I asked Scott McCready, a lawyer working in Boston, to weigh in on the CIA torture tape destruction. Scott’s 28 and works at a an investment firm.
If the White House has a tell when it’s trying to keep a lid on its involvement in a political scandal it is how vigorously it refuses to comment. Thus, the CIA’s destruction of its torture tapes will be a hell of a White House story.
Yesterday and today, Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post writes about the potential liability the White House exposed itself to by highlighting relevant events from the past six years. Currently at issue is the destruction, in November 2005, of interrogation video tapes by the CIA, specifically of suspected terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. On Friday morning, U.S. District Judge Henrey H. Kennedy will convene a hearing to determine if the Bush administration violated a June 2005 court order to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane write in the New York Times: “At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.”
“One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been ‘vigorous sentiment’ among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.”
The gators at the Justice Department have already begun parsing and will argue that the videos weren’t covered by the order because the two men were being held in secret CIA prisons overseas (Thailand), not at the Guantanamo Bay prison. As this argument speaks to the letter not the spirit of the court order, I believe Kennedy will be angered by the administration disdain for the rule of law. Moreover, the Justice Department had the gall to demand that Kennedy butt out of their desperate attempt to erase the past.
In the spring of 2002 when Abu Zubaydah was captured, Bush bragged that he was a top Qaeda operative with knowledge of plans and operations. Yet, Ron Suskind’s 2006 book The 1% Docrtine reveals that at the same time Bush was briefed by the intelligence community that Zubaydah was a low-level, mentally unstable member. Suskind quotes the following exchange between Bush and then-CIA director George Tenet:
“‘I said he was important,” Bush said to Tenet at one of their daily meetings. ‘You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?’
“‘No Sir, Mr. President.’”
Froomkin notes that in a September 2006 speech, Bush for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA detention and interrogation program, Zubaydah was front and center. Bush proudly described how Zubaydah — “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden” — was questioned using the CIA’s new “alternative set of procedures” and then “began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives.”
“But Bush’s Exhibit A in defense of torture may in fact be an exhibit for the prosecution.”
In Froomkin’s Dec. 7 column, evidence uncovered by Suskind suggests Zubaydah was a mentally ill minor functionary, who under brutal questioning sent investigators chasing after false leads about al-Qaeda plots on American nuclear plants, water systems, shopping malls, banks and supermarkets.
Yesterday, Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus write on the front page of The Washington Post that “While CIA officials have described him as an important insider whose disclosures under intense pressure saved lives, some FBI agents and analysts say he is largely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other ‘enhanced interrogation’ measures.”
Moreover, “The question of whether Abu Zubaydah — whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein — was an unstable source who provided limited intelligence under gentle questioning, or a hardened terrorist who cracked under extremely harsh measures, goes to the heart of the current Washington debate over coercive interrogations and torture.”
The piece goes on to tell the inevitable story that the FBI officials and agents involved concluded he knew some Qaeda players but the info he gave became increasingly dubious as the CIA’s torture intensified in late 2002. “In legal papers prepared for a military hearing, Abu Zubaydah himself has asserted that he told his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear to make the treatment stop.”
Some of the methods used on the Z-Man were keeping him naked in his cell, subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music. A CIA agent admitted that Z broke after 35 seconds on the water board. However, other officials said “harsh tactics used on him at a secret detention facility in Thailand went on for weeks or, depending on the account, even months.”
“The videotaping of Abu Zubaydah in 2002 went on day and night throughout his interrogation, including waterboarding, and while he was sleeping in his cell, intelligence officials said. ‘Several hundred hours’ of videotapes were destroyed in November 2005, a senior intelligence officer said. The CIA has said it ceased waterboarding in 2003.”
FBI agents witnessed the torture. “‘They said, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” ‘ said [Retired FBI agent Daniel] Coleman, recalling accounts from FBI employees who were there. ‘ “This guy’s a Muslim. That’s not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?”‘ . . . “Coleman, a 31-year FBI veteran, joined other former law enforcement colleagues in expressing skepticism about Abu Zubaydah’s importance. Abu Zubaydah, he said in an interview, was a ’safehouse keeper’ with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.”
And as for all that plot-thwarting, life saving intelligence Zubaydah coughed up?
“Much of the threat information provided by Abu Zubaydah, Coleman said, ‘was crap.’”
TAGS: Al-Qaeda, Boston, Crack, debate, Iraq, Music, Muslim, New York, New York Times, Osama bin Laden, political, Video, war
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