Zubaida: Not Warrant CIA-FBI Gone Crazy

” … “Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the [Republican President] Bush administration’s argument for torture.” … “That’s why Sunday’s front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.” … “Finn and Warrick reported that “not a single significant plot was foiled” as a result of Zubaida’s brutal treatment — and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions “triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms.”" … “Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the [Republican President Bush] White House. Then he was President George W. Bush’s Exhibit A in defense of the “enhanced interrogation” procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders.” … “But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago — and as The Post now confirms — almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong.” … “Zubaida wasn’t a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn’t holding back critical information. His torture didn’t produce valuable intelligence — and it certainly didn’t save lives.” … “All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well.” … “Indeed, the Post article raises the even further disquieting possibility that intentional cruelty was part of the White House’s motive.” … “There’s no doubt that Zubaida’s capture in spring 2002 was what sent the administration down the path to state-sanctioned torture. Last April, ABC News reported that starting right after his capture, top Bush aides including [Republican] Vice President Dick Cheney micromanaged his interrogation from the White House basement. “The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed,” ABC’s sources said, “some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.” Bush has acknowledged he was aware of those meetings at the time.” … “Techniques that created damage short of “the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function” were later authorized in an August 2002 Justice Department memo, known as the Torture Memo.” … “Just two weeks ago, in a New York Review of Books article based on a confidential report from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mark Danner described the techniques used on Zubaida in harrowing detail.” … “I’ve [Dan Froomkin] written extensively about Zubaida before, and about how the facts of his case as unearthed by [author of the book "The One Percent Doctrine" Ron] Suskind thoroughly undermine the Bush administration’s arguments. See, for instance, my Dec. 18, 2007 column, Exhibit A for Torture, in which I suggested that “Bush’s Exhibit A in defense of torture may in fact be an exhibit for the prosecution.” We learned in December 2007 that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its secret interrogations — 92 in all, it turns out, 90 of them of Zubaida. In February 2008, I wrote about how the White House’s torture argument had now officially become that the ends justify the means.” … “Over the years, I’ve made something of a point of debunkingthe Bush White House’s unsupported assertions that any really useful information was gleaned from torture.” -By Dan Froomkin -WashingtonPost