[Ppnews] Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington04242009.html
April 24-26, 2009


Fruit of the Poisoned Tree

Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. 
forces -- still led by former Vice President Dick 
Cheney -- this has been a rocky few weeks, with 
the publication, in swift succession, of the 
leaked report by the International Committee of 
the Red Cross 
(<http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf>PDF), 
based on interviews with the 14 “high-value 
detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret 
CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded 
that their treatment “constituted torture” (and 
was accompanied by two 
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530>detailed 
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614>articles 
by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), 
the release, by the Justice Department, of 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/04/21/ten-terrible-truths-about-the-cia-torture-memos-part-one/>four 
memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) 
in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the 
use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 
231-page investigation into detainee abuse 
conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee 
(<http://armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Detainee%20Report%20Final_April%2022%202009.pdf>PDF).

The publication of the full Senate Committee 
report was delayed for four months, subject to 
wrangling over proposed redactions, but the 
Executive Summary, 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/23/will-the-bush-administration-be-held-accountable-for-war-crimes/>published 
last December, had already successfully 
demolished the Bush administration’s claims that 
detainee abuse could be blamed on “a few bad 
apples,” and, instead, blamed it on senior 
officials who, with the slippery exception of 
Dick Cheney, included George W. Bush, former 
defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney’s 
chief of staff David Addington, former Pentagon 
General Counsel William J. Haynes II, former 
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General 
Richard Myers, former Attorney General Alberto 
Gonzales, former Justice Department legal adviser 
John Yoo, former Guantánamo commanders Maj. Gen. 
Michael Dunlavey and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, 
and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

Much of the fallout from the release of these 
memos and reports has, understandably, focused on 
the inadequacy of the legal advice offered to the 
CIA for its “high-value detainee” program by the 
OLC, whose lawyers have the unique responsibility 
of interpreting the law as it relates to the 
powers of the executive branch, and whose advice, 
therefore, provided the Bush administration with 
what it regarded as a “golden shield,” which 
would prevent senior officials from being 
prosecuted for war crimes. 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 
explain 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 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/03/30/abu-zubaydah-the-futility-of-torture-and-a-trail-of-broken-lives/>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 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington02072008.html>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.”

Zubaydah was severely wounded during 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/12/09/lost-in-guantanamo-the-faisalabad-16/>his 
capture in Faisalabad, Pakistan, to the extent 
that, as President Bush explained in 
<http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060906-3.html>a 
press conference in September 2006, shortly after 
Zubaydah and 13 other “high-value detainees” had 
been transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA 
prisons, “he survived only because of the medical 
care arranged by the CIA.” We don’t know if there 
is any truth to the allegation, made by Ron 
Suskind in his 2006 book 
<http://www.ronsuskind.com/theonepercentdoctrine/>The 
One Percent Doctrine, that medication was only 
administered in exchange for his cooperation (it 
seems likely, but has been officially denied), 
but we do know, from James Risen’s book 
<http://www.amazon.com/State-War-Secret-History-Administration/dp/0743270673/>State 
of War, that 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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10detain.html?_r=1>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 
<http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Inside-Terror-American/dp/0385526393>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.” We also know from Jane Mayer that 
R. Scott Shumate, the chief operational 
psychologist for the CIA’s Counterterrorist 
Center, left his job in 2003, apparently 
disgusted by developments involving the use of 
the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and that 
“associates described him as upset in particular 
about the treatment of Zubaydah.”

Moreover, although the ICRC report dealt only 
with Zubaydah’s treatment in Afghanistan, it’s 
also clear that the techniques to which he was 
subjected in Afghanistan, in the approximately 
two and a half months before the OLC memos were 
signed, also “constituted torture.”

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.

To understand how torture came to be used before 
it was officially approved, we need to return to 
the New York Times article of September 2006, 
which explained how, according to accounts by 
three former intelligence officials, the CIA 
“understood that the legal foundation for its 
role had been spelled out in a sweeping 
classified directive” signed by President Bush on 
September 17, 2001, which authorized the agency 
“to capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects.”

Significantly, this “memorandum of notification” 
did not spell out specific guidelines for 
interrogations, but as later research, and the 
latest reports have confirmed, the directive led 
to focused efforts by the CIA, and by William J. 
Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel (and a 
protégé of Dick Cheney), to contact foreign 
governments for advice on harsh interrogation 
techniques, and to begin a relationship with a 
number of individuals involved in the Joint 
Personnel Recovery Program (JPRA), the body 
responsible for administering the SERE program 
(Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), which 
is taught at U.S. military schools.

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. David 
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” -- which, noticeably, 
included an assessment by Col. Stuart A. 
Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, 
that a regime based solely on punishment 
“detracts from the flexibility that debriefers 
require to accomplish their mission” -- “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.”

This is disturbing enough, but what makes it even 
more chilling is the realization that the tactics 
being discussed, which, it is clear, led swiftly 
to their enactment in actual interrogations, were 
some months away from being authorized by the 
OLC. As the Times article explained, in what was 
perhaps its most damning passage, “Three former 
intelligence officials said the techniques had 
been drawn up on the basis of legal guidance from 
the Justice Department, but were not yet supported by a formal legal opinion.”

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 with receiving 
approval from somebody in high office.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the Obama 
administration is committed to abiding by the 
laws that President Obama praised so lavishly 
during his election campaign, or whether, 
instead, he and his administration are committed 
to reading from a different book: How to Torture 
With Impunity And Get Away With It, by former 
Vice President Dick Cheney and an array of 
associates, all intoxicated with the thrill of 
unfettered executive power, which concludes by 
claiming that you get away with breaking any damn 
law that you please, so long as you’re voted out of office at the end.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published 
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk

He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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