{"id":4161,"date":"2010-06-10T00:15:10","date_gmt":"2010-06-10T04:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4161"},"modified":"2010-06-10T00:17:30","modified_gmt":"2010-06-10T04:17:30","slug":"breaking-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/06\/10\/breaking-free\/","title":{"rendered":"breaking free…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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.<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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People don’t have much interest in this story. I guess the Iraq debacle is something we’d rather not think about. Who wants to feel ashamed? Who wants to face the fact that we turned out to be the bad guys, that we sacrificed our young for no real reason, that our own government duped us – particularly if you were in favor of the officials who did it to us? Three people have stuck to this story tenaciously – emptywheel<\/font><\/strong>, Jeff Kaye<\/font><\/strong>, and Jason Leopold<\/font><\/strong>. There have been some great books along the way. But the developing story rarely makes the front page. There’s a Special Prosecutor looking into part of it and a few congressional reports of investigations pending. Everyone in the Executive Branch was involved – the President, the Vice President, the DoD, the DoJ, the CIA – everyone. One day, this story is going to be breaking free… <\/div>\n
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Smoking Gun on CIA Torture Conspiracy? <\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n
Human Experimentation Central to EIT Program<\/a>
The Public Record<\/strong>
By Jeffrey Kaye
Sep 27th, 2009 <\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The quote below is from the April 22, 2009 Senate Intelligence Committee narrative<\/a><\/strong> of the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinions on the CIA’s interrogation program…:<\/div>\n