… it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.
Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.
By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.
As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”
We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were… Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.
The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.
… Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality…
President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.
What’s that sound I hear in the background? The one that’s getting louder and louder? Why I think it’s the truth trying to make itself known. I almost wish I didn’t hear it. As much as I’ve personally ranted against the Bush Administration, I’d rather believe that they were inept than corrupt. But what Rich is saying out loud is what a lot of us are thinking. There’s a new hypothesis that’s moving from conjecture into the realm of fact. It’s all part of one story – the Downing Street Memo, the Valerie Plame Affair, the Torture Memos, the Bush Administration’s public campaign for War, the leaks to Judith Miller, the Project for the New American Century. Rich calls lying about Iraq the "original sin" – pretty well stated. We can lay aside for the moment "Why" they wanted to invade Iraq. What we can say with certainty is that all these pieces we’ve been obsessed with for so many years are coming together, and their claim that we just didn’t have good intelligence is out the window. They went after a reason to invade Iraq with a vengence. All they came up with was a forgery from Italy, a shipment of aluminum tubes for small rockets that they morphed into centrifuge tubes, and a fabrication that Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda based on Douglas Feith’s distorted conjectures. Their search for anything solid to justify their war turned up nothing – but they sure gave it a shot, like torturing a Schizophrenic man. They were trying to make Abu Zubaydah lie for them, to keep them from killing him. And as ludicrous as it sounds, that’s the truth that is trying to be heard.
I need to go off topic again, to get something off my chest. Like many other people from the tri-state area who had a relative living and working in NYC on 911, I guess you have to have first hand experience to know what went on that horrible day to realize that whoever was responsible for the low flying plane photo-opt yesterday had to be practically brain dead to think it was all right to do. I remember my son telling me that right after 911, that he would be at a meeting in one of the many tall building in the city and when he and his co workers heard a plane that sounded close to their building, everybody would get down on the floor and kneel under a desk. The physical scars in NYC may be gone but the scars in the brain will never go away.