The CIA would have preferred to have tortured one guy to death.

[n2doc]

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE

As I mentioned a while back, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has been making some remarkably good hires on the margins far distant from the places where Mike (Payola) Allen and the like do their business. Today, the great Ray Bonner re-emerges with the winding tale of Abu Zubaydah, whom the CIA captured in 2002, tortured for a few years, and then tossed into Gitmo to languish. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Gitmo detainees could challenge their sentences in federal court. Many of them, including Zubaydah, did. However, while a number of his fellow inmates were granted relatively speedy hearings, and 100 of them actually released, Zubaydah's case has been stuck in the mud of secret hearings for over six years. Bonner, of whom we who obsess about the crimes of the Reagan administration have fond memories, is pretty clear on why this case in particular hasn't moved the way the others have.

Soon after the agency's contractors began their program of "enhanced interrogation" at the secret black site in Thailand—placing him in a coffin-size box, slamming him against wall, depriving him of sleep, bombarding him with loud music, as well as waterboarding—they sent an encrypted cable to Washington. The CIA interrogators said that if Zubaydah died during questioning, his body would be cremated. And if he survived the ordeal, the interrogators wanted assurances that he would "remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life." Senior officials gave the assurances. Zubaydah, a Saudi citizen, "will never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released," the head of the CIA's ALEC Station, the code name of the Washington-based unit hunting Osama bin Laden, replied. "All major players are in concurrence," the cable said, that he "should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life."

I mean, if the guy doesn't have the good grace to die while we're torturing him, then we should stash him away for life, because we have rendered him nothing more than evidence. He's the knife the killer washes off in the sink, the gun the stick-up kid throws in the river, the witness that has to die because he saw too much or knows too much. Commit the crime. Bury the evidence. These are not original thinkers there, in our intelligence community.

The old boogedy-boogedy has been ginned up now sufficiently that "national security" is said to be a prime issue in the upcoming presidential campaign. Various people on the Republican side are striving to outflex each other; Marco Rubio's alleged comeback is attributed to his tough-guy stance on the jihad menace, which Rubio summed up last weekend by quoting an action movie at a wingnut rodeo in South Carolina. Make no mistake. When they talk about this, it's about putting our national conscience back in cold storage again and returning American foreign policy to the control of the people who run the black cells, who torture people until they are little more than evidence, and then hope to hell they die.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a34938/the-cia-and-its-victims/

[n2doc]

1. kick n/t

[Octafish]

2. 1984 nonperson

"will never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released," the head of the CIA's ALEC Station, the code name of the Washington-based unit hunting Osama bin Laden, replied. "All major players are in concurrence," the cable said, that he "should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life."

What country is this where torture brings justice?