“History Will Not Judge This Kindly”
We’ve known for a while that the Bush Administration — at the highest levels — authorized and was aware of treatment of detainees that can only be described as torture. We also know that they got the Justice Department to gin up legal opinions to fit the square peg of beatings, waterboarding and abuse into the round hole of the Geneva Conventions and American domestic law prohibiting torture. So, in a sense, Mark Danner’s NYRB piece on the Red Cross Report on 14 “high value” detainees who were transferred to Guantanamo from black sites in 2006 is not exactly breaking news. But, still, it should be read by everyone who has any interest in what our country turned into after 9/11. Here is the excerpt that most fully captures the moral empitness at the core of our detainee policy — and the culpability of the Bush Administration:
Two and a half months after Abu Zubaydah woke up strapped to a bed in the white room, the interrogation resumed “with more intensity than before”:
Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area [3 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet high]. The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 1/2 feet] in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face….
I was then put into the tall black box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.
One is reminded here that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room—guards, interrogators, doctor—was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m gonna slap him. Or I’m going to shake him. Or I’m gonna make him stay up for 48 hours,” said John Kiriakou.
Each one of these steps…had to have the approval of the Deputy Director for Operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, “He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.” And that permission would come…. The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific. And the bottom line was these were very unusual authorities that the agency got after 9/11. No one wanted to mess them up. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.… No one wanted to be the guy who accidentally did lasting damage to a prisoner.
Smashing against hard walls before Zubaydah enters the tall black coffin-like box; sudden appearance of plywood sheeting affixed to the wall for him to be smashed against when he emerges. Perhaps the deputy director of operations, pondering the matter in his Langley, Virginia, office, suggested the plywood?
Or perhaps it was someone higher up? Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, according to ABC News, CIA officers “briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee,” including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who “then signed off on the [interrogation] plan.” At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a “golden shield” from the Justice Department—the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous “torture memorandum,” written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002, which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The “golden shield” presumably would protect CIA officers from prosecution. Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees—”whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning”—in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that “some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.” At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
