a hardened terrorist who cracked under extremely harsh measures, goes to the heart of the current Washington debate over coercive interrogations and torture.

• A public assessment of Abu Zubaida's case has been complicated by the newly revealed destruction of the videotaped record of his questioning, according to congressional sources. Intelligence officials say no verbatim transcripts were made, although classified daily summaries were prepared.

  Bush has sided publicly with the CIA's version of events. "We knew that Zubaida had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking," Bush said in September 2006. "And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures," which the president said prompted Abu Zubaida to disclose information leading to the capture of Sept. 11, 2001, plotter Ramzi Binalshibh.

  But former FBI officials privy to details of the case continue to dispute the CIA's account of the effectiveness of the harsh measures, making the record of Abu Zubaida's interrogation hard for outsiders to assess.
• There is little dispute, according to officials from both agencies, that Abu Zubaida provided some valuable intelligence before CIA interrogators began to rough him up, including information that helped identify Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and al-Qaeda operative Jose Padilla. Footnotes in the 9/11 Commission report attribute information about a variety of al-Qaeda personnel and activities to interrogations of Abu Zubaida beginning in April 2002 and lasting through February 2004.

  • What little information he had was obtained without torture. Since then, nothing. At this point, if he had any further information, the torture he was subjected to has probably so destroyed his mind that he couldn't tell us much more anyway.
    
    the Zubayeh case makes me feel as thought the reality is that we have destroyed the lives and minds of men who were with either innocent or minor players at best. Having done so, it's impossible to know what to do with them.
• Former CIA officer John Kiriakou -- who participated in Abu Zubaida's capture, was present for the next three days and later saw classified reports of the agency's harsh interrogations -- attracted attention last week when he said that information obtained from Abu Zubaida under measures that Kiriakou now regards as torture "probably saved lives."
• But FBI officials, including agents who questioned him after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home, have concluded that even though he knew some al-Qaeda players, he provided interrogators with increasingly dubious information as the CIA's harsh treatment intensified in late 2002.
• In legal papers prepared for a military hearing, Abu Zubaida himself has asserted that he told his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear to make the treatment stop.

• Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida's information.

  "I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much."
• Once Abu Zubaida's identity was confirmed, the CIA station chief ordered him to be watched around the clock while U.S. officials made plans for intensive questioning at a secret site elsewhere, several officials said. He was flown out of Pakistan after three days.
• In his book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years in the CIA," Tenet wrote that a trauma physician from Johns Hopkins Medical Center was flown to Pakistan to help keep Abu Zubaida alive during his transfer to the new interrogation site. "Not that we had any sympathy for Zubaydah; we just didn't want him dying before we could learn what he might have to tell us about plans for future attacks," Tenet said.
• During his first month of captivity, Abu Zubaida described an al-Qaeda associate whose physical description matched that of Padilla, leading to Padilla's arrest at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago in May 2002. A former CIA officer said in an interview that Abu Zubaida's "disclosure of Padilla was accidental." The officer added that Abu Zubaida "was talking about minor things and provided a small amount of information and a description of a person, just enough to identify him because he had just visited the U.S. Embassy" in Pakistan.
• Other officials, including Bush, have said that during those early weeks -- before the interrogation turned harsh -- Abu Zubaida confirmed that Mohammed's role as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

• A rift nonetheless swiftly developed between FBI agents, who were largely pleased with the progress of the questioning, and CIA officers, who felt Abu Zubaida was holding out on them and providing disinformation. Tensions came to a head after FBI agents witnessed the use of some harsh tactics on Abu Zubaida, including keeping him naked in his cell, subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music.

  "They said, 'You've got to be kidding me,' " said Coleman, recalling accounts from FBI employees who were there. " 'This guy's a Muslim. That's not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?' " Coleman helped lead the bureau's efforts against Osama bin Laden for a decade, ending in 2004.

10 more annotations...

• In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said. 

   

   Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed. 
• Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.
• Abu Zubaida's case presents the Obama administration with one of its most difficult decisions as it reviews the files of the 241 detainees still held in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Abu Zubaida -- a nom de guerre for the man born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein -- was never charged in a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, but some U.S. officials are pushing to have him charged now with conspiracy.
• Others in the U.S. government, including CIA officials, fear the consequences of taking a man into court who was waterboarded on largely false assumptions, because of the prospect of interrogation methods being revealed in detail and because of the chance of an acquittal that might set a legal precedent. Instead, they would prefer to send him to Jordan.
• Until the attacks on New York and Washington, Abu Zubaida was a committed jihadist who regarded the United States as an enemy principally because of its support of Israel. He helped move people in and out of military training camps in Afghanistan, including some men who were or became members of al-Qaeda, according to interviews with multiple sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He was widely known as a kind of travel agent for those seeking such training.

• Noor al-Deen, a Syrian, was a teenager when he was captured along with Abu Zubaida at a Pakistani safe house. Perhaps because of his youth and agitated state, he readily answered U.S. questions, officials said, and the questioning went on for months, first in Pakistan and later in a detention facility in Morocco. His description of Abu Zubaida was consistent: The older man was a well-known functionary with links to al-Qaeda, but he knew little detailed information about the group's operations. 

   

   The counterterrorism official rejected that characterization, saying, "Based on what he shared during his interrogations, he was certainly aware of many of al-Qaeda's activities and operatives." 
• Abu Zubaida quickly told U.S. interrogators of Mohammed and of others he knew to be in al-Qaeda, and he revealed the plans of the low-level operatives who fled Afghanistan with him. Some were intent on returning to target American forces with bombs; others wanted to strike on American soil again, according to military documents and law enforcement sources.
• Such intelligence was significant but not blockbuster material. Frustrated, the Bush administration ratcheted up the pressure -- for the first time approving the use of increasingly harsh interrogations, including waterboarding.

  • After being told that Zubayeh was not an important figure, and not likely to have any actionable information, or any information of real value.

• "The government doesn't retreat from who KSM is, and neither does KSM," said Joseph Margulies, a professor of law at Northwestern University and one of Abu Zubaida's attorneys, using an abbreviation for Mohammed. "With Zubaida, it's different. The government seems finally to understand he is not at all the person they thought he was. But he was tortured. And that's just a profoundly embarrassing position for the government to be in." 

   

   His lawyers want the U.S. government to arrange for Abu Zubaida's transfer to a country besides Jordan -- possibly Saudi Arabia, where he has relatives. 

   

   The Justice Department declined repeated requests for comment. 

• Even before President Obama suspended military commissions at the military base in Cuba, prosecutors had expunged Abu Zubaida's name from the charge sheets of a number of detainees who were captured with him and stood accused of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. 

   

   When they were first charged in 2005, these detainees were accused of conspiring with Abu Zubaida, and the charge sheets contained numerous references to Abu Zubaida's alleged terrorist activities. When the charges were refiled last year, his name had vanished from the documents. 

   

   Abu Zubaida was born in 1971 in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father and a Jordanian mother, according to court papers. In 1991, he moved to Afghanistan and joined mujaheddin fighting Afghan communists, part of the civil war that raged after the 1989 withdrawal of the Soviet Union. He was seriously wounded by shrapnel from a mortar blast in 1992, sustaining head injuries that left him with severe memory problems, which still linger. 

   

   In 1994, he became the Pakistan-based coordinator for the Khalden training camp, outside the Afghan city of Khowst. He directed recruits to the camp and raised money for it, according to testimony he gave at a March 2007 hearing in Guantanamo Bay. 

•  The application of techniques such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime -- prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction. 

   

   Abu Zubaida's revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports. 

• On the night of March 28, 2002, Pakistani and American intelligence officers raided the Faisalabad safe house where Abu Zubaida had been staying. A firefight ensued, and Abu Zubaida was captured after jumping from the building's second floor. He had been shot three times. 

   

   Cowering on the ground floor and also shot was Noor al-Deen, Abu Zubaida's 19-year-old colleague; one source said that he worshiped the older man as a hero. Deen was wide-eyed with fear and appeared to believe that he was about to be executed, remembered John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who participated in the raid. 

   

   "He was frightened -- mostly over what we were going to do with him," Kiriakou said. "He had come to the conclusion that his life was over." 

   

   Deen was eventually transferred to Syria, but attempts to firmly establish his current whereabouts were unsuccessful. 

• "We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," one former intelligence official said. 

   

   Despite the poor results, Bush White House officials and CIA leaders continued to insist that the harsh measures applied against Abu Zubaida and others produced useful intelligence that disrupted terrorist plots and saved American lives. 

• Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests. 

   

   The agency provided none, the officials said. 
• "He was the above-ground support," said one former Justice Department official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida. "He was the guy keeping the safe house, and that's not someone who gets to know the details of the plans. To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous."

13 more annotations...

• Reinforcing claims made over the last few years — by FBI agents, by author Ron Suskind, and by myself — that the supposed senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was less significant than he was made out to be, the Washington Post ran a front-page story yesterday, in which, drawing on interviews with “former senior government officials who closely followed [his] interrogations,” Peter Finn and Joby Warrick reminded the world that Zubaydah was not actually a senior al-Qaeda operative and had no information about the inner workings of al-Qaeda.
• Moreover, the sources cited by the Post maintained that his torture in secret CIA custody, which began shortly after his capture in March 2002 and transfer to a secret prison in Thailand, and was the first implementation of a torture program for “high-value detainees” that was endorsed at the highest levels of the Bush administration, was so worthless that “not a single significant plot was foiled” as a result of it.
• the Post’s article established that Zubaydah, “born in 1971 in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father and a Jordanian mother, according to court papers,” traveled to Afghanistan in 1991 to support the mujahideen fighting the Communist government that was clinging to power in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, but was “seriously wounded by shrapnel from a mortar blast in 1992, sustaining head injuries that left him with severe memory problems, which still linger.”
• In 1994, while based in Pakistan, Zubaydah began fundraising and coordinating recruits for the Khaldan training camp, in eastern Afghanistan. Although regularly described by the Bush administration as an al-Qaeda training camp, it is clear from numerous sources, including the 9/11 Commission Report, that Khaldan and another camp, Durunta, “were not al-Qaeda facilities,” although there was apparently some contact with Osama bin Laden when it came to exploiting promising recruits.
• After his capture, in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, Zubaydah was flown to a CIA-run “black site” in Thailand, where the FBI began interrogating him using old-school, torture-free methods, which had a proven track record. Within a matter of weeks, however, the FBI agents were shamefully discarded by the administration’s most senior officials, who believed that another major attack was imminent, and that only the use of torture would persuade a significant captured terrorist — as Zubaydah was presumed to be — to talk. The job of interrogating Zubaydah was handed over to the CIA, whose new repertoire of techniques consisted primarily of torture, including waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, extreme violence, prolonged isolation, and the use of sustained nudity and loud music and noise.
• “He was the above-ground support. He was the guy keeping the safe house, and that’s not someone who gets to know the details of the plans. To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous.”

  • If Americans support torturing man like Zubayah, who clearly couldnt' have had information, merely for being associated with Al Qaeda, then we have become no better than the terrorists we hunt.
    
    In any other scenario, like a criminal investigation, Zubayeh might be pumped for information about who and what he knew, but not treated like this. He might have been offered immunity or a lower sentence for whatever information he could offer.
• “because his name often turned up in intelligence traffic linked to al-Qaeda transactions,” some within the intelligence community presumed that he was a significant figure, whereas the truth was that, although committed to the idea of jihad, he did not share Osama bin Laden’s aims, and “regarded the United States as an enemy principally because of its support of Israel.”

• The officials explained that he “had strained and limited relations with bin Laden and only vague knowledge before the Sept. 11 attacks that something was brewing.”

   

  Despite this, officials recalled that the pressure for information “from upper levels of the government,” where meetings were held daily to assess the terrorist threat, was “tremendous.” “They couldn’t stand the idea that there wasn’t anything new,” one of the Post’s sources said. “They’d say, ‘You aren’t working hard enough.’ There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution — a feeling that ‘He’s going to talk, and if he doesn’t talk, we’ll do whatever.’”
• the Post’s article makes clear, nothing of value was gained through Zubaydah’s torture. “Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated,” former officials explained, “while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaydah — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced.”
• The only useful lead cited — that of Jose Padilla, who had reportedly planned to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in New York — is itself extremely dubious, as deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted in June 2002, shortly after Padilla was seized at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, and before he was declared an “enemy combatant” and imprisoned and tortured for three and a half years on the US mainland, that “there was not an actual plan” to set off a “dirty bomb,” and that his research had not gone much further than surfing the internet. Summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

  • And destroyed the lives of two people, one for doing little more than performing a Google search.
• Abu Zubaydah’s relative insignificance and the pointlessness of his torture was first revealed in 2006, in Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine. Far from being “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit” (as TIME magazine — following the government line — described him after his capture), Zubaydah “turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be,” in the words of Barton Gellman, who reviewed Suskind’s book for the Washington Post in 2006. He “appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations,” and was, instead, the “go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like,” reinforcing what former officials explained to the Post for Sunday’s article.
• Suskind described how, through a close scrutiny of his diaries, in which FBI analysts found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said,” Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda, told his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”
• Suskind also provided a colorful description of the results of Zubaydah’s torture, when he produced his “torrent” of false leads, explaining that he “confessed” to all manner of supposed plots — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty — and that, as a result, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each target … The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
• According to Suskind, Bush told CIA director George Tenet, “I said he was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” He added that the President “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” and asked, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” As Suskind described it, “Interrogators did their best to find out,” introducing the torture techniques whose clinically regulated horrors were exposed so memorably by Mark Danner, and also by Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side.

  • If this is true, then president Bush knew that we had detained and tortured a man innocent of much more than buying plane tickets for wives and children -- who knew nothing of any attacks, gave information that was determined as useless, and was already mentally disturbed -- and ordered him tortured further.
    
    Our president was, essentially, a psychopath.
• In December 2007, when the story first broke that the CIA had illegally destroyed videotapes of interrogations including those of Zubaydah, Dan Coleman spoke out again, revisiting the CIA’s introduction of the torture program, after the successes recorded by the FBI, and telling the Washington Post how, when CIA operatives began holding him naked in his cell, “subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music,” FBI operatives who witnessed it said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. This guy’s a Muslim. That’s not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?”
• Coleman also reiterated his skepticism about Zubaydah’s supposed importance, describing him as a “safehouse keeper” with mental problems, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” pointing out that his diaries were “full of flowery and philosophical meanderings, and made little mention of terrorism or al-Qaeda,” and explaining how he and others at the FBI had concluded not only that he had severe mental problems — particularly because of the head injury that he had suffered in 1992 — but also that this explained why he was regarded with suspicion by the al-Qaeda leadership. “They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone,” Coleman said. “You think they’re going to tell him anything?”
• I also examined Zubaydah’s story, revisiting his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, when he stated that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, as Sunday’s Post article confirmed, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.” He added that his only role was to operate a guest house used by those who were training at Khaldan, and he also confirmed senior officials’ analysis of his relationship with bin Laden, saying, “Bin Laden wanted al-Qaeda to have control of Khaldan, but we refused since we had different ideas.” Further confirming points made in the Post’s article, he explained that he opposed attacks on civilian targets, which brought him into conflict with bin Laden, and although he admitted that he had been an enemy of the US since childhood, because of its support for Israel, pointed out that his enmity was towards the government and the military, and not the American people.
• Al-Hubayshi told his tribunal in 2004 that, far from being a mastermind, Zubaydah was responsible for “receiving people and financing the camp,” that he once bought him travel tickets, and that he was the man he went to when he needed a replacement passport. He also confirmed that Zubaydah did not have a long-standing relationship with bin Laden. When asked, “When you were with Abu Zubaydah, did you ever see Osama bin Laden?” he replied, “In 1998, Abu Zubaydah and Osama bin Laden didn’t like each other.” He added, “In 2001, I think the relationship was okay,” and explained that bin Laden put pressure on Zubaydah to close Khaldan, essentially because he wanted to run more camps himself.
• He was noticeably missing from the 27 prisoners charged in the Military Commission trial system at Guantánamo (before Barack Obama suspended the trials on his second day in office), but no previous reports have addressed what may happen to him now. The Post reported that some US officials “are pushing to have him charged now with conspiracy,” but that others, including CIA officials, want him sent to Jordan, where he has been accused of involvement with plots to attack a hotel and Christian holy sites. The Post explained that these officials “fear the consequences of taking a man into court who was waterboarded on largely false assumptions, because of the prospect of interrogation methods being revealed in detail and because of the chance of an acquittal that might set a legal precedent.”

  • If he is sent to Jordan. Will he be tortured? Will he survive?
• On the other hand, Zubaydah’s lawyers want him to be transferred to a country other than Jordan, perhaps Saudi Arabia, where he has relatives
• The most extraordinary revelation in the Post’s article, however, concerns Noor al-Deen, a Syrian teenager who was captured with Zubaydah in Pakistan. According to the former officials who spoke to the Post, al-Deen, who, like Zubaydah, suffered gunshot wounds during his capture, “worshiped the older man as a hero.” Former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou explained that al-Deen was terrified, and feared that he was about to be executed. “He was frightened — mostly over what we were going to do with him,” Kiriakou said. “He had come to the conclusion that his life was over.”
• Unlike the handful of other men seized with Zubaydah, who ended up being sent to Guantánamo (without extensive stays in secret CIA custody), al-Deen and another man, Omar Ghramesh, were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and sent to third countries to be interrogated.
• In 2006, Almalki was interviewed by Stephen Grey for his book Ghost Plane, and explained that two suspects seized with Zubaydah — Omar Ghramesh and an unnamed teenager — were rendered to the “Palestine Branch” on May 14, 2002, along with Abu Abdul Halim Dalak, a student seized in Pakistan in November 2001. Ghramesh explained that in Pakistan US agents had shown him photos of Abu Zubaydah looking battered and bruised, and had told him, “If you don’t talk, this is what will happen to you.”
• Until now, the identity of the “unnamed teenager” was unknown, but it is now apparent that he was Noor al-Deen. The Post explained that the US officials had stated that, “perhaps because of his youth and agitated state,” al-Deen “readily answered US questions,” confirming that Zubaydah “was a well-known functionary with links to al-Qaeda, but he knew little detailed information about the group’s operations.” Nevertheless, his questioning “went on for months,” first in Pakistan, then in Morocco, and then in Syria.
• Unlike the prisoners in Guantánamo, who have at least had some kind of opportunity to challenge the basis of their detention, through two significant Supreme Court rulings granting them habeas corpus rights, these men — genuinely, America’s Disappeared — have effectively vanished off the face of the earth, and are about as far from having any rights as it is possible for a human being to be.

23 more annotations...

• The positions of prominent advocates and opponents on each side   are clear. But what do we know about how the American people in general have   come to view the use of torture by the U.S. government?
• Since 2004, representative samples   have been asked, "Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists   in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be   justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?" The results over   this time period have shown only minor fluctuations. The most recent numbers,   from last month, reveal that 15% of Americans believe torture is often justified,   34% think it is sometimes justified, 22% consider it rarely justified, and 25%   believe torture is never justified. So not only do 49% consider torture justified   at least some of the time, fully 71% refuse to rule it out entirely.
• in January 2009. Fox News/Opinion Dynamics asked a national   sample of Americans, "Do you think the use of harsh interrogation techniques,   including torture, has ever saved American lives since the September 11 (2001)   terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?" The results:   45% "Yes" and 41% "No" (with 14% responding 'Don't Know").   In other words, almost half of Americans think torture "works."
• a national Gallup poll   in January 2005, about eight months after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal,   sheds some light here. The following question was posed: "Here is a list   of possible interrogation techniques that can be used on prisoners. Do you think   it is right or wrong for the U.S. government to use them on prisoners suspected   of having information about possible terrorist attacks against the United States?"   In order of approval percentages, the survey found that 50% approved of depriving   prisoners of sleep for several days; 36% approved of threatening to transfer   prisoners to a country known for using torture; 29% approved of threatening   prisoners with dogs; 18 % approved of forcing prisoners to remain naked and   chained in uncomfortable positions in cold rooms for several hours; 14% approved   of strapping prisoners on boards and forcing their heads underwater until they   think they are drowning; and 13% approved of having female interrogators make   physical contact with Muslim men during religious observances that prohibit   such contact.
•  Based on this sampling of polling results, it is easy at first to be surprised   and troubled by the degree to which Americans have expressed support for the   inhumane treatment and torture of detainees. But public sentiment on such matters   does not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, it often reflects the influence of carefully   orchestrated marketing campaigns by powerful vested interests eager to shape   opinion in support of a specific agenda or facts on the ground. Certainly it   is now well known that the Bush administration embraced the use of "enhanced   interrogation techniques" in national security settings. It is therefore   instructive to carefully consider the five-pronged message that they and their   backers promoted to create a citizenry supportive of torture.
•   The first component involved fostering a "war on terror" environment   of pervasive fear in which the prospect of massive, catastrophic harm was repeatedly   given center stage. Spurred on by improbable ticking time-bomb scenarios where   every second matters, perceptions of an urgent need to protect the country from   looming disaster created a "whatever it takes" mentality in which   efforts to extract crucial information through harsh interrogations and torture   became a "no brainer."
•     The second element advanced the view that we need not be helpless against this   threat because through torture-and torture alone-we can learn what we need to   foil the plans of evildoers. Unsubstantiated evidentiary claims, hidden from   inspection by veils of secrecy, were used to argue that specific interrogation   techniques - regardless of how they might repulse us - were ultimately   the only way we could protect ourselves.

  • This is neither the best way to get information or the best way to get reliable information.
•     Third was the frequent assurance that those we subjected to torture were themselves   guilty of having participated in heinous acts of injustice that caused the loss   of many innocent lives. This argument served to diminish concerns the public   might have felt over the treatment these individuals received while in custody.   Even in the absence of legal proceedings, the detainees could be deemed deserving   of the physical and psychological pain inflicted upon them - they were   responsible for their own suffering.

  • Americans accepted the Bush administration's blanket assertion of guilt, without know of the evidence against them or the quality of that evidence.
    
    This is similair to the death-penalty advocates who argue "They must be guilty of something, or they wouldn't be on death row." Even when confronted with the likelyhood that a comdemned prisoner is innocent of the crime for which he or she is sentenced to die, the fact that this indiivdual is in prison means "they must have done something, even if we don't know what it is," therefore they belong right where they are. Due process for the crimes we think they might have committed is not required.
•     Fourth was the repeated assertion that the United States has a finely tuned   moral compass and engages in torture only with regret and discomfort, only as   a last resort, and only in the service of a far greater good. Sharp contrasts   were drawn between "them" and "us"-between the detainees'   innate evilness and our inherent goodness, between their vile aims and our righteous   purpose. In this context, the interrogators were presented as courageous and   heroic, worthy of praise rather than criticism.
•     The fifth and final component was a concerted effort to stifle open debate   when questions about the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques"   arose. Standard strategy here involved painting skeptics and critics-including   human rights leaders and organizations-as untrustworthy, irresponsible, misinformed,   weak, or unpatriotic. In so doing, the public was encouraged to discount, ignore,   or condemn these voices of concern, and important words of warning therefore   went unheeded.
•     In sum, this seemingly successful campaign of mass persuasion depended upon   convincing the public to believe five things: (1) our country is in great danger,   (2) torture is the only thing that can keep us safe, (3) the people we torture   are monstrous wrongdoers, (4) our decision to torture is moral and for the greater   good, and (5) critics of our torture policy should not be trusted. And all the   while, the marketers painstakingly avoided using the actual word "torture"-and   contested the word's use by anyone else. Of course, this strategy is by no means   unique to the selling of torture. A similar approach, designed for hawking war,   was used with devastating and tragic effect in building public support for the   invasion of Iraq in 2003.

9 more annotations...

• Let's face it, Vice President Dick Cheney didn't just have the President's ear, it is pretty clear he had President Bush by the ear. Take this exchange with CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation this past Sunday about enhanced interrogation techniques:

    

  Schieffer: "You approved this?"

    

  Cheney: "Right."

    

  Schieffer: "Did President Bush know everything you knew?

    

  Cheney: "I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew -- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it."

    

  He "basically authorized it?" It sounds like back then Cheney said, "Just sign here George and don't worry, I got your back." Only now it is clear Cheney is saying, "If you go after me, you got to go after Bush too!"

• The United Nations Convention Against Torture, of which America is a signatory, says, "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession" is torture. Further, torture is illegal under U.S. law, and "The Army Field Manual" specifies that waterboarding is prohibited.

    

  Clearly the OLC was instructed by the White House to manufacture guidelines under which waterboarding would not be torture. In other words, harsh enough to have an impact but gentle enough so as not to cause pain. Journalist Christopher Hitchens underwent waterboarding for a Vanity Fair article last August and his conclusion was, "If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture." So much for legality.

    

  Whether waterboarding worked or not appears to be, at best, a jump ball. Most experts believe that torture does not work because prisoners lie. But Dick Cheney is emphatic that waterboarding did work, and he says four former directors of the CIA agree. As Cheney told Schieffer, "No regrets. I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. I'm convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives."

• However, if it can be shown that the OLC's advice was not only inadequate, but also tailored to specific requests from senior officials, then it may be that the "golden shield" will turn to dust.
• This threat to the "golden shield" probably explains why Dick Cheney's scaremongering has been shriller than usual in the last few weeks, but what has largely been overlooked to date is another question that poses even weightier challenges for the former administration: if the use of torture techniques on Abu Zubaydah, the first supposedly significant "high-value detainee" captured by the US (on March 28, 2002), was authorized by two OLC memos issued on August 1, 2002, then who authorized the torture to which he was subjected in the 18 weeks between his capture and the moment that Jay S. Bybee, the head of the OLC, added his signature to the OLC memos?
• It's clear that the major reason this question has been overlooked is because, as the ICRC report reveals, Zubaydah was not subjected to waterboarding (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning) until after the memo was issued, but what is also apparent is that the treatment to which he was subjected before the waterboard was introduced also "constituted torture."
• when CIA director George Tenet told the President that Zubaydah had been put on pain medication to deal with the injuries he sustained during capture, Bush asked Tenet, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?" which prompted Risen to wonder whether the President was "implicitly encouraging" Tenet to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner "without the paper trail that would have come from a written presidential authorization."
• We also know that, shortly after his capture, Zubaydah was flown to Thailand, to a secret underground prison provided by the Thai government, where, as a New York Times article in September 2006 explained, "he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly loud music -- the genesis of practices later adopted by some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons."

• The details of his treatment, "based on accounts by former and current law enforcement and intelligence officials," were even more shocking. We have become somewhat inured, over the years, to stories of prisoners deprived of sleep for disturbing long periods of time, in which the use of loud, non-stop music -- in this case, the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- played an integral part.

    

  This in itself is unacceptable, as the use of music is not simply a matter of being forced to listen to the same song over and over again at ear-splitting volume, but is, instead, a component in a program of sleep deprivation and isolation designed to provoke a complete mental breakdown. One of the major reference points for the CIA in the 1950s, when it was deeply involved in investigating the efficacy of psychological torture techniques, was research conducted by Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who discovered that, "if subjects are confined without light, odor, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked," and that, within just 48 hours, those held in what he termed "perceptual isolation" can be reduced to semi-psychotic states.
• However, while some interpretation and empathy is required to understand the impact on Abu Zubaydah of his profound isolation in this period, in which, as the Times also reported, he was largely cut off from all human interaction, only occasionally punctuated by an interrogator entering his cell, saying, "You know what I want," and then leaving, there is no denying the visceral impact of the following description. "At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets," the Times explained. "He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue" (emphasis added).
• Further information about Zubaydah's treatment in Thailand has not emerged in great detail. In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer noted only that he was "held naked in a small cage, like a dog," and the ICRC report focused instead on his detention in Afghanistan, from May 2002 to February 2003. What we do know, however, from the Senate Committee's report, is that an FBI agent was so appalled by his treatment at the hands of CIA agents that he "raised objections to these techniques to the CIA and told the CIA it was 'borderline torture,'" and that, sometime later, FBI director Robert Mueller "decided that FBI agents would not participate in interrogations involving techniques the FBI did not normally use in the United States."

• In his statement to the ICRC, Zubaydah explained how, even before the waterboarding began, he was strapped naked to a chair for several weeks in a cell that was "air-conditioned and very cold," deprived of food, subjected to extreme sleep deprivation for two to three weeks -- partly by means of loud music or incessant noise, and partly because, "If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face" -- and, for the rest of the time, until the waterboarding began, was subjected to further sleep deprivation, and kept in a state of perpetual fear.

    

  This array of techniques undoubtedly appears less dramatic than the "real torturing" that followed (in which the waterboarding was accompanied by physical brutality, hooding, the daily shaving of his hair and beard, and confinement in small boxes), but, again, it is critical to try to imagine what two to three weeks of chronic sleep deprivation actually means, and to recall that, by the time Steven G. Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, revised the approval for torture techniques in May 2005, it was noted that it was only considered acceptable to subject a prisoner to 180 hours (seven and a half days) of sleep deprivation.
• Designed to teach military personnel how to resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy, the SERE program uses outlawed techniques derived from techniques used on captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean War to elicit deliberately false confessions, and includes, as the Senate Committee report explained, "stripping detainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures." In some circumstances, the techniques also include waterboarding, and, as numerous sources -- including the recently released reports and memos -- have revealed over the last few years, the reverse-engineering of the SERE techniques constituted the bedrock of the administration's interrogation program, from Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo to the secret dungeons of the CIA.
• As we also know, from the pioneering research conducted by Jane Mayer, by the time that the CIA took over Zubaydah's interrogation from the FBI, in April 2002, the team included Dr. James Mitchell, a retired Air Force SERE psychologist. Thanks to the detailed timeline provided by the Senate Committee, we now know that it was Haynes who first inquired about the applicability of the SERE program to the interrogation of prisoners in December 2001, and we also know that, in April 2002, while "experienced intelligence officers were making recommendations to improve intelligence collection"
• "JPRA officials with no training or experience were working on their own exploitation plan," and a colleague of Mitchell's, Bruce Jessen, a senior SERE psychologist, was providing recommendations for JPRA involvement in the "exploitation of select al-Qaeda detainees" in an "exploitation facility" to be established especially for the purpose -- which, presumably, turned out to be the secret dungeon provided by the Thai government.
• We also know from Mayer that discussions about the CIA's proposed interrogation techniques, in April 2002, involved numerous other senior officials -- beyond the key involvement of Haynes -- in meetings in the White House's Situation Room that were chaired by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and attended by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, and, moreover, that the level of detail provided by Tenet appalled Ashcroft to such an extent that he lamented, "History will not judge us kindly."
• In my book, this means that, regardless of the validity of the OLC's opinions, those who authorized the torture of Abu Zubaydah between March 28 and July 31, 2002 are not protected by the OLC's supposed "golden shield," and should be prosecuted for contravening the prohibition on the use of torture that, since 1988, has been enshrined in U.S. law. This may not apply to all of those who attended the meetings in the White House (plus Haynes), but it's inconceivable that the CIA began subjecting Abu Zubaydah to chronic isolation and sleep deprivation without receiving approval from somebody in high office.

12 more annotations...