Gordon writes: "The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is
the perfect example of the U.S. government's unique combination of willful
law-breaking, ass-covering memo-writing, and 'strategic incompetence.'"
Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
02 May 16
________________________________________
Lets take a moment to think about the ultimate strangeness of our American
world. In recent months, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have offered a range of
hair-raising suggestions: as president, one or the other of them might order
the U.S. military and the CIA to commit acts that would include the
waterboarding of terror suspects (or a hell of a lot worse), the killing
of the relatives of terrorists, and the carpet bombing of parts of Syria.
All of these would, legally speaking, be war crimes. This has caused shock
among many Americans in quite established quarters who have decried the
possibility of such a president, suggesting that the two of them are calling
for outright illegal acts, actual war crimes, and that the U.S. military
and others would be justified in rejecting such orders. In this context,
for instance, CIA Director John Brennan recently made it clear that no
Agency operative under his command would ever waterboard a suspect in
response to orders of such a nature from a future president. ("I will not
agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied
about because this institution needs to endure.")
These acts, in other words, are considered beyond the pale when Donald Trump
suggests them, but heres the strangeness of it all: what The Donald is only
mouthing off about, a perfectly real American president (and vice president
and secretary of defense, and so on) actually did. Among other things,
under the euphemistic term enhanced interrogation techniques, they ordered
the CIA to use classic torture practices including waterboarding (which, in
blunter times, had been known as the water torture). They also let the
U.S. military loose to torture and abuse prisoners in their custody. They
green-lighted the CIA to kidnap terror suspects (who sometimes turned out to
be perfectly innocent people) off the streets of cities around the world, as
well as from the backlands of the planet, and transported them to the
prisons of some of the worst torture regimes or to secret detention centers
(black sites) the CIA was allowed to set up in compliant countries. In
other words, a perfectly real administration ordered and oversaw perfectly
real crimes. (Its top officials even reportedly had torture techniques
demonstrated to them in the White House.)
At the time, the CIA fulfilled its orders to a T and without complaint. A
lone CIA officer spoke out publicly in opposition to such a program and was
jailed for disclosing classified information to a journalist. (He would be
the only CIA official to go to jail for the Agencys acts of torture.) At
places like Abu Ghraib, the military similarly carried out its orders
without significant complaint or resistance. The mainstream media generally
adopted the euphemism enhanced interrogation techniques or harsh
techniques in its reporting -- no torture or war crimes for them then.
And back in the post-2001 years, John Brennan, then deputy executive
director of the CIA, didnt offer a peep of protest about what he surely
knew was going on in his own agency. In 2014, in fact, as its director he
actually defended such torture practices for producing intelligence that
helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. In
addition, none of those who ordered or oversaw torture and other criminal
behavior (a number of whom would sell their memoirs for millions of dollars)
suffered in the slightest for the acts that were performed on their watch
and at their behest.
To sum up: when Donald Trump says such things its a future nightmare to be
called by its rightful name and denounced, as well as rejected and resisted
by military and intelligence officials. When an American president and his
top officials actually did such things, however, it was another story
entirely. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish
quality of those years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single
mistreated human being. It should make Americans shudder. She has also just
published a new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should
Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, that couldnt be more relevant. Its
a must-read for a country conveniently without a memory.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
________________________________________
The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasnt
The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
he allegations against the man were serious indeed.
* Donald Rumsfeld said he was if not the number two, very close to the
number two person in al-Qaeda.
* The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay
Bybee that he served as Usama Bin Ladens senior lieutenant. In that
capacity, he has managed a network of training camps... He also acted as
al-Qaedas coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.
* CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25% of all
the information his agency had gathered about al-Qaeda from human sources
originated with one other detainee and him.
* George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIAs enhanced
interrogation program, claiming that he had run a terrorist camp in
Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained and that he helped
smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan so they would not be captured
by U.S. military forces.
None of it was true.
And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah -- with the
knowledge and approval of the highest government officials -- is a prime
example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick
Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global
War on Terror.
So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn
al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname,
Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in
Guantánamo.
A Saudi national, in the 1980s Zubaydah helped run the Khaldan camp, a
mujahedeen training facility set up in Afghanistan with CIA help during the
Soviet occupation of that country. In other words, Zubaydah was then an
American ally in the fight against the Soviets, one of President Ronald
Reagans freedom fighters. (But then again, so in effect was Osama bin
Laden.)
Zubaydahs later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature.
He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA firsts: the
first post-9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on
by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the
Agencys ghost prisoners (detainees hidden from the world, including the
International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva
Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of
the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush
administration on what the CIA could legally do to a detainee without
supposedly violating U.S. federal laws against torture.
Zubaydahs story is -- or at least should be -- the iconic tale of the
illegal extremes to which the Bush administration and the CIA went in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks. And yet former officials, from CIA head Michael
Hayden to Vice President Dick Cheney to George W. Bush himself, have
presented it as a glowing example of the use of enhanced interrogation
techniques to extract desperately needed information from the evildoers
of that time.
Zubaydah was an early experiment in post-9/11 CIA practices and heres the
remarkable thing (though it has yet to become part of the mainstream media
accounts of his case): it was all a big lie. Zubaydah wasnt involved with
al-Qaeda; he was the ringleader of nothing; he never took part in planning
for the 9/11 attacks. He was brutally mistreated and, in another kind of
world, would be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of Americas top
leaders and its major intelligence agency.
Yet notorious as he once was, hes been forgotten by all but his lawyers and
a few tenacious reporters. He shouldnt have been. He was the test case
for the kind of torture that Donald Trump now wants the U.S. government to
bring back, presumably because it worked so well the first time. With
Republican presidential hopefuls promising future war crimes, its worth
reconsidering his case and thinking about how to prevent it from happening
again. After all, its only because no one has been held to account for the
years of Bush administration torture practices that Trump and others feel
free to promise even more and yuger war crimes in the future.
Experiments in Torture
In August 2002, a group of FBI agents, CIA agents, and Pakistani forces
captured Zubaydah (along with about 50 other men) in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
In the process, he was severely injured -- shot in the thigh, testicle, and
stomach. He might well have died, had the CIA not flown in an American
surgeon to patch him up. The Agencys interest in his health was, however,
anything but humanitarian. Its officials wanted to interrogate him and, even
after he had recovered sufficiently to be questioned, his captors
occasionally withheld pain medication as a means of torture.
When he lost his left eye under mysterious circumstances while in CIA
custody, the agencys concern again was not for his health. The December
2014 torture report produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
(despite CIA opposition that included hacking into the committees
computers) described the situation this way: with his left eye gone, [i]n
October 2002, DETENTION SITE GREEN [now known to be Thailand] recommended
that the vision in his right eye be tested, noting that '[w]e have a lot
riding upon his ability to see, read, and write.' DETENTION SITE GREEN
stressed that this request is driven by our intelligence needs [not]
humanitarian concern for AZ.
The CIA then set to work interrogating Zubaydah with the help of two
contractors, the psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Zubaydah
would be the first human subject on whom those two, who were former
instructors at the Air Forces SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape)
training center, could test their theories about using torture to induce
what they called learned helplessness, meant to reduce a suspects
resistance to interrogation. Their price? Only $81 million.
CIA records show that, using a plan drawn up by Jessen and Mitchell, Abu
Zubaydahs interrogators would waterboard him an almost unimaginable 83
times in the course of a single month; that is, they would strap him to a
wooden board, place a cloth over his entire face, and gradually pour water
through the cloth until he began to drown. At one point during this
endlessly repeated ordeal, the Senate committee reported that Zubaydah
became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full
mouth.
Each of those 83 uses of what was called the watering cycle consisted of
four steps:
1) demands for information interspersed with the application of the water
just short of blocking his airway 2) escalation of the amount of water
applied until it blocked his airway and he started to have involuntary
spasms 3) raising the water-board to clear subjects airway 4) lowering of
the water-board and return to demands for information.
The CIA videotaped Zubaydah undergoing each of these cycles, only to
destroy those tapes in 2005 when news of their existence surfaced and the
embarrassment (and possible future culpability) of the Agency seemed
increasingly to be at stake. CIA Director Michael Hayden would later assure
CNN that the tapes had been destroyed only because they no longer had
intelligence value and they posed a security risk. Whose security was
at risk if the tapes became public? Most likely, that of the Agencys
operatives and contractors who were breaking multiple national and
international laws against torture, along with the high CIA and Bush
administration officials who had directly approved their actions.
In addition to the waterboarding, the Senate torture report indicates that
Zubaydah endured excruciating stress positions (which cause terrible pain
without leaving a mark); sleep deprivation (for up to 180 hours, which
generally induces hallucinations or psychosis); unrelenting exposure to loud
noises (another psychosis-inducer); walling (the Agencys term for
repeatedly slamming the shoulder blades into a flexible, false wall,
though Zubaydah told the International Committee of the Red Cross that when
this was first done to him, he was slammed directly against a hard concrete
wall); and confinement for hours in a box so cramped that he could not
stand up inside it. All of these methods of torture had been given explicit
approval in a memo written to the CIAs head lawyer, John Rizzo, by Jay
Bybee, who was then serving in the Justice Departments Office of Legal
Counsel. In that memo Bybee approved the use of 10 different techniques on
Zubaydah.
It seems likely that, while the CIA was torturing Zubaydah at Jessens and
Mitchells direction for whatever information he might have, it was also
using him to test the effectiveness of waterboarding as a torture
technique. If so, the agency and its contractors violated not only
international law, but the U.S. War Crimes Act, which expressly forbids
experimenting on prisoners.
What might lead us to think that Zubaydahs treatment was, in part, an
experiment? In a May 30, 2005, memo sent to Rizzo, Steven Bradbury, head of
the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel, discussed the CIAs record
keeping. There was, Bradbury commented, method to the CIAs brutality.
Careful records are kept of each interrogation, he wrote. This procedure,
he continued, allows for ongoing evaluation of the efficacy of each
technique and its potential for any unintended or inappropriate results. In
other words, with the support of the Bush Justice Department, the CIA was
keeping careful records of an experimental procedure designed to evaluate
how well waterboarding worked.
This was Abu Zubaydahs impression as well. I was told during this period
that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques,
Zubaydah would later tell the International Committee of the Red Cross, so
no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out
techniques to be used later on other people.
In addition to the videotaping, the CIAs Office of Medical Services
required a meticulous written record of every waterboarding session. The
details to be recorded were spelled out clearly:
In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is
important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented:
how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water
was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the
water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was
filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between
applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.
Again, these were clearly meant to be the records of an experimental
procedure, focusing as they did on how much water was effective; whether a
seal was achieved (so no air could enter the victims lungs); whether the
naso- or oropharynx (that is, the nose and throat) were so full of water the
victim could not breathe; and just how much the subject vomited up.
It was with Zubaydah that the CIA also began its post-9/11 practice of
hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross by
transferring them to its black sites, the secret prisons it was setting up
in countries with complacent or complicit regimes around the world. Such
unacknowledged detainees came to be known as ghost prisoners, because they
had no official existence. As the Senate torture report noted, In part to
avoid declaring Abu Zubaydah to the International Committee of the Red
Cross, which would be required if he were detained at a U.S. military base,
the CIA decided to seek authorization to clandestinely detain Abu Zubaydah
at a facility in Country _______ [now known to have been Thailand].
Tortured and Circular Reasoning
As British investigative journalist Andy Worthington reported in 2009, the
Bush administration used Abu Zubaydahs interrogation results to help
justify the greatest crime of that administration, the unprovoked, illegal
invasion of Iraq. Officials leaked to the media that he had confessed to
knowing about a secret agreement involving Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi (who later led al-Qaeda in Iraq), and Iraqi autocrat Saddam
Hussein to work together to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in
northern Iraq. Of course, it was all lies. Zubaydah couldnt have known
about such an arrangement, first because it was, as Worthington says,
absurd, and second, because Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all.
In fact, the evidence that Zubaydah had anything to do with al-Qaeda was
beyond circumstantial -- it was entirely circular. The administrations
reasoning went something like this: Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaeda
lieutenant, ran the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan; therefore, Khaldan was an
al-Qaeda camp; if Khaldan was an al Qaeda camp, then Zubaydah must have been
a senior al Qaeda official.
They then used their enhanced techniques to drag what they wanted to hear
out of a man whose life bore no relation to the tortured lies he evidently
finally told his captors. Not surprisingly, no aspect of the
administrations formula proved accurate. It was true that, for several
years, the Bush administration routinely referred to Khaldan as an al-Qaeda
training camp, but the CIA was well aware that this wasnt so.
The Senate Intelligence Committees torture report, for instance, made this
crystal clear, quoting an August 16, 2006, CIA Intelligence Assessment,
Countering Misconceptions About Training Camps in Afghanistan, 1990-2001
this way:
Khaldan Not Affiliated With Al-Qa'ida. A common misperception in outside
articles is that Khaldan camp was run by al-Qa'ida. Pre-11 September 2001
reporting miscast Abu Zubaydah as a 'senior al-Qa'ida lieutenant,' which led
to the inference that the Khaldan camp he was administering was tied to
Usama bin Laden."
Not only was Zubaydah not a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant, he had, according to
the report, been turned down for membership in al-Qaeda as early as 1993 and
the CIA knew it by at least 2006, if not far sooner. Nevertheless, the month
after it privately clarified the nature of the Khaldan camp and Zubaydahs
lack of al-Qaeda connections, President Bush used the story of Zubaydahs
capture and interrogation in a speech to the nation justifying the CIAs
enhanced interrogation program. He then claimed that Zubaydah had helped
smuggle Al Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan.
In the same speech, Bush told the nation, Our intelligence community
believes [Zubaydah] had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of
the 9/11 hijackers trained (a reference presumably to Khaldan). Perhaps the
CIA should have been looking instead at some of the people who actually
trained the hijackers -- the operators of flight schools in the United
States, where, according to a September 23, 2001 Washington Post story, the
FBI already knew terrorists were learning to fly 747s.
In June 2007, the Bush administration doubled down on its claim that
Zubaydah was involved with 9/11. At a hearing before the congressional
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, State Department Legal
Adviser John Bellinger, discussing why the Guantánamo prison needed to
remain open, explained that it serves a very important purpose, to hold and
detain individuals who are extremely dangerous... [like] Abu Zubaydah,
people who have been planners of 9/11.
Charges Withdrawn
In September 2009, the U.S. government quietly withdrew its many allegations
against Abu Zubaydah. His attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition on
his behalf; that is, a petition to excercise the constitutional right of
anyone in government custody to know on what charges they are being held. In
that context, they were asking the government to supply certain documents to
help substantiate their claim that his continued detention in Guantánamo was
illegal. The new Obama administration replied with a 109-page brief filed in
the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which is legally
designated to hear the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees.
The bulk of that brief came down to a government argument that was curious
indeed, given the years of bragging about Zubaydahs central role in
al-Qaedas activities. It claimed that there was no reason to turn over any
exculpatory documents demonstrating that he was not a member of al-Qaeda,
or that he had no involvement in 9/11 or any other terrorist activity --
because the government was no longer claiming that any of those things were
true.
The governments lawyers went on to claim, bizarrely enough, that the Bush
administration had never contended that [Zubaydah] had any personal
involvement in planning or executing... the attacks of September 11, 2001.
They added that the Government also has not contended in this proceeding
that, at the time of his capture, [Zubaydah] had knowledge of any specific
impending terrorist operations -- an especially curious claim, since the
prevention of such future attacks was how the CIA justified its torture of
Zubaydah in the first place. Far from believing that he was if not the
number two, very close to the number two person in al-Qaeda, as Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once claimed, the Government has not
contended in this proceeding that [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or
otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.
And so, the case against the man who was waterboarded 83 times and
contributed supposedly crucial information to the CIA on al-Qaeda plotting
was oh-so-quietly withdrawn without either fuss or media attention. Exhibit
one was now exhibit none.
Seven years after the initial filing of Zubaydahs habeas petition, the DC
District Court has yet to rule on it. Given the courts average 751-day
turnaround time on such petitions, this is an extraordinary length of time.
Here, justice delayed is truly justice denied.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, however. According to the Senate
Intelligence Committee report, CIA headquarters assured those who were
interrogating Zubaydah that he would never be placed in a situation where
he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be
released. In fact, all major players are in concurrence, stated the
agency, that he should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.
And so far, thats exactly whats happened.
The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is the perfect
example of the U.S. governments unique combination of willful law-breaking,
ass-covering memo-writing, and what some Salvadorans I once worked with
called strategic incompetence. The fact that no one -- not George Bush or
Dick Cheney, not Jessen or Mitchell, nor multiple directors of the CIA --
has been held accountable means that, unless we are very lucky, we will see
more of the same in the future.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_exhibit_
one_in_any_future_american_war_crimes_trial/http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/
176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_exhibit_one_in_any_future_american_war_c
rimes_trial/
Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
02 May 16
Note for TomDispatch Readers: At this website, the book offers are coming
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The latest is for a new book by a TomDispatch regular we much admire:
Rebecca Gordon. Shes written a particularly readable volume with a
well-deserved hot-button title: American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who
Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her piece today demonstrates
just why such trials were justified (and why, of course, for the leaders of
the sole superpower they will never happen). For a donation of $100 or
more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed,
personalized copy for yourself and lend this website a helping hand staying
afloat in a crazed universe. Check out the details at our donation page.
Lets take a moment to think about the ultimate strangeness of our American
world. In recent months, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have offered a range of
hair-raising suggestions: as president, one or the other of them might order
the U.S. military and the CIA to commit acts that would include the
waterboarding of terror suspects (or a hell of a lot worse), the killing
of the relatives of terrorists, and the carpet bombing of parts of Syria.
All of these would, legally speaking, be war crimes. This has caused shock
among many Americans in quite established quarters who have decried the
possibility of such a president, suggesting that the two of them are calling
for outright illegal acts, actual war crimes, and that the U.S. military
and others would be justified in rejecting such orders. In this context, for
instance, CIA Director John Brennan recently made it clear that no Agency
operative under his command would ever waterboard a suspect in response to
orders of such a nature from a future president. ("I will not agree to carry
out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because
this institution needs to endure.")
These acts, in other words, are considered beyond the pale when Donald Trump
suggests them, but heres the strangeness of it all: what The Donald is only
mouthing off about, a perfectly real American president (and vice president
and secretary of defense, and so on) actually did. Among other things, under
the euphemistic term enhanced interrogation techniques, they ordered the
CIA to use classic torture practices including waterboarding (which, in
blunter times, had been known as the water torture). They also let the
U.S. military loose to torture and abuse prisoners in their custody. They
green-lighted the CIA to kidnap terror suspects (who sometimes turned out to
be perfectly innocent people) off the streets of cities around the world, as
well as from the backlands of the planet, and transported them to the
prisons of some of the worst torture regimes or to secret detention centers
(black sites) the CIA was allowed to set up in compliant countries. In
other words, a perfectly real administration ordered and oversaw perfectly
real crimes. (Its top officials even reportedly had torture techniques
demonstrated to them in the White House.)
At the time, the CIA fulfilled its orders to a T and without complaint. A
lone CIA officer spoke out publicly in opposition to such a program and was
jailed for disclosing classified information to a journalist. (He would be
the only CIA official to go to jail for the Agencys acts of torture.) At
places like Abu Ghraib, the military similarly carried out its orders
without significant complaint or resistance. The mainstream media generally
adopted the euphemism enhanced interrogation techniques or harsh
techniques in its reporting -- no torture or war crimes for them then.
And back in the post-2001 years, John Brennan, then deputy executive
director of the CIA, didnt offer a peep of protest about what he surely
knew was going on in his own agency. In 2014, in fact, as its director he
actually defended such torture practices for producing intelligence that
helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. In
addition, none of those who ordered or oversaw torture and other criminal
behavior (a number of whom would sell their memoirs for millions of dollars)
suffered in the slightest for the acts that were performed on their watch
and at their behest.
To sum up: when Donald Trump says such things its a future nightmare to be
called by its rightful name and denounced, as well as rejected and resisted
by military and intelligence officials. When an American president and his
top officials actually did such things, however, it was another story
entirely. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish
quality of those years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single
mistreated human being. It should make Americans shudder. She has also just
published a new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should
Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, that couldnt be more relevant. Its a
must-read for a country conveniently without a memory.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasnt
The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
he allegations against the man were serious indeed.
* Donald Rumsfeld said he was if not the number two, very close to the
number two person in al-Qaeda.
* The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay
Bybee that he served as Usama Bin Ladens senior lieutenant. In that
capacity, he has managed a network of training camps... He also acted as
al-Qaedas coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.
* CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25% of all
the information his agency had gathered about al-Qaeda from human sources
originated with one other detainee and him.
* George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIAs enhanced
interrogation program, claiming that he had run a terrorist camp in
Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained and that he helped
smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan so they would not be captured
by U.S. military forces.
None of it was true.
And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah -- with the
knowledge and approval of the highest government officials -- is a prime
example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick
Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global
War on Terror.
So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn
al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname,
Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in
Guantánamo.
A Saudi national, in the 1980s Zubaydah helped run the Khaldan camp, a
mujahedeen training facility set up in Afghanistan with CIA help during the
Soviet occupation of that country. In other words, Zubaydah was then an
American ally in the fight against the Soviets, one of President Ronald
Reagans freedom fighters. (But then again, so in effect was Osama bin
Laden.)
Zubaydahs later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature.
He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA firsts: the
first post-9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on
by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the
Agencys ghost prisoners (detainees hidden from the world, including the
International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva
Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of
the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush
administration on what the CIA could legally do to a detainee without
supposedly violating U.S. federal laws against torture.
Zubaydahs story is -- or at least should be -- the iconic tale of the
illegal extremes to which the Bush administration and the CIA went in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks. And yet former officials, from CIA head Michael
Hayden to Vice President Dick Cheney to George W. Bush himself, have
presented it as a glowing example of the use of enhanced interrogation
techniques to extract desperately needed information from the evildoers
of that time.
Zubaydah was an early experiment in post-9/11 CIA practices and heres the
remarkable thing (though it has yet to become part of the mainstream media
accounts of his case): it was all a big lie. Zubaydah wasnt involved with
al-Qaeda; he was the ringleader of nothing; he never took part in planning
for the 9/11 attacks. He was brutally mistreated and, in another kind of
world, would be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of Americas top
leaders and its major intelligence agency.
Yet notorious as he once was, hes been forgotten by all but his lawyers and
a few tenacious reporters. He shouldnt have been. He was the test case for
the kind of torture that Donald Trump now wants the U.S. government to bring
back, presumably because it worked so well the first time. With Republican
presidential hopefuls promising future war crimes, its worth reconsidering
his case and thinking about how to prevent it from happening again. After
all, its only because no one has been held to account for the years of Bush
administration torture practices that Trump and others feel free to promise
even more and yuger war crimes in the future.
Experiments in Torture
In August 2002, a group of FBI agents, CIA agents, and Pakistani forces
captured Zubaydah (along with about 50 other men) in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
In the process, he was severely injured -- shot in the thigh, testicle, and
stomach. He might well have died, had the CIA not flown in an American
surgeon to patch him up. The Agencys interest in his health was, however,
anything but humanitarian. Its officials wanted to interrogate him and, even
after he had recovered sufficiently to be questioned, his captors
occasionally withheld pain medication as a means of torture.
When he lost his left eye under mysterious circumstances while in CIA
custody, the agencys concern again was not for his health. The December
2014 torture report produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
(despite CIA opposition that included hacking into the committees
computers) described the situation this way: with his left eye gone, [i]n
October 2002, DETENTION SITE GREEN [now known to be Thailand] recommended
that the vision in his right eye be tested, noting that '[w]e have a lot
riding upon his ability to see, read, and write.' DETENTION SITE GREEN
stressed that this request is driven by our intelligence needs [not]
humanitarian concern for AZ.
The CIA then set to work interrogating Zubaydah with the help of two
contractors, the psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Zubaydah
would be the first human subject on whom those two, who were former
instructors at the Air Forces SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape)
training center, could test their theories about using torture to induce
what they called learned helplessness, meant to reduce a suspects
resistance to interrogation. Their price? Only $81 million.
CIA records show that, using a plan drawn up by Jessen and Mitchell, Abu
Zubaydahs interrogators would waterboard him an almost unimaginable 83
times in the course of a single month; that is, they would strap him to a
wooden board, place a cloth over his entire face, and gradually pour water
through the cloth until he began to drown. At one point during this
endlessly repeated ordeal, the Senate committee reported that Zubaydah
became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full
mouth.
Each of those 83 uses of what was called the watering cycle consisted of
four steps:
1) demands for information interspersed with the application of the water
just short of blocking his airway 2) escalation of the amount of water
applied until it blocked his airway and he started to have involuntary
spasms 3) raising the water-board to clear subjects airway 4) lowering of
the water-board and return to demands for information.
The CIA videotaped Zubaydah undergoing each of these cycles, only to
destroy those tapes in 2005 when news of their existence surfaced and the
embarrassment (and possible future culpability) of the Agency seemed
increasingly to be at stake. CIA Director Michael Hayden would later assure
CNN that the tapes had been destroyed only because they no longer had
intelligence value and they posed a security risk. Whose security was
at risk if the tapes became public? Most likely, that of the Agencys
operatives and contractors who were breaking multiple national and
international laws against torture, along with the high CIA and Bush
administration officials who had directly approved their actions.
In addition to the waterboarding, the Senate torture report indicates that
Zubaydah endured excruciating stress positions (which cause terrible pain
without leaving a mark); sleep deprivation (for up to 180 hours, which
generally induces hallucinations or psychosis); unrelenting exposure to loud
noises (another psychosis-inducer); walling (the Agencys term for
repeatedly slamming the shoulder blades into a flexible, false wall,
though Zubaydah told the International Committee of the Red Cross that when
this was first done to him, he was slammed directly against a hard concrete
wall); and confinement for hours in a box so cramped that he could not
stand up inside it. All of these methods of torture had been given explicit
approval in a memo written to the CIAs head lawyer, John Rizzo, by Jay
Bybee, who was then serving in the Justice Departments Office of Legal
Counsel. In that memo Bybee approved the use of 10 different techniques on
Zubaydah.
It seems likely that, while the CIA was torturing Zubaydah at Jessens and
Mitchells direction for whatever information he might have, it was also
using him to test the effectiveness of waterboarding as a torture
technique. If so, the agency and its contractors violated not only
international law, but the U.S. War Crimes Act, which expressly forbids
experimenting on prisoners.
What might lead us to think that Zubaydahs treatment was, in part, an
experiment? In a May 30, 2005, memo sent to Rizzo, Steven Bradbury, head of
the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel, discussed the CIAs record
keeping. There was, Bradbury commented, method to the CIAs brutality.
Careful records are kept of each interrogation, he wrote. This procedure,
he continued, allows for ongoing evaluation of the efficacy of each
technique and its potential for any unintended or inappropriate results. In
other words, with the support of the Bush Justice Department, the CIA was
keeping careful records of an experimental procedure designed to evaluate
how well waterboarding worked.
This was Abu Zubaydahs impression as well. I was told during this period
that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques,
Zubaydah would later tell the International Committee of the Red Cross, so
no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out
techniques to be used later on other people.
In addition to the videotaping, the CIAs Office of Medical Services
required a meticulous written record of every waterboarding session. The
details to be recorded were spelled out clearly:
In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is
important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented:
how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water
was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the
water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was
filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between
applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.
Again, these were clearly meant to be the records of an experimental
procedure, focusing as they did on how much water was effective; whether a
seal was achieved (so no air could enter the victims lungs); whether the
naso- or oropharynx (that is, the nose and throat) were so full of water the
victim could not breathe; and just how much the subject vomited up.
It was with Zubaydah that the CIA also began its post-9/11 practice of
hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross by
transferring them to its black sites, the secret prisons it was setting up
in countries with complacent or complicit regimes around the world. Such
unacknowledged detainees came to be known as ghost prisoners, because they
had no official existence. As the Senate torture report noted, In part to
avoid declaring Abu Zubaydah to the International Committee of the Red
Cross, which would be required if he were detained at a U.S. military base,
the CIA decided to seek authorization to clandestinely detain Abu Zubaydah
at a facility in Country _______ [now known to have been Thailand].
Tortured and Circular Reasoning
As British investigative journalist Andy Worthington reported in 2009, the
Bush administration used Abu Zubaydahs interrogation results to help
justify the greatest crime of that administration, the unprovoked, illegal
invasion of Iraq. Officials leaked to the media that he had confessed to
knowing about a secret agreement involving Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi (who later led al-Qaeda in Iraq), and Iraqi autocrat Saddam
Hussein to work together to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in
northern Iraq. Of course, it was all lies. Zubaydah couldnt have known
about such an arrangement, first because it was, as Worthington says,
absurd, and second, because Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all.
In fact, the evidence that Zubaydah had anything to do with al-Qaeda was
beyond circumstantial -- it was entirely circular. The administrations
reasoning went something like this: Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaeda
lieutenant, ran the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan; therefore, Khaldan was an
al-Qaeda camp; if Khaldan was an al Qaeda camp, then Zubaydah must have been
a senior al Qaeda official.
They then used their enhanced techniques to drag what they wanted to hear
out of a man whose life bore no relation to the tortured lies he evidently
finally told his captors. Not surprisingly, no aspect of the
administrations formula proved accurate. It was true that, for several
years, the Bush administration routinely referred to Khaldan as an al-Qaeda
training camp, but the CIA was well aware that this wasnt so.
The Senate Intelligence Committees torture report, for instance, made this
crystal clear, quoting an August 16, 2006, CIA Intelligence Assessment,
Countering Misconceptions About Training Camps in Afghanistan, 1990-2001
this way:
Khaldan Not Affiliated With Al-Qa'ida. A common misperception in outside
articles is that Khaldan camp was run by al-Qa'ida. Pre-11 September 2001
reporting miscast Abu Zubaydah as a 'senior al-Qa'ida lieutenant,' which led
to the inference that the Khaldan camp he was administering was tied to
Usama bin Laden."
Not only was Zubaydah not a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant, he had, according to
the report, been turned down for membership in al-Qaeda as early as 1993 and
the CIA knew it by at least 2006, if not far sooner. Nevertheless, the month
after it privately clarified the nature of the Khaldan camp and Zubaydahs
lack of al-Qaeda connections, President Bush used the story of Zubaydahs
capture and interrogation in a speech to the nation justifying the CIAs
enhanced interrogation program. He then claimed that Zubaydah had helped
smuggle Al Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan.
In the same speech, Bush told the nation, Our intelligence community
believes [Zubaydah] had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of
the 9/11 hijackers trained (a reference presumably to Khaldan). Perhaps the
CIA should have been looking instead at some of the people who actually
trained the hijackers -- the operators of flight schools in the United
States, where, according to a September 23, 2001 Washington Post story, the
FBI already knew terrorists were learning to fly 747s.
In June 2007, the Bush administration doubled down on its claim that
Zubaydah was involved with 9/11. At a hearing before the congressional
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, State Department Legal
Adviser John Bellinger, discussing why the Guantánamo prison needed to
remain open, explained that it serves a very important purpose, to hold and
detain individuals who are extremely dangerous... [like] Abu Zubaydah,
people who have been planners of 9/11.
Charges Withdrawn
In September 2009, the U.S. government quietly withdrew its many allegations
against Abu Zubaydah. His attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition on
his behalf; that is, a petition to excercise the constitutional right of
anyone in government custody to know on what charges they are being held. In
that context, they were asking the government to supply certain documents to
help substantiate their claim that his continued detention in Guantánamo was
illegal. The new Obama administration replied with a 109-page brief filed in
the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which is legally
designated to hear the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees.
The bulk of that brief came down to a government argument that was curious
indeed, given the years of bragging about Zubaydahs central role in
al-Qaedas activities. It claimed that there was no reason to turn over any
exculpatory documents demonstrating that he was not a member of al-Qaeda,
or that he had no involvement in 9/11 or any other terrorist activity --
because the government was no longer claiming that any of those things were
true.
The governments lawyers went on to claim, bizarrely enough, that the Bush
administration had never contended that [Zubaydah] had any personal
involvement in planning or executing... the attacks of September 11, 2001.
They added that the Government also has not contended in this proceeding
that, at the time of his capture, [Zubaydah] had knowledge of any specific
impending terrorist operations -- an especially curious claim, since the
prevention of such future attacks was how the CIA justified its torture of
Zubaydah in the first place. Far from believing that he was if not the
number two, very close to the number two person in al-Qaeda, as Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once claimed, the Government has not
contended in this proceeding that [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or
otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.
And so, the case against the man who was waterboarded 83 times and
contributed supposedly crucial information to the CIA on al-Qaeda plotting
was oh-so-quietly withdrawn without either fuss or media attention. Exhibit
one was now exhibit none.
Seven years after the initial filing of Zubaydahs habeas petition, the DC
District Court has yet to rule on it. Given the courts average 751-day
turnaround time on such petitions, this is an extraordinary length of time.
Here, justice delayed is truly justice denied.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, however. According to the Senate
Intelligence Committee report, CIA headquarters assured those who were
interrogating Zubaydah that he would never be placed in a situation where
he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be
released. In fact, all major players are in concurrence, stated the
agency, that he should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.
And so far, thats exactly whats happened.
The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is the perfect
example of the U.S. governments unique combination of willful law-breaking,
ass-covering memo-writing, and what some Salvadorans I once worked with
called strategic incompetence. The fact that no one -- not George Bush or
Dick Cheney, not Jessen or Mitchell, nor multiple directors of the CIA --
has been held accountable means that, unless we are very lucky, we will see
more of the same in the future.
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