There is a sickness abroad in the Land.
It fly's in the face of that Land where Freedom ringsBut the Truth is,
that Land where Freedom rings never did exist. Our Ruling Class has
always been willing to rape, plunder and torture in order to get what
it wants.
Return America to her former greatness? Sorry Mr. president, those
days never existed.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/12/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
JOHN KIRIAKOU: Those Torture Drawings in the NYT
December 12, 2019
In 2002, John Kiriakou captured the Guantanamo prisoner who drew those
sickening pictures. Abu Zubaydah has a constitutional right to face his
accusers in court, or be released, Kiriakou says.
Entrance to Camp 1 in Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta, 2005. (Kathleen T. Rhem.
Wikimedia Commons)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
The New York Times last week published shocking drawings by Guantanamo
prisoner Abu Zubaydah showing in graphic detail the types of tortures he
endured at the hands of CIA officers and contractors at secret prisons
around the world. The drawings were sickening. With a child's simplicity,
they showed the irrational cruelty of the CIA's torture program, which
weakened our country, violated domestic and international law and ended up
saying so much more about us, as Americans, than it did about the
terrorists
who wished us harm.
The Times did its duty of reminding us what monsters the CIA produced in
the
early years of its so-called war on terror, people introduced to most
Americans in the Senate's torture report. These are people such as the
CIA's former Director George Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin.
They include unapologetic torture proponents such as former Deputy Director
for Operations Jose Rodriguez and current CIA Director Gina Haspel. They
are the creators of the torture program: psychologists James Mitchell and
Bruce Jessen. And in the photos of Abu Zubaydah's drawing that the Times
ran, the CIA dutifully blacked out even the stick-figure sketches of the
actual torturers, those CIA officers who sold their souls to break the law,
all in honor of that false god called "national security."
Woefully Inadequate Article
With that said, the Times article, although revelatory in terms of Abu
Zubaydah's personal story, was woefully inadequate. It never mentioned,
for
example, how the Obama administration did literally nothing to make any of
this right. Remember former President Barack Obama's decision to hold no
one accountable for the torture program and instead "look forward, not
backward?" That didn't serve justice. It just protected the torturers and
the criminals who supported them. Remember the promise to close Guantanamo?
It never happened.
Please Make Your End-of-Year Donation Today
And what about that Senate torture report? We talk about "the Senate
torture report" like we actually know what was in it. We don't. The
5,500-page report was never released. Instead, after a battle royal with
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Obama finally allowed
only a heavily redacted version, less than 700 pages, of the report's
executive summary to see the light of day. And all of that happened after
then-CIA Director and Obama loyalist John Brennan ordered CIA officers to
secretly hack into the SSCI's computer system to see what committee
investigators were up to. Of course, no charges for that were ever filed.
Guantanamo Bay prisoner Abu Zubaydah.
Abu Zubaydah has been in U.S. custody for a long time. It's already been
nearly 18 years. I know. I captured him on the night of March 22, 2002, in
an al-Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. We were convinced at the
time that he was the third-ranking person in al-Qaeda. That was wrong.
He was certainly a bad man. He had founded both of al-Qaeda's training
camps in southern Afghanistan and he had also created an al-Qaeda safe
house
in Peshawar, Pakistan, called the "House of Martyrs." Want to go to
Afghanistan to make jihad? Call Abu Zubaydah. Already in Afghanistan and
you want to go home? Call Abu Zubaydah. But he was not the No. 3. He had
never even joined al-Qaeda. And he had never pledged fealty to Osama bin
Laden.
A Pakistani policeman shot and severely wounded Abu Zubaydah on the night
we
captured him. He was then transported to a secret CIA prison to recover
and
to be tortured. As you can imagine, he confessed to a wide variety of
terrorism-related crimes, whether he had actually committed them or not. A
torture victim will tell his torturer literally anything just to make the
torture stop. None of that information, because it was collected
illegally,
is admissible in a court of law.
And so, Abu Zubaydah, like every other Guantanamo detainee with the
dubious
exception of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, sits in
solitary confinement year after year without ever having been charged with
a
crime.
There is only one way out of this national embarrassment. Abu Zubaydah has
a constitutional right to face his accusers in a court of law. He has a
right to be tried by a jury of his peers. If he is not charged - if he
cannot be charged - with a crime, he must be released. That's the law.
It's
the American way.
Former President George W. Bush got us into this situation by allowing the
likes of his Vice President Dick Cheney to run the country. Barack Obama
did
nothing to improve the situation. Indeed, he sided with the CIA at every
opportunity. President Donald Trump (who has publicly supported torture),
well. it's not even worth having that conversation. But the bottom line
is
that what Abu Zubaydah and others have endured in secret prisons and at
Guantanamo is not the American way. It's not constitutional. It's not
legal. We have to correct this immediately.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the
Espionage
Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
