More On Torture

Not for the faint of heart....

Torture: An Author and a Resister

Friday 01 May 2009

by: Ann Wright, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

The funeral for Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson, Flagstaff, Arizona. (Photo: Jill Torrance / Getty Images)

As a Bush administration political appointee Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, Jay Bybee, a Mormon, wrote one of four torture memos released last month. Bybee's August 1, 2002, 20-page memorandum laid out in excruciating detail the interrogation techniques he was authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use on al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.

Bybee authorized ten "enhanced interrogation techniques" to encourage Abu Zubaydah to disclose "crucial information regarding terrorist networks in the United States or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against US interests overseas." The torture techniques authorized were (1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap, (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress position, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box and (10) waterboarding.

The current Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder has stated that waterboarding is torture, while the previous Attorney General Judge Mukasey refused to comment on whether waterboarding is torture.

From recently released CIA documents, we know the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.

But, we know that from March through June, 2002, according to FBI interrogator Ali Soufan in an op-ed to The New York Times on April 23, 2009, FBI interrogators had already gotten "actionable intelligence" from Zubaydah using traditional, non-torturing interrogation techniques, including that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 and that Jose Padilla was planning to be a "dirty bomber."

Ninety of the 92 interrogation videotapes the CIA admits it destroyed were interrogations of Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah's British attorney Brent Mickum, in the most detailed account the public has had of Zubaydah's life, states that after all the waterboarding and other torture methods used, the CIA finally recognized Zubaydah was not the senior al-Qaeda leader they had portrayed him to be. According to Mickum, the military commissions at Guantanamo are now "airbrushing" his name from the charge sheets of other Guantanamo prisoners. Mickum reveals Zubaydah was severely wounded in Afghanistan in 1992 while fighting communist insurgents after the withdrawal of Soviet forces. He has two pieces of shrapnel in his head, which have affected his memory to the extent that "he cannot remember his mother's name or face." Mickum states that Zubaydah was shot and severely wounded when he was picked up in Pakistan. His life was saved by a John Hopkins surgeon flown to the region. After being saved from death, he was almost tortured to death by CIA operatives. Mickum says that Zubaydah is a stateless Palestinian with no country to argue on his behalf and a United States government now embarrassed at being caught in its own illegal conduct.

We know that combinations of the other nine techniques authorized by Jay Bybee can be classified as torture, as the Convening Authority of the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Susan Crawford declared when she dismissed the charges against Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani, in January, 2009, in the last days of the Bush administration.

Crawford said that for 160 days al-Qahtani's only contact was with the interrogators and that 48 of 54 consecutive days he was subjected to 18- to 20-hour interrogations. He was strip searched and had to stand naked in front of a female agent. Al-Qahtani was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation and was told that his mother and sister were whores. With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks." He was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus. The interrogations were so severe that twice al-Qahtani had to be hospitalized at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which, in extreme cases, can lead to heart failure and death. At one point, al-Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the interrogation records showed.

The torture techniques Jay Bybee authorized in 2002 migrated to Iraq in 2003. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller traveled to Iraq from Guantanamo to demonstrate to soldiers in Iraq the techniques the military and CIA were using in Guantanamo.

In September 2003, another Mormon, a woman soldier, US Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson, said she refused to use the interrogation techniques that Bybee had authorized on Iraqi prisoners. An Arabic linguist with the US Army's 101st Airborne Division at Tal Afar base, Iraq, 27-year-old Peterson, refused to take part in interrogations in the "cage" where Iraqis were stripped naked in front of female soldiers, mocked and their manhood degraded and burned with cigarettes, among other things. Three days later, on September 15, 2003, Peterson was found dead of a gunshot wound at Tal Afar base. The Army has classified her death as suicide.

Jay Bybee, in thanks for his being the loyal soldier to the Bush administration's policies of torture, was nominated and confirmed by the US Senate as a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he sits to this day in his lifetime appointment. Jay Bybee, an author of torture, reportedly has a placard in his home for his children that reads, "We don't hurt each other."

Alyssa Peterson, for saying no to torture, is dead, perhaps by her own hand.

To help Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson rest in peace, I say we should demand accountability from our officials and IMPEACH the torture judge, Jay Bybee.

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Ann Wright is a 29-year US Army Reserves veteran who retired as a colonel. She was a US diplomat, who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somali, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Mongolia and Afghanistan, where she helped reopen the US Embassy in December 2001. She has traveled to Gaza twice in the past three months and will make her third trip in May 2009. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience."

Let The Sun Shine In......

Lifting Bush's Shroud

During his confirmation hearings in January, Eric Holder promised that if he became attorney general, he would increase the Justice Department's transparency. Specifically, he pledged to make public controversial memos the Bush administration fought to keep secret. Earlier this week, Holder made good on his promise, releasing nine Bush-era memos that formed the basis for the previous administration's policies on issues such as torture, wiretapping, and the suppression of free speech. Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch said the memos "read like a how-to document on how to evade the rule of law." "Americans deserve a government that operates with transparency and openness," read a statement by Holder, underscoring the clean break with the Bush administration. "It is my goal to make OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions available when possible while still protecting national security information and ensuring robust internal executive branch debate and decision-making." Also this week, the Obama administration revealed in court documents that the CIA destroyed 92 tapes showing interrogations of detainees -- far more than the Bush administration was willing to admit. In December 2007, the New York Times reported that the CIA had destroyed at least two videotapes documenting suspected al Qaeda operatives being subjected to "severe interrogation techniques."

WHAT THESE MEMOS REVEAL: Some of the memos were released in response to a lawsuit against former OLC attorney John Yoo, by Jose Padilla, whom the United States held for years as an enemy combatant. The Obama administration concluded that there was no classified information in these documents; this admission was a stunning contrast to the Bush era, when officials attempted to maximize government secrecy by increasing the classification of government documents. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) praised Holder's quick release of the memos, saying that they finally "provide details of some of the Bush administration's misguided national security policies." The picture they end up painting is of an administration that believed "the president had broad authority to set aside constitutional rights," as the Associated Press reported. Furthermore, several of the memos -- including ones on extraordinary rendition and First Amendment rights -- were eventually rescinded, reflecting the "major legal errors committed by Bush administration lawyers during the formulation of its early counterterrorism policies."

CREATING A DICTATORSHIP: A memo written by Yoo on Oct. 23, 2001, contained one of the most surprising revelations: the Bush administration considered suspending First Amendment rights. "Freedom of speech is integral to a free society," President Bush said in May 2008. However, seven years earlier, Yoo wrote, "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. ... The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically." After reading the memos, Harpers' Scott Horton wrote, "We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship." In fact, Yoo's memo was too much even for Steven Bradbury, the man who failed to gain Senate confirmation to head the OLC because of his extreme views on torture. On Oct. 6, 2008, Bradbury wrote a memo saying that Yoo's suggestions to ignore free speech were "overbroad" and "not sufficiently grounded."

A BLANK CHECK: Yoo's October 2001 memo also dismissed the Fourth Amendment, claiming that protections against unwarranted searches and seizures could be subordinated in the war on terrorism. Yoo similarly proposed invading Americans' privacy in a Sept. 25, 2001 memo, advocating "warrantless searches for national security reasons." The Associated Press noted that the document "did not specifically attempt to justify the government's warrantless wiretapping program, but it provided part of the foundation." In fact, one of the most controversial memos from the Bush era that many lawmakers have been asking to be released is one explicitly justifying the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping. Another major focus of the memos is the treatment of detainees. A March 13, 2002 memo written by then-assistant attorney general in the OLC Jay Bybee argued that the president had the authority to transfer detainees to other countries, whether or not they may be tortured there. Recognizing his controversial proposals, Bybee provided ways for the Bush administration to avoid being held legally liable. "So long as the United States doe[s] not intend for a detainee to be tortured post-transfer, however, no criminal liability will attach to a transfer even if the foreign country receiving the detainee does torture him," he wrote. "These memos were meant to provide the president with a blank check with respect to the rights of not only prisoners overseas but people in the United States as well," concluded the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer.

FINDING THE TRUTH: The release of these memos came as Congress determines how to investigate -- and perhaps even prosecute -- the Bush administration's misdeeds. Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the creation of a "truth commission" to investigate these wrongdoings. Leahy initially hinted at providing "blanket immunity" to Bush officials willing to testify, but both Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have warned against this approach. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has also put together a report looking at whether Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury "knowingly signed off on an unreasonable interpretation of the law to provide legal cover for a program sought by Bush White House officials." Whitehouse and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) have called on the Justice Department to release this report.

Let The Sun Shine In......