This is a painful read, and an important reminder that we have not yet finished with the excesses that began in the months after 9/11.
I have defended men and women on death row for nearly all of my thirty years as a lawyer, and have represented people caught up in the excesses of the “war on terror” since very shortly after that war was launched. For more than a decade, I have been counsel for Zayn al-Abedin Muhammad Hussein, known more widely as Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah was the first person immured in a “black site,” the clandestine prisons operated around the globe by the CIA from early 2002 to late 2006. He was the first prisoner to have his interrogation “enhanced,” and the only person subjected to all the DOJ-approved interrogation techniques, as well as a number that were never approved (including, for example, rectal rehydration). The infamous torture memo was, in fact, written specifically to legitimize Abu Zubaydah’s torture.
At the time of his capture and for years afterward, government officials took great pains to demonize Abu Zubaydah in order to justify his abuse. “The other day,” President George W. Bush announced at a Republican fundraiser in April 2002, “we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah. He’s one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He’s not plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs.” Various senior administration officials described Abu Zubaydah in comparably colorful terms.
These pronouncements, however, are not what set the torture scandal into motion. For that, we can thank a “psychological assessment” written by unnamed CIA officers and faxed to John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who was the lead author of the torture memo. This document described Abu Zubaydah as “the third or fourth man in al-Qaida” and “a senior Usama Bin Laden lieutenant” who had been “involved in every major al-Qaida terrorist operation” and was “a planner of the 11 September hijackings.” He “managed a network of [al-Qaeda] training camps,” “directed the start-up of a Bin Laden cell in Jordan,” and “served as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts, or foreign communications.” He was also alleged to be “engaged in ongoing terrorism planning against US interests.” For good measure, he had supposedly written the organization’s “manual on resistance techniques” and had a particular expertise in thwarting conventional interrogations. It was this assessment that provided Yoo with the “facts” needed to legalize the unlawful and rationalize the unthinkable.
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The “facts” recounted above to justify this torture were all false. Abu Zubaydah was no lieutenant to Osama bin Laden. He held no position in al-Qaeda, senior or otherwise. He had no part in September 11 or any other al-Qaeda operations. He did not operate a network of al-Qaeda camps, open an al-Qaeda cell in Jordan, or manage al-Qaeda’s external communications. He did not draft any resistance manual, for al-Qaeda or anyone else, and had no special expertise in resisting interrogations.
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/28/the-innocence-of-abu-zubaydah/