The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_exhibit_one_in_any_future_american_war_crimes_trial/

by _g2lm • 10 years ago

350 168 10 years ago

tomdispatch.com

confluence• 10 years ago

The CIA is not known for its intelligence.

GordonS3• 10 years ago

Agreed, they've come to be known for lack of oversight, being involved in corruption, being involved in drug production and trafficking, overthrowing democraically elected governments, installing despots, grabbing people from their home countries and torturing them in absolutely vile ways, and more.

The 3 letters 'CIA' now strike fear into the hearts of innocent people across the globe.

saiya-jin• 10 years ago

I would say disgust rather than fear, just another entitled bunch of aholes who think they can do whatever they want all around the globe and they actually have means to do so.

but then comes fleeting moment of satisfaction when some of them are shot, kidnapped etc... yeah, that's how despised they are

overlordalex• 10 years ago

The website comes up with a pop-up when I try read the article, but when I hit the 'x' to close it I get dumped at the homepage.

Here's the Google cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Itp90I0...

puddintane• 10 years ago

On my phone it is a scrolling advertisement. To get past it don't click on it just scroll using the page around the ad and once you get past it you can scroll again! Desktop I'm not sure about however

elcapitan4• 10 years ago

While "waterboarding the right man 83 times in 1 month" would of course be a very honorable occupation.

brillenfux• 10 years ago

"Justified" is the word you're looking for.

We want it to be justified, not honorable. Nobody gives two shits about honor as soon as it is about "them" (whoever fits that definition currently).

GordonS3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure this kind of disgusting behaviour can ever be justified.

dandare• 10 years ago

If they can do this to him they can do it to anyone. The saddest thing is the example the "free world" is giving to all totalitarian torturers.

hoodoof• 10 years ago

Well if he didn't hate the CIA before then he probably does now.

DoofusOfDeath• 10 years ago

Good point. The argument could be made that the CIA agents involved have provided material support for terrorism.

cmdrfred• 10 years ago

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx_GOM4Jcjo

Reminds me of this.

jmnicolas2• 10 years ago

This article will not change anything. By the time our day end we will have been bombarded by so much other information that it will just be one more forgotten thing.

And there's so much things that are revolting that our brains are just shutting down as a self defense mechanism.

Sociopaths in power don't even need to hide anymore, they know they are hidden in the noise.

I mean look at Turkey : they help ISIS, they shoot Syrian refugees crossing the border, they kill their own Kurdish population and they denies a genocide ... barely a blip in the news.

harryf2• 10 years ago

20 years ago it wouldn't have been news at all. Now it's hard to make things completely vanish. Its just the balance between scandals and outrage has shifted; far more scandals are floating to the surface in the Information Age and outrage has yet to catch up. But it will

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

20 years ago, it would have been far bigger news. There's been a gradual slide in the conditions in Turkey that make what's happening there now not very surprising.

user_0001• 10 years ago

yes, but we need Turkey. They are in Nato, they are on "our" side - thus we do not criticise (and if we do - very meekly).

The same as when they are "our" dictators, or "theirs". Whether the government is murdering "communists in their 10s / 100s of thousands or whether the government is trying to improve the lot of the country's people via social programs at the experience of foreign (our) international businesses.

curiousgal• 10 years ago

barely a blip in the news.

This might sound harsh but look beyond the metaphor; if I wake up in the morning and find poop in the toilet, it's not really such a big surprise. But if I find poop on the kitchen table, well we have reason to be concerned now.

yuzi2• 10 years ago

Unless everyone is waking up to find poop on the kitchen table every morning for so long that they then begin treating it as normal. Which is what the parent post is suggesting - that we are already there.

Aelinsaar4• 10 years ago

Pretty much. Of course, all of that stands to change if the quality of life for the people "shutting down" their brains suddenly plummets. Then, magically, you would see people flip out. Short of that, they'll just take the suffering of others as their own possible worst end.

rhino369• 10 years ago

One reason this won't cause a blip in the news is because it's really sensationalist and biased.

The article implies that the government was totally wrong about Abu Zubaydah and, therefore, he was totally innocent But to prove that the article cites to the court memo that says the US government doesn't alleged Zubaydah was a member of al Qaeda.

But the government still alleged he ran an independent terrorist training camp that was affiliated with al Qaeda. The gov't just didn't "contend that Petitioner was a 'member' of al-Qaida in the sense of having sworn bayat (allegiance) or having otherwise satisfied any formal criteria that either Petitioner or al-Qaida may have considered necessary for inclusion in al~Qaida. Nor is the Government detaining Petitioner based on any allegation that Petitioner views himself as part of al-Qaida as a matter of subjective personal conscience, ideology, or worldview. Rather, Respondent's detention of Petitioner is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was 'part of' hostile forces and 'substantially supported' those forces."

totall• 10 years ago

If he wasn't innocent, he would be judged by an independent court, and be given the chance of challenging the evidence against him. The US is a democracy.

jmnicolas2• 10 years ago

Even a guilty man shouldn't be subjected to 81 waterboardings in a month.

patrickg_zill• 10 years ago

Before, we were told how tough it was on a person to be waterboarded.

That it was so debilitating that it was only used in extreme cases.

Now this guy is waterboarded 3 times a day for a month, basically at every meal (if you want to think about it in terms of frequency).

It seems clear that it is not rare; and that it doesn't really deliver results.

Again and again, we have been lied to about waterboarding, how often it is done, what level of use we get out of it, etc.

And, this is just 1 example - there could well be other methods of torture and many other cases of incompetence... makes you want to say "you know what? Let's just scrap the whole thing..."

If waterboarding was a piece of software it would be considered too crashy and unreliable and a replacement that worked better would be sought immediately.

overcast5• 10 years ago

Well it didn't deliver results, because none of it was true. So how could the guy give up any information that didn't exist?

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

Part of the result of any interrogation is to figure out if the subject has the information you want.

So it didn't deliver at all.

iandanforth• 10 years ago

Imagine you had a scale, onto which you put a weight labeled "100kg". You know it weights 100kg because it says so right there. The scale however, only registers 85kg. You take it off, you put it back on, the scale always says the same thing. You try different scales, they say 85kg, but you keep going because it's 100kg and you're going to find a scale that's accurate! Eventually you find a scale that says what you want.

This straw man illustrates that at some point, it isn't the tool, but the process that's flawed. Even if your tool is accurate, if you don't believe it, you can't get at the truth, and if you work hard enough you can find a broken tool to tell you what you want.

So perhaps there is some truth to the idea that torture can extract true information from people, but if the whole process operates like the above straw man, it totally invalidates the use of the tool.

fucking_tragedy• 10 years ago

If your goal is to utterly break and dehumanize a person until they're rendered psychotic, incontinent, incapable of human interaction or ever being able to take care of themselves again, this is how you accomplish it.

We handled interrogations with Nazis better. We showed them respect and they gave us valuable information.

It leads me to believe intelligence wasn't the main motivator for the continued torture of these people, but only an excuse.

shostack• 10 years ago

"If your goal is to utterly break and dehumanize a person until they're rendered psychotic, incontinent, incapable of human interaction or ever being able to take care of themselves again, this is how you accomplish it."

Not to mention make them more pliable and potentially willing to give a false testimony just to make it end. Not that false testimonies have ever been tortured out of people by governments before.

yuzi2• 10 years ago

If waterboarding was a piece of software it would be considered too crashy and unreliable and a replacement that worked better would be sought immediately

Only there is no possible replacement so they just continue using the same horrible thing. If there is one thing people are terrible at it's understanding that not doing something is often a viable option.

Aelinsaar4• 10 years ago

They think there is a replacement though. They always keep searching for something, but the realities of torture mean they never will. In reality, inevitably, torture is kept hidden anyway, so improvised means and methods because the norm. You couldn't deny soldiers field telephone magnetos for most of the 20th century, which meant you couldn't deny them electroshock torture devices either. Same with rubber hoses, or basins of filthy water.

Aelinsaar4• 10 years ago

It's not JUST waterboarding... you just described torture in a nutshell. I suggest reading, 'Torture and Democracy', it's incredibly enlightening and has a fantastic set of sources.

deepnet• 10 years ago

But it did deliver results, confessions that were directly cited by the US Commander in Chief to justify the invasion of Iraq.

This poses a further question. Was the invasion decided apon based on the belief such intelligence was true or was this confession rather something to justify a decision ?

Winston Churchill's criticism of torture is that it was not useful because you were told what you want to hear - under torture the victim will say anything to make it stop.

Enhanced Interrogation is a euphemism. That the actions described in the article are torture is clear.

spangry4• 10 years ago

Interesting implication from the title of the article: that it would be 'right' to waterboard some other men. Who are they, and what justifies their torture? And before someone says it, I don't think "gathering intelligence" is a sufficiently moral or practical justification. People being tortured don't tell you valuable information; they tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop.

The CIA is a sickening and surprisingly amateurish organisation. Their actions over the past decades have ruined the United States' international moral authority. It's laughable whenever some US politician goes on TV and proclaims that America is some magical paragon of liberal democratic virtue. It's a sick joke.

an_ko• 10 years ago

I think the word “wrong” in the title was meant to be understood in the sense of “pressed the wrong button”—undelining technical rather than moral incompetence from the CIA. Torturing someone already strongly implies the latter.

jccc• 10 years ago

To be fair:

"And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah—with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials—is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror."

... from very near the beginning of the article.

gshulegaard• 10 years ago

Although, to be fair I can't read the article because of its abhorrent pop up...which redirects me when I try to close it.

ikeboy12• 10 years ago

Who are they, and what justifies their torture?
People being tortured don't tell you valuable information; they tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop.

You're already asserting your position, and disguising it as a question. Virtually everyone seriously condoning torture believe it is effective. If they were to believe it wasn't effective, they wouldn't order it to be done.

You may think it's not effective, but that should be argued on its own merit. You're assuming the conclusion, then pretending that everyone else does and are therefore unjustified.

zyxley4• 10 years ago

You may think it's not effective

Torture factually isn't effective. https://www.cgu.edu/pdffiles/sbos/costanzo_effects_of_interr...

evan_• 10 years ago

Virtually everyone seriously condoning torture believe it is effective.

I think a very high number of "torture proponents" are simply in favor of hurting the "bad guys" and don't even care that there might be information to be had.

Donald Trump said it best, to an arena full of cheering supporters:

"If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing"

In his mind, and the minds of his constituents, the "information gathering" aspect is a sly wink at the other sadists in the room.

spangry4• 10 years ago

Assuming the conclusion? That would only be true if I also stated that the only possible justification someone might give for torture is intelligence gathering. I was simply addressing what I thought would be the most likely counter-argument, not asserting it's the only possible counter-argument.

By all means, feel free to argue the merits of my 'pre-emptive counter-counter argument' (boy this is getting confusing). Or if you like, feel free to argue the merits of some alternative justification for torturing people. Here, I'll start you off:

- It's a good deterrent to <x> behaviour

- It's fun

- It hurts people we don't like

- The victim is a witch, and we need to find out who the other witches are

soneca• 10 years ago

Here is some research to back up that torture is ineffective: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7576/full/527035a...

But it is behind a paywall :/

rdtsc• 10 years ago

Virtually everyone seriously condoning torture believe it is effective. If they were to believe it wasn't effective, they wouldn't order it to be done.

Not that simple. They "say" they believe is it is effective. The reason they do it is not necessarily the same.

People have sadistic tendencies and will torture and inflict pain on others just for pleasure and amusement. Bullies do it on playgrounds, people in power do it to their subordinates, others torture animals for pleasure and so on.

I don't buy the idea that just because they ended up as advisory experts to the Pentagon, or they rose into power it somehow means those tendencies are not there.

hartpuff8• 10 years ago

The CIA is a sickening and surprisingly amateurish organisation. Their actions over the past decades have ruined the United States' international moral authority.

I'm not even sure that's true. I think the perception of the CIA (perhaps due to generally positive portrayals of it on TV and in movies) is completely different to, say, the perception people have of the Stasi or KGB.

And yet did those organizations, which people rightly consider to be bad, actually do anything worse than the CIA has been doing in the last 70 years?

Cthulhu_3• 10 years ago

Behold, the effects of propaganda. I'd really like to see some solid research in how much the CIA or US government funds TV shows and movies to portray those organizations as the good guys, or whether it's more due to patriotism or whatever it is that makes a movie-maker portray organizations like that as good or bad.

ikeboy12• 10 years ago

And yet did those organizations, which people rightly consider to be bad, actually do anything worse than the CIA has been doing in the last 70 years?

The average American is not personally affected by anything the CIA does. Can the same be said about the KGB?

cmdkeen• 10 years ago

Yes both in terms of degree and scale. In my mind the CIA's actions are morally indefensible but still pale in comparison to what those organisations got up to. Even if you throw in the FBI in its darkest days under Hoover you don't get close to the tyranny the KGB inflicted.

It is going to take Western history a long time to get over its Communist apologists like Hobsbawm and be willing to fully accept the horrors that system spawned.

pdonis3• 10 years ago

did those organizations, which people rightly consider to be bad, actually do anything worse than the CIA has been doing in the last 70 years?

Yes, they did.

kstenerud• 10 years ago

You can read any implication you want into 11 words of text.

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

- Cardinal Richelieu

cm2012• 10 years ago

I am against torture. However, it behooves us to be honest to avoid counter arguments. There is a time when torture clearly does work - when you have a way to quickly verify information. I.E. if there is a safe in the room, or a phone number you can call, or something like that. However, most of the time torture is not used for that purpose.

x5n1• 10 years ago

What's the difference between a drone strike or a beheading of innocents? What's the difference between Assad torturing non-Syrians or Americans doing the same thing at black ops sites? Out of all the justifications for acting brutally or inhumanely according to the ethical standard American rhetoricians, most of the justifications that sort of give a passing nod to all the State sponsored brutality are rooted not in any real plots that have happened, but in fictional ones that could happen.

spangry4• 10 years ago

I agree. This is the one situation I can think of where torture would probably be an effective means of obtaining the information you want.

And I also agree it's important to make this distinction, and for people to define what they mean by 'verify'. In my mind, the information is verified if the safe unlocks, the bomb is defused etc. The danger, I think, is when people consider 'verified' to include 'corroborating information obtained through torture'. This tends to lead you to false conclusions (e.g. half the women in your village are witches, as they all implicated each other when they were tortured).

Paradigma11• 10 years ago

So you ask them 30 questions 10 of which you know the correct answers. Also if you have several prisoners you can compare answers. This should give you a good idea about the validity of the answers.

Just waterboarding till you get a story you like is obviously bullshit but this also does not tell you much about the potential efficacy of torture.

masswerk• 10 years ago

"(...)" This should give you a good idea about the validity of the answers."

And this is exactly, how we learned about the witches and why we had to burn them.

towlejunior• 10 years ago

The CIA may be sickening, but at least they don't intentionally misinterpret headlines in order to segway into grandstanding.

matthewhuff89• 10 years ago

Trevor would be so into this story

Luc• 10 years ago

Imagine the patches with cool Latin slogans!

Esau2• 10 years ago

Speaking as someone who served in the U.S. military - this is not how a prisoner should be treated.

Cthulhu_3• 10 years ago

Well no shit; there's the Geneva convention and shit that makes practices like torture and such illegal. The US can waltz right over that though, because what is anyone going to do?

Esau2• 10 years ago

I understand that some people argue that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to members of terrorist organizations; that it only applies to members of a sovereign country's military. Regardless, it reflects badly on us.

Torture is wrong; no matter who is doing it or who it is being done to.

1024core• 10 years ago

The sad part is: despite reading this article and fully agreeing with it, conservatives in this country will just shrug and say: mistakes happen, let's not dwell on it. And they feel justified in taking this view because they know deep down that it would never happen to a white person in today's US. Case in point: John Walker Lindh -vs- Jose Padilla. JWL (a white guy) was actually fighting against the Americans; was taken prisoner, treated well, immediately put on trial and sentenced to 20 years (he'll be out in 7). Jose Padilla (a Hispanic male) was tortured for years in a Naval brig, without charges.

CWuestefeld• 10 years ago

conservatives in this country will just shrug and say: mistakes happen, let's not dwell on it.

Apparently so will our Liberal president:

I hope that today’s report can help us leave these [torture] techniques where they belong—in the past. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/09/state...

woodman2• 10 years ago

Both liberals and conservatives will eagerly switch off their brains when their pet interest is threatened. For conservatives it is their brand of culture, for liberals it is their brand of state. The puppet show is getting boring. As far as the identity politics, I can't think of a group more paranoid about government abuse in the US than white male birch society types.

lvs• 10 years ago

Obama, for his part, also committed not to pursue any prosecutions for the misdeeds of his predecessor's administration.

Lagged2Death• 10 years ago

The historical purpose and utility of torture is to produce made-up confessions and bullshit "intelligence" to lend some veneer of necessity to whatever course of action the high and mighty have already committed to.

Just about anybody with a Middle-Eastern-sounding name and the slightest plausible connection to or proximity with "Al Qaeda" (conveniently defined and delimited by the torturers themselves) would have been equally useful for this purpose. There is no "right" man, no "wrong" man. That's torture. It's a show, a blood pageant. It's reading the Tarot or goat entrails.

That's the system, the procedure you defend when you apologize for torture.

eric_h3• 10 years ago

Same article on a website that is not awful

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176132/tomgram%3A_rebecca_go...

dang• 10 years ago

OK, we changed to that from http://www.thenation.com/article/the-cia-waterboarded-the-wr.... We'll also use the article's title (which you have to scroll down to see), which doesn't suffer from the problem users have pointed out with the Nation's title.

Strom2• 10 years ago

Good thing I clicked on it before it was changed. I have the complete opposite reaction. The Nation's page has a nice picture to set the theme and uses a wider space with a bigger font, while the TomDispatch page looks like something from 1999.

eric_h3• 10 years ago

I agree that the design of the nation's site is better/more modern. However, when I landed on the site, I was able to read the first sentence before a modal subscription form popped up. I clicked the little x button in the top right of that modal, and it did a full page load redirecting me to an article about hillary clinton, and then popped the subscription modal again.

I clicked the x button again and it did the same fucking thing, so I gave them the email address go.fuck.yourself@gmail.com, found the article I was trying to read and noticed that it was sourced from the link I dropped above. That page loaded quickly and showed me what I wanted to see, the content.

/rant

astazangasta• 10 years ago

Sometimes I question whether there is the possibility of change, here. The CIA has started openly torturing people - they have no doubt been covertly torturing people for years; we've been showing this in our fiction for decades, and this is probably largely the public's view of how the CIA is - unsavory characters who do the "dirty work" that needs to get done to keep us safe.

Why do we accept this notion of torture as a heroic virtue, when it's obviously not? I think we're unable to assimilate the alternative - that our national myths are all false, that we are subject to an evil torture state, that our security apparatus is beyond democratic control or the rule of law. All of these are horrific, monstrous possibilities that we can't confront, so it's much easier for us to rationalize them away by suggesting that the CIA's actions are not, actually, evil.

Determining otherwise requires an act of national catharsis, a revolution in our understanding of ourselves as a political entity. We are not safe, good, democratic. We are venal, aggressive, evil. Making this confrontation will take more than just a factual understanding.

okreallywtf• 10 years ago

I think their discussion of "learned helplessness" is interesting in this context. I think it also applies to most Americans in the feeling that this will occur in our name, without our consent or approval, regardless of what we do. I don't think this is truly the case but it is hard to shake the feeling that it is and be as outraged by this as we absolutely should be.

consto• 10 years ago

Bush is a war criminal

pdonis3• 10 years ago

I notice that the article places all the blame on the Bush administration--yet it says the Obama administration quietly dropped the charges but did not release Zubaydah.

IkmoIkmo• 10 years ago

Charges is not the right word, he has to this day not been charged with anything whatsoever. He's held based on suspicion, allegations, stuff like that. Essentially awaiting a fair trial for over a decade, while being tortured in the process. It's quite insane.

pdonis3• 10 years ago

Charges is not the right word

Yes, good point, I should have said "dropped the claims being made" or something like that.

visarga• 10 years ago

Well, that should teach these non-terrorists not to be easily mistaken for terrorists any more.

rjett• 10 years ago

As a free member of the western world, happily able to pursue "the dream," and unexposed to the direct effects of war and humanitarian crimes, what am I to do? If you think about it, the domestic conditions in the US, relative to many of the places in the non-western world, are such that we have no incentive to ACTUALLY do anything to change things for the better. Sure, we get upset about reading articles like this. But is getting upset for 5 minutes, writing an article, making a movie, or even settling into the mindset of being jaded and skeptical about our own country's leadership really the toolset we are left with at the end of the day to cause change? Is there revolution in the modern west? Or are we neutered by the relatively great living conditions we take for granted?

woodman2• 10 years ago

So here is a false choice, but consider which one would have a greater and longer lasting impact:

A) You dash to the rolltop and feverishly write letters to every politician you can think of. You then get on a bus with a bunch of other upset people, go to DC and wave signs with clever catch phrases. You then live in a tent on public space for several weeks.

B) You consider this information, your feelings, and your prior model of the way the world worked. Methodically you reexamine long unchallenged precepts related to morality, the role of the state, and the logical consistency of the entire endeavor. After a while you find that things make a lot more sense, you are no longer experience the effects of cognitive dissonance when new information hits your brain. You share this new understanding, through example (maybe by pestering strangers online, either or).

Clearly I favor option B, but one could easily deride it as slacktivism - though the self reflection is not something you often see in #Kony2012. Every example of positive change that I can think, involved marching and rhyming slogans, would not have been possible without a great deal of uncomfortable self examination.

fiatmoney• 10 years ago

You would expect this to happen. Things like the Geneva Conventions are artifacts of roughly symmetric wars, where one could reasonably expect treatment & retaliation to be reciprocal. This explains things like restrictions on, eg, hollow point bullets - it's easy enough for everyone to use them, and it only serves to increase the severity of the conflict with no change in relative outcomes.

Now that the US doesn't actually fear having large numbers of troops captured, and even if they did their opponents have no desire to reciprocate treatment, they're "free" to engage in whatever horrific behavior they would like, and vise versa.

Lind is good on this: http://www.amazon.com/Generation-Warfare-Handbook-William-Li...

npx• 10 years ago

I think it's time to confront the reality that we have a serious asshole epidemic in America. It has gone unchecked for a few centuries and it has reached a fever pitch of state sanctioned torture and Donald Trump supporters.

Much like idiots, assholes cannot possibly realize that they are being assholes. It's one of the symptoms. They're actually completely confident that what they're doing makes total sense. It's a touch-and-go sorta thing; how do you openly confront assholery without becoming a huge asshole? I call this the Snowden dilemma. It's a real problem.

We are well past the point of occasionally waking up to find feces on the kitchen table. The majority of this country is subsisting entirely on a diet of pure shit. I don't want to seem elitist - I regard myself as a world class dummy - but I do know what shit tastes like and I understand that eating it is bad for you. I don't have any answers but I think we're in a lot of trouble here.

"Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. [...] It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world." --H.L. Mencken

titzer• 10 years ago

I don' think there's a magic bullet to asshattery. There has to be a cultural shift away from asshattery as acceptable behavior. The same way there has been a cultural shift away from domestic abuse and racism being acceptable (though they both have their stragglers).

The problem is that the diet of pure shit serves a purpose. It keeps people both agitated and docile at the same time. The kind of agitated and docile you would recognize in a cranky 80 yr man who shouts at clouds. Angry and uncomfortable, but ultimately harmless; miles away from taking an AK-47 and marching on Washington, and ultimately willing to pull the lever for the blue or red party, or best, not vote at all.

The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

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