(1.)”One focus of scrutiny could be the period from April to August of 2002, when C.I.A. officers interrogated Abu Zubaydah before the Justice Department gave its official written endorsement of the interrogation program. According to a Justice Department inspector general’s report, F.B.I. officials who watched some of the interrogation sessions in a Thailand safe house reported that the C.I.A. interrogators had used several harsh techniques” …
Harsh techniques! Other reports call them brutal. Why did only some call these interrogation techniques what they were: torture.
This story continued:
Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on Friday raised the prospect of prosecuting senior Bush administration officials and Justice Department lawyers who authorized the harsh interrogations … In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article published Friday, two senior Bush administration officials were highly critical of the White House decision to declassify the memos. ‘Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001’, wrote Michael V. Hayden, a former C.I.A. director, and Michael B. Mukasey, a former attorney general”. This can be read in full here.
(2.) “The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show. Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said. Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, ‘seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect’. C.I.A. officers adopted these techniques only after the Justice Department had given its official approval on Aug. 1, 2002, in one of four formerly secret legal memos on interrogation that were released Thursday. A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been ‘unnecessary’. Quoting a 2004 report on the interrogation program by the C.I.A. inspector general, the footnote says that ‘although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within C.I.A. headquarters still believed he was withholding information’.” The debate over the significance of Abu Zubaydah’s role in Al Qaeda and of what he told interrogators dates back almost to his capture, and has been described by Ron Suskind in his 2006 book, ‘The One Percent Doctrine’, a 2006 article in The New York Times and a March 29 article in The Washington Post asserting that his disclosures foiled no plots. (His real name is Zein al-Abideen Mohamed Hussein.) But interviews with current and former government officials who have direct or indirect knowledge of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation suggest that the United States began the waterboarding, labeled as illegal torture by top Obama administration officials, based on a profound misunderstanding of its captive. In March 2002, when Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan after a gunfight with Pakistani security officers backed by F.B.I. and C.I.A. officers, Bush administration officials portrayed him as a Qaeda leader. That judgment was reflected in the Aug. 1, 2002, legal opinion signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The memo summarizes the C.I.A.’s judgment that Abu Zubaydah, then 31, had risen rapidly to ‘third or fourth man in Al Qaeda’ and had served as ‘senior lieutenant’ to Osama bin Laden. It said he had ‘managed a network of training camps’ and had been ‘involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by Al Qaeda’. The memo reported the C.I.A.’s portrayal of ‘a highly self-directed individual who prizes his independence’, a deceptive narcissist, healthy and tough, who agency officers believed was the most senior terrorist caught since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His interrogation, according to multiple accounts, began in Pakistan and continued at the secret C.I.A. site in Thailand, with a traditional, rapport-building approach led by two F.B.I. agents, who even helped care for him as his gunshot wounds healed. Abu Zubaydah gave up perhaps his single most valuable piece of information early, naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom he knew as Mukhtar, as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot. A C.I.A. interrogation team that arrived a week or two later, which included former military psychologists, did not change the approach to questioning, but began to keep him awake night and day with blasting rock music, have his clothes removed and keep his cell cold. The legal basis for this treatment is uncertain, but lawyers at C.I.A. headquarters were in constant touch with interrogators, as well as with Mr. Bybee’s subordinate in the Office of Legal Counsel, John C. Yoo, who was drafting memos on the legal limits of interrogation. Through the summer of 2002, Abu Zubaydah continued to provide valuable information. Interrogators began to surmise that he was not a leader, but rather a helpful training camp personnel clerk who would arrange false documents and travel for jihadists, including Qaeda members … At the time, former C.I.A. officials say, his tips were extremely useful, helping to track several other important terrorists, including Mr. Mohammed. But senior agency officials, still persuaded, as they had told President George W. Bush and his staff, that he was an important Qaeda leader, insisted that he must know more … As described in the footnote to the memo, the use of repeated waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah was ordered ‘at the direction of C.I.A. headquarters’, and officials were dispatched from headquarters ‘to watch the last waterboard session’. The memo, written in 2005 and signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that the waterboarding was justified even if the prisoner turned out not to know as much as officials had thought. And he did not, according to the former intelligence officer involved in the Abu Zubaydah case. ‘He pleaded for his life’, the official said. ‘But he gave up no new information. He had no more information to give’. Abu Zubaydah’s own account, given in 2006 to the International Committee of the Red Cross, corroborates that what he called ‘the real torturing’, including waterboarding, began only ‘about two and a half or three months’ after he arrived at the secret site, according to the group’s 2007 report. Since 2002, the C.I.A. has downgraded its assessment of Abu Zubaydah’s significance, while continuing to call his revelations important”. This was published by the NYTimes here.
(3.)The Washington Post revealed in an article also published on Saturday that “Psychologists Helped Guide Interrogations”, that “When the CIA began what it called an ‘increased pressure phase’ with captured terrorism suspect Abu Zubaida in the summer of 2002, its first step was to limit the detainee’s human contact to just two people. One was the CIA interrogator, the other a psychologist. During the extraordinary weeks that followed, it was the psychologist who apparently played the more critical role. According to newly released Justice Department documents, the psychologist provided ideas, practical advice and even legal justification for interrogation methods that would break Abu Zubaida, physically and mentally. Extreme sleep deprivation, waterboarding, the use of insects to provoke fear — all were deemed acceptable, in part because the psychologist said so. ‘No severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted’, a Justice Department lawyer said in a 2002 memo explaining why waterboarding, or simulated drowning, should not be considered torture. The role of health professionals as described in the documents has prompted a renewed outcry from ethicists who say the conduct of psychologists and supervising physicians violated basic standards of their professions … Most of the psychologists were contract employees of the CIA, according to intelligence officials familiar with the program … The CIA declined to comment yesterday on the role played by health professionals in the agency’s self-described ‘enhanced interrogation program’, which operated from 2002 to 2006 in various secret prisons overseas. ‘The fact remains that CIA’s detention and interrogation effort was authorized and approved by our government’, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Thursday in a statement to employees … The American Psychological Association has condemned any participation by its members in interrogations involving torture, but critics of the organization faulted it for failing to censure members involved in harsh interrogations. The ICRC, which conducted the first independent interviews of CIA detainees in 2006, said the prisoners were told they would not be killed during interrogations, though one was warned that he would be brought to “‘he verge of death and back again’, according to a confidential ICRC report leaked to the New York Review of Books last month. ‘The interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics’, the ICRC report concluded. The newly released Justice Department memos place medical officials at the scene of the earliest CIA interrogations. At least one psychologist was present — and others were frequently consulted — during the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, the nom de guerre of Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, a Palestinian who was captured by CIA and Pakistani intelligence officers in March 2002, the Justice documents state. An Aug. 1, 2002, memo said the CIA relied on its ‘on-site psychologists’ for help in designing an interrogation program for Abu Zubaida and ultimately came up with a list of 10 methods drawn from a U.S. military training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. That program, used to help prepare pilots to endure torture in the event they are captured, is loosely based on techniques that were used by the Communist Chinese to torture American prisoners of war … Author Jane Mayer and journalist Katherine Eban separately identified as key figures James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two psychologists in Washington state who worked as CIA contractors after 2001 and had extensive experience in SERE training. Mitchell, reached by telephone, declined to comment, and Jessen could not be reached yesterday. The CIA psychologists had personal experience with SERE and helped convince CIA officials that harsh tactics would coerce confessions from Abu Zubaida without inflicting permanent harm. Waterboarding was touted as particularly useful because it was ‘reported to be almost 100 percent effective in producing cooperation’, the memo said. The agency then used a psychological assessment of Abu Zubaida to find his vulnerable points. One of them, it turns out, was a severe aversion to bugs. ‘He appears to have a fear of insects’, states the memo, which describes a plan to pla caterpillar or ace similar creature inside a tiny wooden crate in which Abu Zubaida was confined. CIA officials say the plan was never carried out … The memos acknowledge that the presence of medical professionals posed an ethical dilemma. But they contend that the CIA’s use of doctors in interrogations was morally distinct from the practices of other countries that the United States has accused of committing torture. One memo notes that doctors who observed interrogations were empowered to stop them ‘if in their professional judgment the detainee may suffer severe physical or mental pain or suffering’. In one instance, the CIA chose not to subject a detainee to waterboarding due to a ‘medical contraindication’, according to a May 10, 2005, memo. Yet some doctors and ethicists insist that any participation by physicians was tantamount to complicity in torture” … This article was published in full here .