The slow emergence of our understanding about the Torture Program has been excruciating, particularly with respect to the now legendary Abu Zubaydah. He was captured on March 28th, 2002, almost a year before we invaded Iraq. When we first learned about him specifically, we didn’t know that stories about him were the ones we’d been hearing about as "actionable intelligence." Abu Ghraib was revealed in 2004, but again, it was literally years before we knew of the Torture Memos, the torture programs, the black sites. Again, it was Abu Zubaydah that was the central case.Even after we knew about the torture we thought it was to get information about al Qaeda’s plans. It was relatively recently that we realized that a big motive in the torture program was to get some detainee to connect al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to justify invading Iraq for oil and other reasons. And it was even later that we found out that there was a massive attempt to cover up what we had done back in that six months between Zubaydah’s capture and the September push for war with Iraq.
Now there’s an even more macabre discovery on our plate. The Memos written to justify torturing prisoners were written after the fact. Actually, Abu Zubaydah was used as a lab rat to try out torture techniques that were then fed back to the OLC Memo writers who used the data to formulate the Memos authorizing his torture. Everything about that six months turns out to have been absolutely an illusion, including Abu Zubaydah’s importance. He was a minor operative, a jihadist but not really part of al Qaeda.
A close reading of the CIA’s Inspector General Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s narrative on the Office of Legal Counsel [OLC] torture memos reveals a more detailed picture of the CIA’s involvement in the construction of those documents. What emerges is consistent with recent charges of CIA experimentation on prisoners, and of the overall experimental quality of the torture program itself.
It also points to a crucial piece of “analysis” by the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, a memo which may or may not include damning medical and psychological evidence of the damaging effects of SERE techniques, and which the IG report maintains was utilized “in substantial part” in the drafting of the August 1, 2002 Bybee memos. If one is looking for a smoking gun in the torture scandal, in my opinion, one doesn’t have to look much further than this.
The quote below is from the April 22, 2009 Senate Intelligence Committee narrative of the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinions on the CIA’s interrogation program…:
According to CIA records, because the CIA believed that Abu Zubaydah was withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions, attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel met with the Attorney General, the National Security Adviser, the Deputy National Security adviser, the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council, and the Counsel to the President in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S. military and intelligence community. At this meeting, the CIA proposed particular alternative 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. To enable OLC to review the legality of the techniques, the CIA provided OLC with written and oral descriptions of the proposed techniques. >The CIA also provided OLC with information about any medical and psychological effects of DoD’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape [SERE] School, which is a military training program during which military personnel receive counter-interrogation training.While the fact that the OLC accepted at face value the CIA’s statements regarding the safety or the effects of the interrogation procedures they were proposing is no surprise to anyone who has read the torture memos — and evidence of the unprofessionalism and bias of the memo’s authors — the degree to which the conspiracy (by CIA or OLC, or both) to withhold evidence of the real effects of the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” [EITs] by the CIA has never been made more concrete than now…
Torture Diaries, Drawings and the Special Prosecutor
t r u t h o u t
by: Jason Leopold
29 March 2010
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…
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. Zubaydah began keeping a diary in 1992 after he suffered a severe head injury while fighting communist insurgents in Afghanistan. The injury left "significantly impaired both his long- and short-term memory," states a January 14, 2009, court motion filed by Mickum…
However, because the diaries are written in Arabic and US District Court Judge Richard Roberts’ ruling did not state that the government was required to have the diaries translated, it is unlikely the defense will learn what Zubaydah wrote about his torture any time soon. A clerk who works for Roberts would not discuss any aspect of the judge’s ruling…
"The cost of translating these volumes is exorbitant," Mickum said. "I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is only one translator who has top-secret security clearance and he is working on 30 other cases and goes to Guantanamo every week. It would cost us about $1,300 for a six-hour day, a cost that does not include travel expenses." Mickum said he received a $253,000 grant from the JEHT Foundation that was used, in part, to help pay for the translations of earlier volumes of Zubaydah’s diaries. However, Mickum could not obtain additional funds from JEHT, a charity that backed juvenile and criminal justice system reforms, because the organization had a majority of its assets invested with Bernie Madoff, and was forced to shut down…The Special Prosecutor and Zubaydah’s Drawings
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.
During a recent meeting with Durham, Mickum said he learned that the special prosecutor had obtained drawings during the course of his probe that Mickum believed were Zubaydah’s. In addition to the diaries, Mickum had previously sought from the Justice Department drawings Zubaydah made while in CIA custody. But the Justice Department told Mickum they could not locate the drawings. "When I met with John Durham I discovered he had drawings, which, based on my review I believed were my client’s," Mickum said. "The drawings were ultimately produced to us in late 2009"…
Mickum said in lieu of the torture tapes, the drawings Zubaydah made contain the best description of the torture techniques CIA interrogators used against Zubaydah while he was being held at the agency’s black site prison facilities…
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. He said he’s discussed this, as well as other issues, with Durham on at least four occasions. He described the special prosecutor as "professional" and "thoroughly engaged"…
"An Experiment"
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. 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…
"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]"…
The Justice Department, in its factual return, has since abandoned every major claim that the Bush administration made about Zubaydah being a high-level al-Qaeda official and no longer believes or contends that he was ever connected to the terrorist organization or was involved in the planning of any terrorist plots, according to Mickum. Separately, the Senate Intelligence Committee is close to completing a yearlong review of the Bush administration’s so-called "enhanced interrogation" program and may soon issue a report that contains the most detailed information to date about Zubaydah, which intelligence sources interviewed over the past two weeks said will "embarrass" Bush administration officials who continue to maintain that he was an important figure in al-Qaeda, and will debunk assertions from the likes of Dick Cheney that his torture produced actionable intelligence.
Human Experimentation at the Heart of Bush Administration’s Torture Program
t r u t h o u t
by: Jason Leopold
06 June 2010
High-value detainees captured during the Bush administration’s "war on terror," who were subjected to brutal torture techniques, were used as "guinea pigs" to gauge the effectiveness of various torture techniques, a practice that has raised troubling comparisons to Nazi-era human experimentation. according to a disturbing new report released by Physicians for Human Rights, an international doctors’ organization…
"Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of [the] interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations," said the 27-page report, entitled "Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program." "Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."
The report is based on extensive research of previously declassified government documents that shows the crucial role medical personnel played in establishing and justifying the legality of the Bush administration’s torture program. Many of the details contained in the document has already been painstakingly documented by Marcy Wheeler at her blog Emptywheel, and Truthout’s own Jeffrey Kaye on his blog Invictus and in articles published on this web site and at Firedoglake.
Written by medical and psychological experts, some of who have worked with victims of torture, the report said the research and experimentation on detainees violate medical professional standards, the Geneva Conventions on treatment of detainees, and international law based on the Nuremberg principles that were embraced by the civilized world after it was revealed that the Nazis engaged in medical atrocities on prisoners during World War II. “The essence of the ethical and legal protections for human subjects is that the subjects, especially vulnerable populations such as prisoners, must be treated with the dignity befitting human beings and not simply as experimental guinea pigs,” the PHR report said.
Frank Donaghue, PHR’s chief executive officer, said the report appears to demonstrate that the CIA violated "all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation"…
I felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people. — Abu Zubaydah to the Red Cross
Physicians for Human Rights just released a report documenting what Jeff Kaye and more recently Jason Leopold have been discussing for years: America’s torturers were conducting a kind of human experimentation on the earliest detainees. PHR is calling on Attorney General Holder to investigate whether CIA’s medical personnel committed the war crime of human experimentation.
Most of the contents of the report will be familiar to readers of this blog. I find the following detail the most interesting new observation.
As part of the 2006 Military Commissions Act, the WCA was amended to delineate the specific violations of Common Article 3 that would be punishable. Among those violations is “performing biological experiments.” The amended language prohibits:
The act of a person who subjects, or conspires or attempts to subject, one or more persons within his custody or physical control to biological experiments without a legitimate medical or dental purpose and in so doing endangers the body or health of such person or persons.While this language maintains the existing prohibition on biological experiments contained in the previous version of the WCA, the effect of this amendment appears to weaken the prohibition by moving away from the type of strict language found in the Geneva Conventions [Third Geneva Convention, Article 13], which states:
No prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental, or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned and carried out in his interest.The new language of the WCA added two qualifications that appear to have lowered the bar on biological experimentation on prisoners. That language requires that the experiment have a “legitimate” purpose, but does not require that it be carried out in the interest of the subject. It also adds the requirement that the experiment not “endanger” the subject, which appears to raise the threshold for what will be considered illegal biological experimentation.That is, one of the things the Bush Administration did with the Military Commissions Act was retroactively change the law on human experimentation such that experimentation no longer needed to have a personal benefit to the research subject, and could instead be justified because of a “legitimate” interest. You know, like the “legitimate” interest of knowing how long a human could be subject to sleep deprivation before they started hallucinating? Which suggests to me that someone in government recognized the risk CIA’s torturers faced.
I won’t give up on this story either.