There are some interesting, if extremely disturbing, developments stemming from the legal process surrounding alleged al-Qaeda operative, and Gitmo prisoner, Abu Zubaydah:
Attorneys defending Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo prisoner designated as the first “high-value” detainee by the Bush administration, have finally gained access to three volumes of diaries he wrote while he was in the custody of the CIA and brutally tortured by agency interrogators and contractors at a secret “black site” prison.
The diaries, identified as volumes 7, 8 and 9, were written between 2002 and 2006 and total a little more than 300 pages. They were turned over to defense attorneys by the government late last year after a lengthy legal battle, and are believed to contain detailed descriptions of the torture techniques to which Zubaydah was subjected.
The diaries are crucial to the defense, said one of Zubaydah’s attorneys, Brent Mickum, because they will reveal locations of where Zubaydah was detained and identify people with whom he spoke, contradicting previous government assertions that Zubaydah was connected to and involved in the planning of terrorist plots against the United States.
The diaries could also be used to piece together the timeline of the various torture techniques used against Zubaydah, a chronolgy that has thus far been difficult to corroborate due to the serendipitous destruction of the video tapes of the interrogations:
Zubaydah was one of two high-value detainees whose interrogations between April and August of 2002 were captured on 90 videotapes that the CIA destroyed in November 2005 as public attention began focusing on allegations that the Bush administration had subjected “war on terror” prisoners to brutal interrogations that crossed the line into torture.
The destruction of the videotapes has been the subject of an ongoing investigation led by John Durham, a US attorney from Connecticut, who was appointed special prosecutor in 2008 by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to probe whether crimes were committed by CIA personnel and others in connection with the destruction of the tapes. [...]
One of the lingering questions about the torture tapes is whether it showed CIA interrogators using techniques on Zubaydah that had not yet been approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). The OLC is where attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee had worked.
Yoo was the principal author of two August 2002 torture memos that Bybee signed, which gave the CIA the legal authority to torture Zubaydah using ten techniques, such as waterboarding, slamming his head repeatedly against a wall and forcing him to remain awake for as long as 11 consecutive days. Documents released last year showed that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times during the month of August 2002.
Mickum said he always contended the tapes showed Zubaydah being subjected to torture methods – particularly waterboarding – prior to the legal authorization issued by the Justice Department and that was one of the primary reasons the CIA destroyed the videotapes.
Below are potentially the most explosive revelations and, if true, reveal a level of callous depravity that is beyond mere sadism:
Mickum’s hunch appears to be correct. Several tapes that were destroyed showed CIA interrogators using a combination of brutal torture techniques against Zubaydah beginning in mid-April 2002, four months before these techniques were legally authorized in the notorious torture memos issued by OLC. Additionally, there were at least three videotapes that showed Zubaydah being waterboarded in late May and early June 2002.
That information is based on interviews conducted over the past 14 months with three dozen current and former officials at the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the State Department and the Justice Department, who have intimate knowledge about Zubaydah, have seen classified documents related to his torture, as well as the raw intelligence reports leading up to his capture. Many of these current and former officials are also familiar with the Guantanamo Review Task Force’s conclusions about Zubaydah. (An in-depth investigative report based on these interviews will be published at a later date.)
These sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because details remain classified, said one of the main reasons Zubaydah’s early torture sessions were videotaped was to gain insight into his “physical reaction” to the techniques used against him, which was then shared with officials at the CIA and the Justice Department, who used that information to help draft the August 2002 torture memo stating what interrogation methods could be legally used, how often the methods could be employed and how it should be administered without crossing the line into torture.
For example, one current and three former CIA officials said some videotapes showed Zubaydah being sleep deprived for more than two weeks. Contractors hired by the CIA studied how he responded psychologically and physically to being kept awake for that amount of time. By looking at videotapes, they concluded that after the 11th consecutive day of being kept awake Zubaydah started to “severely break down.” So, the torture memo concluded that 11 days of sleep deprivation was legal and did not meet the definition of torture.
“I would describe it this way,” said one former National Security official. “[Zubaydah] was an experiment. A guinea pig. I’m sure you’ve heard that a lot. There were many enhanced interrogation [methods] tested on him that have never been discussed before we settled on the 10 [techniques].”
In essence, if true, the Bush administration used human guinea pigs to test out various torture techniques in order to craft a legal doctrine of permissible abuse of detainees. There really needs to be legal accountability for that if these reports are confirmed.
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