1 Boring Old Man

He was initially interrogated by FBI Agent Ali Soufan using conventional rapport-building techniques. But in April, a CIA team including two contracted psychologists, James Mitchell and Paul Jessen, arrived and began to take over the interrogation. When Soufon found them building a container for a mock burial, he balked and the FBI soon pulled out of the interrogation because they said it was prohibited Torture. Zubaydah was tortured, but the Memo authorizing the program from the OLC [John Yoo, Jay Bybee] didn’t appear until August 1, 2002. There has always been a strong suspicion that Zubaydah’s torture began before the Memo authorized it. That was explained away as having been authorized verbally by the OLC earlier than the official Memo. Indeed, there is, in the ACLU FOIA documents, a Fax from John Yoo in the OLC on July 13, 2002 doing just that.

1. US Recants Claims on "High-Value" Detainee Abu Zubaydah _{Jason Leopold}
2. Government Admits Abu Zubaydah Suffered from Cognitive Impairment _emptywheel
3. Government Admits Its Understanding of Abu Zubaydah Has “Evolved” _emptywheel
4. Abu Zubaydah Experienced “Hard” Dislocation After Session 63 _emptywheel
5. The Government Makes No Claim Abu Zubaydah Had Knowledge of Impending Terrorist Plans _emptywheel
6. CIA Lawyers Were Discussing “Issue that Arose” Three Days Before July 13 Fax _emptywheel
7. How John Yoo Negated the Mental Suffering of Death Threats in the Bybee Two Memo _emptywheel
8. Why John Yoo’s Attempts to “Negate” the Torturers’ Intent Fails _emptywheel

The John Yoo Torture Memo that approves all the horrid techniques was submitted on August 1, 2002, though Yoo had started writing it in April [April 11, 2002]. It was full of glowing reports of Abu Zubaydah’s mental health, gleaned from an attached Psychological Evaluation dated June 24, 2002 . emptywheel found two copies of this Psychological Evaluation in the document dumps, [1][2] and they are different. Here are the two versions of a particular paragraph:

[Notice the jargon!] "strong signs of sympathetic nervous system arousal (possibly fear)" means that he was terrified. Notice that they describe "the initial ‘hard’ dislocation of expectation intervention following session 63" in the first version. What does that mean? It means that they suddenly slapped the shit out of him or slammed him into a wall – something like that. Now notice the sanitized version that was in the official report. ‘hard’ becomes ‘confrontational’; they remove the word ‘intervention’ which means they actively did something; and they eliminated the reference to when they did it [following session 63]. Looks like they did something that hadn’t yet been approved, since this  Psychological Evaluation was used to generate the approval.

As a matter of fact, June 24, 2002 was a busy day. The Vaughn Index of with-held documents shows that there was a hand-written list of possible torture techniques [that they didn’t release] also from that very same day.

So back to that Psychological Evaluation.They were roughing up Zubaydah before it was written. So Yoo’s Fax on July 13, 2002 couldn’t have been the pre-approval from the OLC that was offered as an explanation for this reference in the Psychological Evaluation. So, I was rereading the August Torture Memo, and there in the very first paragraphs is a reference to their previous pre-approval:

But it was the week before the Memo. Everything points to the simplest of conclusions. The CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah before there was any authorization. And if you read  emptywheel‘s extensive reconstructions, it is equally obvious that these supposed independent OLC opinions were not only after the fact, but also composed in conjunction with the White House and CIA Lawyers to fit their every wish [some of which had already been put into action], with instructions on how to evade prosecution for what they were doing. The term proposed conduct is a joke. By this time, they were already torturing Zubaydah.