Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures. President George W. Bush, White House, Sept. 6, 2006

Special Handling Instructions

And what was that "alternative set of procedures" that Bush authorized to get the prisoner to talk? What were the means? Ron Suskind describes the various techniques.

"According to CIA sources, he was waterboarded [subjected to simulated drowning]…beaten …repeatedly threatened and made certain of his impending death. His medication was withheld … [he was] bombarded with deafening, continuous noise and harsh lights … as a man, already diminished by serious injuries [to the groin, he was more fully at the mercy of interrogators than an ordinary prisoner." Suskind, 2006, p. 115

The following analysis was conveniently omitted. It is from one of the most experienced and respected anti-terrorism agents to serve in the U.S. government:

This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality. That's why they let him fly all over the world doing meet and greet. That's why people used his name on all sorts of calls and e-mails. He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights.… He knew very little about real operations, or strategy. He was expendable…. Dan Coleman, retired senior FBI terrorism agent, quoted from Suskind, 2006, p. 100. Also see Cooperative History Research Commons.

Coleman confirmed the analysis he shared with Suskind in an April 16, 2007, National Public Radio interview by Mary Louise Kelly, who reported this on NPR on April 17, 2007.

Coleman had worked on this case and reviewed the diaries, ten years of strange reflections captured with Zubaydah in 2002.

CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official. Barton Gellman, Review of The One Percent Doctrine, June 20, 2006, Washington Post.

Coleman evaluated the highly coercive interrogation techniques used in the Abu Zubaydah case in late 2007.

"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much." Washington Post, Dec. 18, 2007

How did someone characterized as "a mailman" and "certifiable, insane" became one of the great masterminds of al Qaeda? This act of will formed the rationale for policies that lack any contact with reality; policies that are more in place in the most chaotic periods of history than in a society that produced two separate teams of scientists that cracked the DNA code.

What is Torture?

Torture is defined as follows in the UN Convention on Torture:

"… torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." Signed by the United States, 1988; ratified by the United States, 1994.

 1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5