Abu Zubaydah
The Bush administration gave its initial clearance for CIA interrogators to brutalize an al-Qaeda “high-value detainee” through verbal guidance and didn’t follow up with a formal legal opinion until “months later,” the CIA’s former inspector general said.
In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, ex-CIA Inspector General John Helgerson confirmed what has long been suspected, that the abusive interrogation of al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in 2002 began well before the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel cobbled together a controversial legal opinion justifying acts that are commonly regarded as torture.
Der Spiegel’s reporter posed a question to Helgerson that assumed Zubaydah’s torturous interrogation had predated the Aug. 1, 2002, legal memo from OLC attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee. “Did the lawyer who signed the memorandum simply authorize a technique months after this technique had already been applied?” reporter Britta Sandberg asked Helgerson.
Helgerson told Sandberg that “basically” her assumption was correct and added, “There was some legal advice given orally to the CIA that had then been followed up by memorandums months later.”
Though human rights groups had long speculated that the torture of Zubaydah began prior to the Yoo-Bybee memo, some experts were surprised by Helgerson’s use of the word “months,” suggesting the abusive interrogations may have started soon after a wounded Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, and then flown to a CIA “black site” in Thailand. Two weeks earlier, on March 13, 2002, Yoo and Bybee prepared a legal memorandum for George W. Bush that said he could ignore a law that prohibited the transfer of prisoners to countries that engage in torture.
This altered chronology also undercuts assertions by defenders of the interrogation program, the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, that the policy was carefully crafted and implemented only after legal issues were carefully weighed by the OLC, which advises presidents about interpreting laws, in this case those that prohibit torture.
Exactly what the OLC’s oral legal advice was – and whether it was inappropriately influenced by White House political desires – may be answered by a still classified report prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit, according to Justice Department sources who have been briefed on the contents of the report. These sources added that the legal guidance Helgerson referred to came from OLC.
The watchdog unit has spent five years probing whether Yoo, Bybee and another OLC lawyer Steven Bradbury provided poor legal advice in authorizing CIA interrogators to use the near-drowning of waterboarding and other interrogation methods to glean information about terrorist plots from prisoners.
The report’s findings are said to conclude that Yoo acted as an advocate for administration policy and massaged his legal advice to fit the wishes of his Bush administration superiors, rather than carefully analyzing the law as an independent-minded lawyer, according to these sources.
Clues to a Chronology
Early clues about when torture was begun on Zubaydah surfaced earlier this year, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the CIA in connection with the agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes in 2005.
In court documents, the CIA disclosed that it began videotaping interrogations of Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, in April 2002, four months before Yoo and Bybee drafted their torture memo.
The agency also acknowledged that 12 of those videotapes showed the two detainees being subjected to harsh techniques. However, the agency refused to disclose documents to the ACLU that would have indicated whether the torture took place prior to the Aug. 1, 2002, legal memo.
Then, in May a newly declassified timeline released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence fleshed out the details a bit more.
According to the Intelligence Committee, in April 2002, while Zubaydah was still hospitalized and recovering from gunshot wounds, the CIA’s Office of General Counsel began to discuss with John Bellinger, legal adviser to the National Security Council, and the OLC, about “the CIA’s proposed interrogation plan for Abu Zubaydah and legal restrictions on that interrogation.”
The CIA believed that as early as April 2002, just a few weeks after he was captured, Zubaydah was withholding “imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions” – a position that drew objections from FBI interrogators who believed they had successfully obtained actionable intelligence from Zubaydah through rapport-building and other non-violent techniques.
It was around this time, in April and May of 2002, that meetings were arranged involving high-ranking Bush administration officials, including then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, Michael Chertoff, who at the time was the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to discuss an “alternative” set of interrogation methods, including waterboarding.
“The CIA’s Office of General Counsel subsequently asked OLC to prepare an opinion about the legality of its proposed techniques,” the Intelligence Committee timeline states.
For his part, Zubaydah told the International Committee of the Red Cross that his treatment grew nastier as his detention progressed, although he offered no specific timeline. He did recall that CIA interrogators said he was their first subject, “so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”
Just a month after Zubaydah’s capture, in its April 27, 2002, issue, Newsweek published a story about the “imminent threat information” that he supposedly gave up to his interrogators. The article, “How Good Is Abu Zubaydah’s Information?” said the Bush administration “issued two domestic terrorism warnings” based on the information Zubaydah provided to “U.S. interrogators.”
But none of the alleged threats, including plots to attack banks in the Northeast or U.S. shopping malls, materialized or were ever shown to have been anything approaching an actual operation. If Zubaydah had been tortured this early in his captivity, it could be evidence of how torture often elicits unreliable information, a point that FBI and other experienced interrogators also have noted.
Information Doubted
In an interview, Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent assigned to the agency’s elite Bin Laden unit, said Abu Zubaydah “wasn’t privy to a lot of what I would consider to be a lot of really good operational details,” getting most of his information second-hand.
“We thought he would be best described as a logistical officer who managed a series of safe houses and was a great travel agent,” Cloonan said. “But to cast him and describe him as the al-Qaeda emir or leader for the subcontinent or worse to that effect I think was a mistake. … Based on his age and ethnicity, [he] would [n]ever be brought into the inner circle of al-Qaeda.”
There was also the question of Zubaydah’s personality. “My partner had a chance to look at a lot of Abu Zubaydah’s diaries, poems and other things that he has written and he said that after reading this you just come away with the feeling that this is a guy who can’t be trusted or being given huge amounts of responsibility,” Cloonan said. “He just seemed mentally unstable. …
“I’m not at all suggesting that Abu Zubaydah wasn’t valuable. Anytime you get one of these guys and get their cooperation I think is a win. You can get information that’s really valuable from people who are further down the food chain. It’s how you get the information and whether you’re getting real cooperation or simply compliance because somebody’s either waterboarding you or gets you on sleep deprivation.
“We know and the science tells us that people cannot recall details accurately, they can’t look at pictures, they will make things up if deprived of the bare essentials of life over the course of time. I don’t understand how you could sleep deprive somebody for 11 days and now expect this person to provide you with accurate information.
“Even if they wanted to they’re probably so debilitated at this point they need to be rehabilitated before they ever give you anything.”
Cloonan’s description of Zubaydah backs up what author Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine.
Suskind said Zubaydah was not the “high-value detainee” the CIA had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families. However, George W. “Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote, adding that Bush asked one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”
And after Zubaydah was subjected to coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, he spoke about a wide range of plots against a number of U.S. targets, such as shopping malls, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Yet, Suskind wrote, the information Zubaydah provided under duress was not credible.
According to Suskind, Zubaydah’s captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind wrote.
Hyping the Case
Still, in public statements, Bush portrayed Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States” and added: “So, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures” to get Zubaydah to talk.
The President did not want to “lose face” because he had stated his importance publicly, Suskind wrote.
In the book, State of War, New York Times reporter James Risen wrote that days after Zubaydah was captured, CIA Director George Tenet went to the White House to provide Bush with a daily intelligence briefing as well as details of “the Zubaydah case.”
“Bush asked Tenet what information the CIA was getting out of Zubaydah,” Risen wrote. “Tenet responded that they weren’t getting anything yet, because Abu Zubdaydah had been so badly wounded that he was heavily medicated. He was too groggy from painkillers to talk coherently. Bush turned to Tenet and asked: ‘Who authorized putting him on pain medication?’”
Risen’s source for the information told him it’s possible that this was simply “jocular banter” between Bush and Tenet. But Risen wrote that it’s also a possibility that the “comment meant something more.”
“Was the president of the United States implicitly encouraging the director of Central Intelligence to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner? If so, this episode offers the most direct link yet between Bush and the harsh treatment of prisoners by both the CIA and the U.S. military,” Risen wrote. “If Bush made the comment in order to push the CIA to get tough with Abu Zubaydah, he was doing so indirectly, without the paper trail that would have come from a written presidential authorization.”
CIA documents from a Combatant Status Review Tribunal in March 2007 revealed that Zubaydah’s torturers eventually apologized to him and said they concluded he was not a top al-Qaeda lieutenant as the Bush administration and intelligence officials had claimed.
“They told me sorry we discover that you are not number three [in al-Qaeda], not a partner, even not a fighter,” Zubaydah said during his tribunal hearing.
Is this clip referring to the same “dirty bomb” as the one mentioned by Zubaydah? The arrest was of Jose Padilla. Note the date: June 11, 2002.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-11-2002/headlines—dirty-something
Headlines – Dirty Something
The U.S. government announces a month-old arrest of an American citizen who was working with Al Qaeda to set off a dirty bomb on U.S. soil.
Tags: terrorism, Al Qaeda, Headlines, war on terror, America, George W. Bush
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Jose Padilla (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29)
Padilla was arrested in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and was detained as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President George W. Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts. Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” after his arrest in 2002 on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack. That charge was dropped and his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.
On January 3, 2006, he was transferred to a Miami, Florida, jail to face criminal conspiracy charges. On August 16, 2007, José Padilla was found guilty, by a federal jury, of charges against him that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was widely described in media as a suspect of planning to build and explode a “dirty bomb” in the United States, but he was not convicted on this charge.
On January 22, 2008, Padilla was sentenced by Judge Marcia G. Cooke of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida to 17 years and four months in prison. His mother, Estela Ortega Lebron was relieved but announced that they would appeal the judgment: “You have to understand that the government was asking for 30 years to life sentence in prison. We have a chance to appeal, and in the appeal we’re gonna do better.”[1].
Don’t click on the Wikipedia link above, it won’t work.
Jose Padilla (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29
Hey Dave,
Love this Jon Stewart clip! He was just as funny in the early days.
Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator does indeed say that Zubaydah Identified Padilla. Whether Padilla was actually plotting to build a dirty bomb is another story.
But, Soufan said in this NYT op-ed that defenders of torture like Dick Cheney say that waterboarding Zubaydah, and subjecting him to other torturous methods, produced results. Here’s Soufan: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html
“Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.”
I think Soufan was trying to put out a clue; that Zubaydah was tortured before the issuance of the torture memo.
Hi Jason,
Glad you liked it. I love that archive, love this Web site.
Thanks for setting me straight. I was confusing the two bogus reports (attacks against financial institutions & shopping malls) with the ‘dirty bomb’ plot that Zubaydah revealed prior to being waterboarded.
Col. Wlkerson’s March article, describing how it was known early on that the battlefield vetting was pure chaos, and a comment he made in his recent interview with Andy Worthington, suggest to me the pivotal importance of the role of myth-making in the whole sordid affair.
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Lawrence Wilkerson: But it was something this administration almost made a cult of doing — not just on interrogation, but on almost everything, whether it was Iraq, whether it was the Middle East in general, whether it was North Korea. The attitude was: Don’t talk to me from a position of expertise, talk to me from a position of fixed religious adamancy, you know.
Andy Worthington: Exactly. And again, that was the story that impressed me in Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, when, after understanding that there were so many “Mickey Mouse prisoners,” as General Dunlavey called them, John Bellinger, who, at the time, was the National Security Council’s Legal Advisor, went to try and have a meeting with Alberto Gonzales, when he was still Bush’s Counsel, and found David Addington there, and Addington said, we’re not bothered about what you’ve got to say about innocence and guilt. The President has said they’re all guilty on capture, that’s the end of the story, nobody’s reviewing it. You know, it’s an example of justifying actions on the basis of executive power. . .
http://pubrecord.org/torture/5086/cia-ig-zubaydahs-torture-preceded-john-yoos-torture-memo/comment-page-1/#comment-596
Wouldn’t that make this a variation of the Nuremberg defense? Just following the orders of “The Big Man Upstairs,” a cosmic tyrant who governs a political mechanism, the state, by kinetic activity, is that what they were doing? Talk about your “faith-based” policies, how does Life as Holy War sound, eh?
Fr this reason, I agree with Col. Wilkerson’s assessment of Cheney: he’s crazy. He seems to be suffering mythic inflation, in which one’s ego inflates to mythic proportions.
Our mythology is one of a war-god who governs his creation with fiat and force; what’s so surprising if our actions express that belief? That archetype is both the reassuring Father, and the scarecrow with which one can easily herd the American electorate.
How did we get jacked to war? I think it’s obvious: it’s the mythology!
They knew they were capturing innocent people and torturing them for information the detainees couldn’t possible have, some of them to death. That’s not self-defense, that’s human sacrifice on the altar of their fears.
Say you step on a cat’s tail, and it shrieks; now what? Duct tape its mouth shut? Step on its head? Why not stop inflicting pain, see how that works out for a change?
Nope, can’t do that. Force is what we believe in. Remember Tom Engelhardt’s article, “Crusading in the Arc of Instability”?
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“This unkind assessment,” adds Maalouf, “accurately reflects the impression made by the [crusaders] upon their arrival in Syria: they aroused a mixture of fear and contempt, quite understandable on the part of an Arab nation which, while far superior in culture, had lost all combative spirit.”
Americans, despite heavy competition, now look like the new barbarians of the arc of instability — and things are going to get worse. Don’t think the calling of air power into downtown Baghdad is likely to be forgotten. This is the behavior of barbarians, no less so than the use of suicide bombs in Baghdad’s streets.
The Church of Our Man of Global Domination
So think of this as Bush’s crusading scorecard for the years 2001-2007 — this record of barbarism with its guarantee of a “whirlwind of blowback,” as Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times puts it, and the unmistakable look of a war against Islam.
In truth, the most obvious factor linking all of the above together, however, the real thing they have in common, is not, in the normal sense, religious at all. If there is a religious war going on, waged by men (and a few women) of faith, then that faith is neither Christianity, nor Judaism, nor is the war against Islam per se. It comes instead from the fundamentalist Church of Our Man of Global Domination and at its heart is the monotheistic religion of Force. If the arc of instability were inhabited by recalcitrant, angry, sometimes armed, and sometimes destructive Buddhists, sitting on vast energy reserves, this war would look like a war against the Buddha himself.
The essential doctrine of faith that ties all the disparate foreign-policy acts of this administration together is the belief that to every global problem, to every difficult situation, there is but a single striking and uniform response — not the application of democracy, but the application of force.
In its pursuit of force as a faith, the Bush administration has managed to lower the bar on all applications of force by any state (just as it has raised the value of a nuclear arsenal and so, despite its threats of war, lowered the bar on the proliferation of those weapons). This is but a small part of the price a regime of force must pay when force is such an inadequate instrument in our world. The single most striking aspect of Bush foreign policy is that, over and over, it is revealed to be a quiver with but a single arrow in it. If things are going well, you reach back, take that arrow of force, or the threat of it, and notch it into your bow. If things are going badly, you do the same. For an administration so focused on the domination of planetary resources, its officials have, in fact, proven themselves remarkably resourceless.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/158512/crusading_in_the_arc_of_instability
HA! Look, there’s Pepe Escobar, I planned on quoting him next:
The New Great Game is not only focused on the face-off between the United States and strategic competitors Russia and China – with Pipelineistan as a defining element.
The full spectrum dominance doctrine requires the control of the Pentagon-coined “arc of instability” from the Horn of Africa to western China. The cover story is the former “global war on terror”, now “overseas contingency operations” under the management of President Barack Obama’s administration.
Most of all, the underlying logic remains divide and rule. As for the divide, Beijing would call it, without a trace of irony, “splittist”. Split up Iraq – blocking China’s access to Iraqi oil. Split up Pakistan – with an independent Balochistan preventing China from accessing the strategic port of Gwadar there. Split up Afghanistan – with an independent Pashtunistan allowing the building of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline bypassing Russia. Split up Iran – by financing subversion in Khuzestan and Sistan-Balochistan. And why not split up Bolivia (as was attempted last year) to the benefit of US energy giants. Call it the (splitting) Kosovo model.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KI03Df01.html
Clearly, to this poet, our beliefs about how the world works and our proper role in it, that is, our mythos materializes our realities. It’s in this mythic context that US actions make the most sense to me.
IMO, there’s an effort underway, to transform the president into somebody’s idea of god, the better to remake the world in their own self-righteous image.
It’s the mythology of dominance, dammit!
Strange, I managed to link that comment to itself. D’oh! Here’s the Worthington/Wilkerson link.
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/09/09/an-interview-with-col-lawrence-wilkerson-part-two/
Hey Dave, thanks so much for the the kind words! And you are doing great work over at the Examiner!
Appreciate your insightful comments. I think Wilkerson is dead on. He conducted his own investigation into torture/abuse at the urging of Powell after Powell had been been briefed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Wilkerson said he found a paper trail that led directly to Dick Cheney, David Addington and Donald Rumsfeld and the entire narrative that we have been told is just plain wrong
Jason… really great work. Again.
Helgerson’s response to Sandberg (at der Spiegel) that she “was basically correct” about the OLC memo of August 2002 being a retroactive permission slip for conduct already engaged in, followed immediately by his clarification that it was instead a formalized memorialization of an earlier oral authorization jumped right out at me when I read it.
There’s been speculation of a “back channel” between OVP (Addington) and OLC (Yoo), and as noxious an authoritarian scumbag as Yoo has proven himself to be, it is precisely that authoritarian-follower mentality, IMHO, which would have directed him to seek orders from “up the chain” regarding CIA’s request for the OLC “oral OK” and then the later-written legal cover memo(s).
Wilkerson says the paper trail leads straight to Cheney, and Cheney and Addington both were vociferous opponents of decisions made during the Reagan years to permanently shelve torture and ban it worldwide… and they wasted no time, it would seem, in bringing it back once they were in a position to do so.
So I have to wonder: why? Torture’s only actual efficacious purpose is for the terrorization (and subjugation) of populations. How deeply involved was Cheney himself (along with Addington) in the terror campaigns — featuring U.S.-trained torturers — in Central and South America in the 1970′s and 1980′s? What is Cheney’s specific purpose behind what appears to have been a long-standing intent to return torture — population terrorization and subjugation — not just to both the CIA and the U.S. military, but also to a wholly-unaccountable private contractor mercenary force (whom Judge Laurence Silberman, on the Court of Appeals, has just immunized)?
Cheney is very busy making it abundantly clear that he is not going “gentle into that good night,” so I am very concerned about what his long-term game plan actually is, what his targets are, and where his “Team B” is. $9 billion in palletized, shrinkwrapped cash just evaporated… and we assume that’s just the tip of the iceberg (how much rake-off was there from the TARP, and to whom?). A whole lot of people who should be a whole lot more loudly active about the business of investigation and prosecution of these war criminals seem way too damn intimidated… and many of those same people were so absolutely unrestrained in their endlessly loud outrage at Clinton’s blowjob. I don’t think that mere rank partisan hypocrisy explains it.
So… I remain very concerned.
Thanks for all your great work, Jason
PJ, thanks so very much for the kind words and for taking the time to read the story. I am very appreciative. I think that when the OPR report is released you will begin to see evidence of that back channel as it relates to OLC. I have no doubt (unless they further watered down the report but I am told they haven’t). My colleague, Robert Parry, has written a great article of the the 1980s terror campaigns and the involvement, to some degree, of Cheney. Check it out: http://consortiumnews.com/2009/090809.html
Jason, I’ve been relying on your reporting for awhile now. You’re in that “must read” group with Greenwald, Horton, Marcy and a few others (personally, I also list Jeff Kaye in there)… I really don’t believe its possible to consider oneself informed in this subject matter area without having read your work and the work of those others.
I have to thank you for the link to Robert Parry’s article (and works)… the reference could not have been better chosen — more on point — for the issues and concerns I’d mentioned. I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with his work.
The delay on the OPR report is curious… and a tad concerning, as it smells a tad like ‘polity manipulation.’ Not that a government would ever deliberately engage in such a thing, of course.
If Holder & Co. are following Elizabeth de la Vega’s “go slow and get convictions” strategy of careful, methodical, “don’t scare the fish” approach to criminal prosecution, then I’m in favor. If, alternatively, its just more “don’t distract us from bigger priorities,” then I’m both opposed and disappointed.
Not knowing which it is — while time moves on, memories fade, and witnesses die — is maddening.
Thanks again…
PJ,
Those kind words mean a great deal to me. Thank you so much. I am very grateful for your support. Particularly to be in the company of writers you mention. Jeff Kaye has indeed done fantastic work and I know he will really appreciate you taking notice.
If you haven’t heard it yet please check out this excellent audio interview with Scott Horton and Robert Parry, discussing the issues I mentioned. Parry goes far deeper than his article and I think you will be quite interested. http://antiwar.com/radio/2009/09/12/robert-parry-9/
The OPR report delay is absolutely about politics. The report has been finished now for about a month.
The key thing about Durham’s investigation is that we don’t really know exactly what his mandate is yet. If, like Alberto Mora, he is restricted from going up the chain of command than it will indeed be a whitewash. However, I have heard that Durham’s probe into the destruction of the torture tapes has been very meticulous.
We shall see.