The CIA Waterboarded the Wrong Man 83 Times in 1 Month

[Logical]

None of the allegations against Abu Zubaydeh turned out to be true. That didn’t stop the CIA from torturing him for years.


The allegations against the man were serious indeed.

Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in Al Qaeda.
The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps…. He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.”
CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25 percent of all the information his agency had gathered about Al Qaeda from human sources “originated” with one other detainee and him.
George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” claiming that “he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” and that “he helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan” so they would not be captured by US military forces.

None of it was true.

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.

Much more at:
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-cia-waterboarded-the-wrong-man-83-times-in-1-month/

[edhopper]

1. This is why

it was wrong for Obama to let these mother fuckers off the hook.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

2. No, no...

We must look forward as we walk softly with comfortable shoes.

[yourpaljoey]

3. To misquote Patrick Henry: "Give me comfortable shoes, or give me death!"

All part of Obama's "Legacy."

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

6. Oh, what comfortable shoes slouches

towards Bethlehem to be worn.

[annabanana]

11. heh . . . . .n/t

[yourpaljoey]

22. Mere blue suede shoes are loosed upon the world

vexed to nightmare by Q and his rocking mariachis

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

23. ...

[yourpaljoey]

27. Tell me, what is the origin of your cool name

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

31. ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw#

[yourpaljoey]

33. I should have recalled that

As a teen I read a lot of sci-fi.
Just yesterday I was thinking about the computer called Fair Dinkum Thinkum

[Paulie]

46. Mike was pretty cool. Though he couldn't walk through walls.

He needed help.

[yourpaljoey]

49. ello ello... I must review my library... such awesome stuff to dive back into

[edhopper]

42. But first here

[IMG][/IMG]

I am a BIG Asimov fan.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

43. Yes, but it was in the wiki post.

I also loved I Robot.

One of my brothers turned me on to SciFi at an early age.

[Paulie]

47. Ever read With Folded Hands?

http://www.relicradio.com/otr/2010/07/sf112-with-folded-hands-by-dimension-x/

[yourpaljoey]

48. I Robot is a classic among classics

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

50. Yep. I'm more of a Niven "known space" reader now.

I wish I had unlimited time to read.

[yourpaljoey]

51. You is robot... I believe you have all the time in (what's left of) the world

known space is cool stuff

[Enthusiast]

10. Huge +1!

Since when do we prosecute war crime selectively? Or choose to ignore it?

[Jeffersons Ghost]

44. Obama let other killers who invaded Iraq/ Afghanistan "off the hook" too

Some of these killers shot women and children, during urban warfare, because they were poorly trained. Other killers, who worked for the US Department of Defense, get thanks from the public, for following orders. Some of the killers wore US Military uniforms, while torturing suspects at Abu Ghraib, and Haditha. Waterboarding is mild, compared to types of torture used at Abu Ghraib, and Haditha by military personnel, who were not connected with the CIA. Like US Military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan, CIA agents were simply following orders at Gitmo. BTW, several presidents let lots of us Vietnam veterans "off the hook" too.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. And they did it as an experiment to learn how to torture more effectively.

Which is the war crime of conducting experiments on prisoners against their will.

nobody will be charged. nobody will go to jail.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

5. So it doesn't matter if it was the right guy or the wrong guy.

The results of the torture experiments can be presented as validation.

A little skill with Powerpoint, and it all looks legitimate.

[malaise]

7. The only way to clean up this planet is to send the war criminals

to the Hague

[Hydra]

8. It's worse than that, actually

They tortured people before this, but it was all hush-hush. This was the attempt to legalize and normalize the practice.

With half our party and the Dem President asking "What's the big deal?" I can't see how they did not partially succeed.

[OnyxCollie]

9. Practice makes perfect!

Review Articles TOTALITARIANISM The Revised Standard Version By ROBERT BURROWES*

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd edition, New York, Harcourt, Brace & Company, i966, 526 pp. $8.75.

Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd edition, revised by Carl J. Friedrich, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, i965, 439 pp. $9.95.

Arendt's conception of totalitarianism is that of a "fictitious, topsy-turvy world" (437). The most striking feature of that world is less the omnipresence than the non-utilitarian character of terror. Unlike the terror of other systems, totalitarian terror is not understandable in terms of the utilitarian motives or self-interest of the rulers. It is explicable only as a means to the insane, anti-utilitarian and selfless "experimental inquiry into what is possible" (436, 440).

The CIA Didn’t Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings
http://www.thenation.com/article/193185/cia-didnt-just-torture-it-experimented-human-beings

In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.” Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.

To implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Their “theory” had a particular means-ends relationship that is not well understood, as Mitchell testily explained in an interview on Vice News: “The point of the bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop.” In other words, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the Bush administration’s euphemism for torture) do not themselves produce useful information; rather, they produce the condition of total submission that will facilitate extraction of actionable intelligence.

~snip~

But here we are again. This brings us back to Mitchell and Jessen. Because of their experience as trainers in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, after 9/11 they were contacted by high-ranking Pentagon officials and, later, by lawyers who wanted to know whether some of those SERE techniques could be reverse-engineered to get terrorism suspects to talk.

The road from abstract hypotheticals (can SERE be reverse-engineered?) to the authorized use of waterboarding and confinement boxes runs straight into the terrain of human experimentation. On April 15, 2002, Mitchell and Jessen arrived at a black site in Thailand to supervise the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value detainee” captured by the CIA. By July, Mitchell proposed more coercive techniques to CIA headquarters, and many of these were approved in late July. From then until the program was dry-docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torments, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.

CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/15/cia-torture-human-experimentation-doctors

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.

~snip~

The relevant section of the CIA document, “Law and Policy Governing the Conduct of Intelligence Agencies”, instructs that the agency “shall not sponsor, contract for, or conduct research on human subjects” outside of instructions on responsible and humane medical practices set for the entire US government by its Department of Health and Human Services.

A keystone of those instructions, the document notes, is the “subject’s informed consent”.

~snip~

The previously unknown section of the guidelines empower the CIA director and an advisory board on “human subject research” to “evaluate all documentation and certifications pertaining to human research sponsored by, contracted for, or conducted by the CIA”.

[Enthusiast]

12. Reminds us of Josef Mengele.

[democrank]

13. The fact that nobody was charged

and a good chunk of the country is willing to overlook these horrific crimes tells me all I need to know about our human rights our values.

[Iggo]

14. Actually, every time they did it it was wrong, whether they had the right guy or not.

War crimes, pure and simple.

[HereSince1628]

15. Torture, Execution, War: all demonstrations of power. You have power by demonstrating it

If you aren't using it, it can be assumed you don't -really- have it, or the will to use it.

The more appalling, heinous, and uncivilized the consequences of that application, the more it's demonstration exhibits the power of the one's who wield it.

We think such logic only works in places like North Korea, but in that we are mistaken.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

16. Course they did

An agency with no accountability, a lot of power and unending resources

[prayin4rain]

17. So disgusting. n/t

[Orrex]

18. Well, it should be said that there's no "right" person to waterboard

But this is beyond disgusting in any case. '

We can rest assured that no one of consequence will be held accountable.

[whereisjustice]

19. 83 times? Well according to our president, that's just 83 times a patriot!

[Doctor_J]

20. It's important not to be too sanctimonious

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

21. Of course, the DOJ will indict the torturers, bring them to court, and punish them.

Or...maybe not.

[xocet]

26. "Or...maybe not." seems to be the course that has been and will be chosen by this and

probably future Administrations.

It seems that stating that "We tortured some folks..." will be the extent of the required penance.

The CIA Waterboarded the Wrong Man 83 Times in 1 Month
None of the allegations against Abu Zubaydeh turned out to be true. That didn’t stop the CIA from torturing him for years.
By Rebecca Gordon

April 25, 2016

...

The new Obama administration replied with a 109-page brief filed in the US District Court in the District of Columbia, which is legally designated to hear the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees.

The bulk of that brief came down to a government argument that was curious indeed, given the years of bragging about Zubaydah’s central role in Al Qaeda’s activities. It claimed that there was no reason to turn over any “exculpatory” documents demonstrating that he was not a member of Al Qaeda, or that he had no involvement in 9/11 or any other terrorist activity—because the government was no longer claiming that any of those things were true.


The government’s lawyers went on to claim, bizarrely enough, that the Bush administration had never “contended that [Zubaydah] had any personal involvement in planning or executing…the attacks of September 11, 2001.” They added that “the Government also has not contended in this proceeding that, at the time of his capture, [Zubaydah] had knowledge of any specific impending terrorist operations”—an especially curious claim, since the prevention of such future attacks was how the CIA justified its torture of Zubaydah in the first place. Far from believing that he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person in” Al Qaeda, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once claimed, “the Government has not contended in this proceeding that [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.”

...

Seven years after the initial filing of Zubaydah’s habeas petition, the DC District Court has yet to rule on it. Given the court’s average 751-day turnaround time on such petitions, this is an extraordinary length of time. Here, justice delayed is truly justice denied.

...

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-cia-waterboarded-the-wrong-man-83-times-in-1-month/

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

30. Yep. War crimes are just "mistakes" here.

[thesquanderer]

37. re: "'We tortured some folks...' will be the extent of the required penance. "

yes, please see post #36

[Logical]

29. Great point! nt

[OnyxCollie]

24. 6,000 page Senate torture report and zero prosecutions.

We need to look forward, past the fact that "we tortured some folks."

[RufusTFirefly]

25. Hey! If you can't trust Michael Hayden, who can you trust?

He's the one who repeatedly denied that the phrase "probable cause" is part of the Fourth Amendment.

https://m.

We've gone through the Looking Glass, folks. The saner you are, the crazier you'll get trying to make sense of things.

[Bayard]

28. Almost 3 times a day?

That holds us up as a moral beacon to the rest of this mad, mad world.

[L. Coyote]

32. THIS >> " still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld"

[Solly Mack]

34. K&R

[polly7]

35. And yet no-one pays for this.

Torture, ruining innocent people's lives, having their families suffer so much .......... it's all hunky dory. I remember when torture was considered inhumane - evil, even.

[thesquanderer]

36. "We tortured some folks." And no consequences.

That was the day my admiration for Obama dropped considerably.

Maybe it was, in a sense, brave for him to come out and say it, as the U.S. had never "officially" acknowledged it. But to pair that with no consequences was also for the U.S. to officially put forth that we are above the law.

And it may seem minor by comparison, but it really rubbed me the wrong way that he said "folks." It almost makes it sounds like everyone was just there for a good time, and hey, accidents happen. Maybe someone just had to much to drink. Well, yeah, I guess waterboarding is kind of like that.

[OnyxCollie]

38. About "folks,"

Propaganda Techniques
From Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Propaganda Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Quoted at http://carmen.artsci.washington.edu/propaganda/home.htm and http://www.vcsun.org/~ilene/secured_305text/propa.html

Plain folks
"Plain Folks" is a device used by politicians, labor leaders, businessmen, and even by ministers and educators to win our confidence by appearing to be people like ourselves- "just plain folks among the neighbors." In election years especially do candidates show their devotion to little children and the common, homey things of life. They have front porch campaigns. For the newspapermen they raid the kitchen cupboard, finding there some of the good wife's apple pie. They go to country picnics; they attend service at the old frame church; they pitch hay and go fishing; they show their belief in home and mother. In short, they would win our votes by showing that they're just as common as the rest of us- "just plain folks"- and, therefore, wise and good. Businessmen often are "plain folks" with the factory hands. Even distillers use the device. "It's our family's whiskey, neighbor; and neighbor, it's your price."

[CrispyQ]

41. This. ^^^

And it may seem minor by comparison, but it really rubbed me the wrong way that he said "folks." It almost makes it sounds like everyone was just there for a good time, and hey, accidents happen. Maybe someone just had to much to drink. Well, yeah, I guess waterboarding is kind of like that.

[Rex]

39. When will there be accountablility for those actions? Shouldn't someone pay for those crimes?

I kid...we all know there are different laws that apply to different social networks.

[rhett o rick]

40. Sadly this will be Obama legacy. We tortured some folks and dont give a crap.

And it's not really his fault. Decisions to prosecute torturers go to a higher paygrade. Gen James Clapper is my guess.

[tabasco]

45. And the presumptive Democratic nominee went along with the unjustified war,

whereas most Democrats in Congress had the good sense and decency to vote against it.

[eridani]

52. Even if he had been what he was accused of being, that is STILL no excuse n/t