Rewarding Impunity

Why is President Obama's attorney general handing out prizes for sweeping torture under the rug?

Foreign Policy
David Cole

On Oct. 17, Eric Holder handed out the Justice Department's annual awards for distinguished service to a slew of department employees. Featured at the top of the awards announcement were the men and women who successfully prosecuted 10 New Orleans police officers for killing innocent civilians in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and a U.S. marshal who risked his life to protect a victim from a violent fugitive during the fugitive's capture. But buried at the bottom of the list -- the 13th of 14 "distinguished service awards" -- was a more unusual awardee: Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham. Durham and his team received the award not for bringing anyone to justice, but for declining to hold accountable anyone in the CIA for its brutal interrogations of detainees at secret prisons, or "black sites," in connection with President George W. Bush's "war on terror."

"In order to conduct the investigations," the citation reads, "the team had to review significant amounts of information, much of which was classified, and conduct many interviews in the United States and at overseas locations."

There's no question that Durham worked hard for a long time, and that the investigation was complex and substantial. After all, more than 100 men were "disappeared" into the CIA's black sites for extended incommunicado detention and interrogation. Because the CIA prisons were a secret, everything that happened there is classified, complicating investigation still further. And because the investigation itself is secret, we can't know precisely what evidence Durham considered, what roadblocks he faced, what judgment calls he made.

But here's what we do know. Many of those "disappeared" into the CIA's black sites were tortured and/or illegally subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, were waterboarded 83 and 183 times, respectively. They and other detainees were stripped naked, doused with water, beaten about the face and stomach, slammed into walls, deprived of sleep for days on end, forced into painful stress positions, and confined in small dark boxes for hours at a time. And these were just the "authorized" torture tactics, given a green light by a secret memo written in August 2002 by John Yoo and Jay Bybee from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and specifically okayed by President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, among others.

We also know, thanks to the CIA's own Inspector General, that CIA interrogators in the black sites went beyond even the illegal brutality authorized by high-level officials. One detainee was threatened with a handgun and a power drill. A mock execution was staged next to a detainee's cell. Interrogators threatened to kill the children of another detainee if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know.

We also know that in 2005, CIA higher-up Jose Rodriguez ordered the destruction of videotapes of two of those interrogations, shortly after the Washington Post revealed the existence of the CIA secret prisons where the interrogations took place, and while the tapes were under request from several courts and a Senate committee looking into charges of abuse.

Durham cleared everyone in the CIA of accusations of wrongdoing. Does he deserves a medal for that? Maybe so, but then there are a few other recipients the attorney general left out. Surely John Yoo and Jay Bybee deserve medals for making the interrogations possible in the first place, by issuing a memo that Jack Goldsmith, director of the Office of Legal Counsel after Bybee, has called a "get out of jail free card." Goldsmith himself, along with his successors as OLC heads under Bush -- Daniel Levin and Steven Bradbury -- also deserve medals for secretly allowing the torture tactics to continue even after the administration rescinded the initial memo when the Post published it. Tellingly, the Bush administration could not publicly defend, even for a moment, what everyone had signed off on in secret; but Goldsmith, Levin, and Bradbury ensured, in subsequent secret memos and authorizations, that the CIA's illegal program could go on.

Abu Zubaydah Poses a Real Threat to al Qaeda

9/11 Blogger
Kevin Ryan

Abu Zubaydah, a man once called al-Qaeda’s “chief of operations” appears to be at the center of an unraveling of the official myth behind al Qaeda.  After his capture in early 2002, Zubaydah was the first “detainee” known to be tortured.  The information allegedly obtained from his torture played a large part in the creation of the official account of 9/11 and in the justification for the continued use of such torture techniques.  Yet in September, 2009, the U.S. government admitted that Zubaydah was never a member or associate of al Qaeda at all.  These facts raise an alarming number of questions about the veracity of our knowledge about al Qaeda, and the true identity of the people who are said to be behind the 9/11 attacks.

Unlike other alleged al Qaeda leaders, including Khlaid Sheik Mohammed and Rasmi bin Alshibh, Zubaydah has never been charged with a crime.  As these other leading suspects await their continually-postponed military trial, Zubaydah is instead being airbrushed out of history.  Why would the U.S. government want us to forget Zubaydah, the first and most important al Qaeda operative captured after 9/11?

The 9/11 Commission called Zubaydah an “Al Qaeda associate,” a “long-time ally of Bin Ladin,” a “Bin Ladin lieutenant,” and an “al Qaeda lieutenant.”[1] The Commission’s claims were somewhat contradictory in that Zubaydah was, in the Commission’s report, represented as both an al Qaeda leader and simply a terrorist colleague who collaborated in the training and recruiting of operatives.  For example, the Commission reported that Zubaydah “helped operate a popular terrorist training camp near the border with Pakistan” [Khalden Camp], and that Bin Laden had an agreement with Zubaydah to “conduct reciprocal recruiting efforts whereby promising trainees at the camps would be invited to join al Qaeda.”  It was unclear why a “Bin Laden lieutenant” would need such a reciprocal agreement with Bin Laden.

Other claims made by the 9/11 Commission were that “KSM and Zubaydah each played key roles in facilitating travel for al Qaeda operatives,” and that “Zubaydah had been a major figure in the millenium plots.” These claims are supported primarily by the torture testimony of Zubaydah and others, and by Zubaydah’s “diary.”

In an amazing turnabout in 2009, an attorney for Zubaydah wrote in The Guardian that the majority of the accusations against Zubaydah were understood by all parties to be false.  In fact, he wrote, they “were known to be false when uttered.“[2]  Attorney Brent Mickum said that his client, said to be the “number three man in al Qaeda,” was never a member or associate of al Qaeda and that — “These facts really are no longer contested: [Zubaydah] was not, and never had been, a member of either the Taliban or al-Qaida. The CIA determined this after torturing him extensively.”  In fact, he “was never a member or a supporter of any armed forces that were allied against the United States,” and he was never the “head of a military camp that trained terrorists. That allegation is false at all levels.”

It turns out that Mickum’s report was correct and that “Abu Zubaydah’s supposed relationship with al-Qaida is a complete myth.”[3]

We know this because, as of September 2009, the U.S. government agreed that Zubaydah was never an al Qaeda operative.  During Zubaydah’s habeas corpus petition, the government admitted that Abu Zubaydah had never been a member of al-Qaeda, nor involved in the attacks on the African embassies in 1998, or the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.[4]  The motion, filed by the U.S. government, states:

  

…the Government has not contended in this proceeding that Petitioner [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.

Respondent [The United States Government] does not contend that Petitioner was a “member” of al-Qaida in the sense of having sworn a bayat (allegiance) or having otherwise satisfied any formal criteria that either Petitioner or al-Qaida may have considered necessary for inclusion in al-Qaida. Nor is the Government detaining Petitioner based on any allegation that Petitioner views himself as part of al-Qaida as a matter of subjective personal conscience, ideology, or worldview.

The Government has not contended in this proceeding that Petitioner had any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

… the Government has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings… or the attacks on September 11, 2001.

In his article that same year, attorney Mickum went on to point out that the torture tapes, which the CIA had first lied to the 9/11 Commission about and then destroyed, had a lot to do with Zubaydah.  Mickum wrote:  “the videotapes of his torture were destroyed. Just recently, the government revealed that 90 of the 92 videotapes that the CIA destroyed related to our client.”  Not only that, Mickum went on to say that the U.S. government has removed all “reference to my client from the charge sheets and factual returns of other prisoners whose cases were being prosecuted. Abu Zubaydah has been linked to nearly 50 prisoners and former prisoners through media accounts and official Guantanamo Bay documents. Of these, approximately two dozen have either had their charges dropped or have been released from custody.”  They have, essentially, “airbrushed Abu Zubaydah out of history.”

Obviously this attempt to remove a key 9/11 accomplice from history must make a significant difference to the official account of 9/11.  We would expect that major revisions to the 9/11 Commission Report would be necessary given the knowledge that the man never had a connection to al Qaeda.

In order to better understand just how much Zubaydah meant as a primary source for the official account of 9/11, we must review the extensive claims made about Zubaydah by the U.S. government and mainstream media  over the years.  We’ve seen that the 9/11 Commission (falsely) called Zubaydah an “al Qaeda lieutenant.”  The Joint Congressional inquiry did the same, calling him “al-Qa’ida leader Abu Zubaydah,” and the “Bin Ladin lieutenant captured in March 2002.”  As late as 2006, the Justice Department’s Inspector General report on the 9/11 attacks called Zubaydah a “Bin Laden lieutenant.”

When Zubaydah was captured, in March 2002, U.S. government officials touted him as the biggest catch of the War on Terror, at least until the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM).  FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that Zubaydah’s capture would help deter future attacks.[5]  White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that Zubaydah could provide a treasure-trove of information about al-Qaeda.[6]  Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Zubaydah was “a man who knows of additional attacks”, who has “trained people to do this”, and was a big fish who had a fountain of knowledge.[7]

The extensive allegations against Zubaydah went on and on, and included that he was:

• along with KSM, one of “Al Qaeda’s top operational managers” – “Counterterrorism Czar”Richard Clarke, in his book Against All Enemies
• “sinister” and “there is evidence that he is a planner and a manager as well. I think he’s a major player.” – Former State Department director of counter-terrorism, Michael Sheehan [8]
•  “extremely dangerous” and a planner of 9/11. – State Department legal advisor John B. Bellinger III in a June 2007 briefing.[9]
• a trainer, a recruiter, understood bomb-making, was a forger, a logistician, and someone who made things happen, and made “al-Qaeda function.” – Former CIA station chief, Bob Grenier [10]
• “a close associate of UBL’s, and if not the number two, very close to the number two person in the organization. I think that’s well established.” -Donald Rumsfeld [11]
•  “a very senior al Qaeda official who has been intimately involved in a range of activities for the al Qaeda.” – Donald Rumsfeld [12]
• a “very senior al Qaeda operative.” – Donald Rumsfeld
• a “key terrorist recruiter and operational planner and member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle.” – White House spokesman Ari Fleischer [13]
• someone whose capture was a “very serious blow” to al-Qaeda and therefore one of al-Qaeda’s “many tentacles” was “cut off.” – White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
•  “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” –President George W. Bush [14]
•  “one of al-Qaeda’s top leaders” who was “spending a lot of time as one of the top operating officials of al Qaeda, plotting and planning murder.” –President George W. Bush [15]
•  “al Qaeda’s chief of operations.” – President George W. Bush [16]
• “one of the top three leaders” in al-Qaeda. – President George W. Bush [17]
• someone whose interrogation “led to reliable information”, a “prolific producer” of information, with whom originated roughly 25 percent of the information on al Qaeda that came from human sources. – Michael Hayden [18]
• one of three individuals “best positioned to know about impending terrorist atrocities.” – Michael Hayden [19]

As the myth of Zubaydah grew, it was reported that he was –

• “worth a ton of guys at Gitmo.”[20]
• a “senior bin Laden official” and the “former head of Egypt-based Islamic Jihad.”[21]
• “played a key role in the East Africa embassy attacks.”[22]
• listed as a “trusted aide” to bin Laden with “growing power.”[23]
• in control of al-Qaeda.[24]
• an aide of bin Laden who ran training camps in Afghanistan and “coordinated terror cells in Europe and North America.”[25]
• a “key terrorist recruiter, operational planner, and member of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle.”[26]
• “bin Laden’s CEO”,[27] and “a central figure in Al Qaeda”[28]
• Bin Laden’s “travel planner.”[29]
• “one of a handful of men entrusted with running the terrorism network in the event of Osama bin Laden’s death or capture.”[30]
• a senior bin Laden lieutenant who was believed “to be organizing al Qaida resources to carry out attacks on American targets.”[31]
• the fourth ranking member of al Qaeda behind Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Muhamed Atef.[32]
• someone who knew the identities of “thousands” of terrorists that passed through al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan [33]
• a colleague of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber.[34]
• one of bin Laden’s top planners of terrorist operations who knew of al Qaeda plots and cells.[35]
• the “connection between bin Laden and many of al-Qaida’s operational cells.”[36]
• the source of information that UAL Flight 93 was intended to hit the White House.[37]

Because we now know that Zubayda was never an al Qaeda operative, or even an al Qaeda associate, we are forced into the stunning realization that all of this was false.  The questions that should arise from that realization include:  How much of what we know about al Qaeda, and how much of the War on Terror, was built on the torture testimony of a man who clearly could not have known anything about al Qaeda at all?

Originally, we were told that it was Zubaydha who first identified KSM as the Bin Laden associate called “Mukhtar.”  This was according to Ali Soufan, the FBI official who first interrogated him at a secret CIA site in Thailand.  Soufan also claimed that Zubaydah said KSM was the “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks.  In his 2007 book, CIA director Tenet went further, claiming that “interrogating Abu Zubaydah led to Ramsi bin al Shibh.”[38]

CIA agent who publicly opposed waterboarding charged with leaking classified secrets to journalists

Daily Mail

A high profile CIA agent made famous by his public opposition to waterboarding has been indicted by a grand jury for leaking government secrets to reporters. 

John C. Kiriakou is accused of telling journalists the name of another operative and his role in the capture of al-Qaida financier Abu Zybaydah shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks. 

The indictment of Kiriakou, returned by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, is part of an aggressive Justice Department crackdown on leakers and is one of a half-dozen such cases opened during the Obama administration.

Prison time: CIA operative John C. Kiriakou, left, faces up to 45 years in prison.
His indictment was part of a crackdown on people who leak government secrets

The five-count indictment charges Kiriakou, 47, who was arrested in January, with divulging to journalists - including a New York Times reporter - the role of an associate who participated in the capture of suspected al-Qaida financier Abu Zubaydah in the months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The officer's participation in that mission was classified.

The indictment also accuses Kiriakou of separately disclosing a covert officer's name to an unidentified journalist. The government began investigating after information about that officer appeared in a sealed legal brief submitted by lawyers representing a detainee at Guantanamo Bay. Authorities say the journalist passed on the officer's name to a defense team investigator. The defense lawyers are not alleged to have done anything illegal.

Kiriakou, who is free on bond, is scheduled to be arraigned April 13 in US District Court in Alexandria.

Authorities say Kiriakou denied to FBI agents that he had leaked the information and answered 'Heavens, no' when asked if he had provided Zubaydah's name to a reporter. They say he lied about his actions in an effort to convince the CIA to let him publish a book, 'The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror.'

The indictment includes one charge of making false statements, which carries a maximum five-year prison sentence, and four counts of violating either the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act - each punishable by up to 10 years.

Captured: Al-Qaida financier
Abu Zubaydah was
waterboarded 86 times
after his capture

Kiriakou received public attention for his statements on waterboarding, which he called an 'unnecessary' form of interrogation during a 2007 interview with ABC. Kiriakou said the technique had been used effectively to break down Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, and had been justified in the months after September 11. But he also appeared to express misgivings about whether the harsh interrogation method was still appropriate.
'(W)e were really trying to do anything that we could to stop another major attack from happening,' Kiriakou said. 

'I don't think we're in that mindset right now. ... And, as a result, waterboarding, at least right now, is unnecessary.'

He has since acknowledged that much of what he said turned out to be wrong. An FBI interrogator, for instance, has testified to the Senate that Zubaydah's waterboarding did not yield important intelligence, contrary to claims by the CIA and the Bush administration. And he has acknowledged that he was not present for the interrogations and instead relied on what he'd heard and read.

“Guidebook to False Confessions”: Key Document John Yoo Used to Draft Torture Memo Released

Public Record

Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye have another exclusive over at Truthout on the origins of Bush’s torture program. Kaye and Leopold report:

In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency’s first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was “withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions,” according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, “attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S.”

One of the key documents handed out to Bush officials at this meeting, and at Principals Committee sessions chaired by Rice that took place between May and July 2002, was a 37-page instructional manual that contained detailed descriptions of seven of the ten techniques that ended up in the legal opinion widely referred to as the “torture memo,” drafted by Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, three months later. According to Rice, Yoo had attended the Principals Committee meetings and participated in discussions about Zubaydah’s torture.

That instructional manual, referred to as “Pre-Academic Laboratory (PREAL) Operating Instructions,” has just been released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The document sheds additional light on the origins of the Bush administration’s torture policy and for the first time describes exactly what methods of torture Bush officials had discussed – and subsequently approved – for Zubaydah in May 2002.

CIA Criminal Revolving Door: CIA Officer “Albert” Involved in False Intelligence Linking Al-Qaeda to Iran, Iraq

Boiling Frog
Kevin Fenton

A recent book by former FBI agent Ali Soufan shows that the same CIA officer was involved in generating intelligence that falsely linked al-Qaeda to first Iran and then Iraq. The officer was also involved in a notorious torture episode and was reprimanded by the Agency’s inspector general.

The officer, who Soufan refers to as “Fred,” but whose real first name is “Albert” according to a February 2011 Associated Press article, served at the CIA station in Jordan in 1999. During that time, al-Qaeda, aided by a collection of freelance terrorists headed by Abu Zubaidah, attempted to commit a series of attacks in the country, known as the Millennium Plot. However, the attacks were foiled by the local Jordanian intelligence service, working with the CIA and FBI.

During the investigations of the plotters, Albert drafted a series of official cables that were later withdrawn. Although the withdrawing of the cables was first mentioned in a July 2006 article by Lawrence Wright for the New Yorker, Wright did not mention what was in the cables or by whom they were drafted. The content of one of them and the drafter were first revealed upon the publication of Soufan’s book in mid-September 2011.

According to Soufan, one of the twelve withdrawn cables falsely stated that the group of terrorists later arrested for the Millennium Plot in Jordan was linked to Iran. Albert’s reasoning for this was that the group had trained in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, an area of high activity by the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Therefore, the group in Jordan had to be working with Hezbollah and be backed by Iran.

Soufan was also sending reports to Washington, and someone in DC noticed that Albert claimed a link to Iran while Soufan did not. An investigation followed and Soufan was proved right—the Millennium Plot had nothing to do with Iran—leading to the withdrawal of Albert’s cables. In his book, Soufan attributes Albert’s error to “a tendency to jump to conclusions without facts.”

Albert had previously worked with the FBI as a translator, but had failed to make agent status, and Soufan says he was reputed to bear a grudge against the Bureau for this slight.

The contents of the other eleven cables that had to be withdrawn are unknown.

The second episode, where Albert played a part in the generation of false information that helped justify the invasion of Iraq, is notorious. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a senior militant training camp commander in Afghanistan, was captured by US forces and turned over to the FBI towards the end of 2001. Al-Libi was being interrogated by George Crouch and Russell Fincher, an FBI agent a group of CIA officers had withheld information from in the run-up to 9/11. Al-Libi was co-operating with Crouch and Fincher, and had even provided information about an ongoing plot in Yemen.

Albert burst into the interrogation room, told al-Libi that information about plots in Yemen was meaningless, and made threats against him. As a result of this, al-Libi clammed up and refused to provide more information that day. Albert was subsequently banned from Bagram air base, where the interrogation was being conducted.

What the Guantanamo leaks won't reveal

Crucial documents on the controversial prison were not released by WikiLeaks, as they are classified 'Top Secret'.

Al Jazeera
Darryl Li

In the coming days, many will pore over the Guantánamo files released by Wikileaks to find startling revelations or to justify pre-existing positions. But before diving in, it may help to reflect on a few things that may not be explicit in the documents but are crucial to understanding their significance. These include:

1. “Threat assessment” is a game with no winners: If the initial document dump is any guide, most of what Wikileaks has obtained are “detainee assessments” that reveal more about the inner fantasy world of the US intelligence apparatus than who the detainees really are. The fantasy is not some elaborate conspiracy to fabricate stories from whole cloth; rather, it is the result of an intense desire for “useful” intelligence, coupled with an astounding lack of safeguards or quality control.

Journalists and bloggers are already hard at work cataloging the contradictions, omissions, and simple failures of logic in these files. Analyzing the Pentagon Papers decades ago, Hannah Arendt was struck by the bureaucratic self-deception and “defactualization” that thrive in environments of official secrecy, and the same rings true here: The Guantanamo jailers saw what they wanted to see – and found what pressures from above and their own cultural presuppositions pushed them to find. A recent Guardian headline captures this terrifying inertia: “Guantánamo piled lie upon lie through the momentum of its own existence.” Stephen Abraham, a former army intelligence officer once stationed at Guantánamo, described in detail the shoddiness of the dossiers, which were reviewed mainly for “format and grammar. The quality assurance review would not ordinarily check the accuracy of the information.”

Although these assessments would be considered “analytical” rather than “raw” intelligence, one can see very little analysis in them at all. They cite intelligence reports without any discernible attempt to assess their veracity. They read as if someone searched for the detainee’s name in a giant database and then simply pasted together all the passages they could find. For these reasons, one of the worst things one could do is use these files as a baseline for assessing the culpability or dangerousness of their subjects. The “detainee assessments” should not feed the stale, speculative, and fearmongering debate over Guantánamo “recidivism”; they should end it.

2. Torture. In the fantasy world of secret documents, the first inconvenient truths to disappear are the allegations of detainee torture and abuse. The “detainee assessments” do not discuss the interrogation tactics or conditions of detention to which prisoners were subjected. Revealingly, one of the few dossiers to mention allegations of torture refers only to “publicly released records” – any internal concerns about abuse, presumably, were discarded in the sausage-making process. And for detainees who spent time in foreign or secret CIA prisons before arriving in Cuba, such pre-Guantánamo sojourns are usually mentioned only in passing if at all.

Dossiers of “high-value detainees” Abu Zubayda and ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri contain no hint of their repeated waterboarding and other abuses documented by, among others, the International Committee of the Red Cross. Mamdouh Habib’s assessment casually notes that “he spent six months with Egyptian interrogators before being transferred to U.S. custody.” Yet in those six months he says he was beaten and subject to electric shocks in interrogations personally overseen by Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, whom the later Obama administration later hoped to install as president.
Unfortunately, these assessments are blissfully walled off from abuse. Most useful information on torture at Guantánamo would likely have be in other databases housing detainee medical records or logs and video kept by guards and interrogators.  Other documentation that would address torture directly was likely classified at a much higher level and/or destroyed (like the CIA video tapes of black site interrogations, an act for which the Obama administration has declined to file criminal charges).

3. The farce of prosecutions: Many have rightly condemned the “military commissions” established at Guantánamo as incompatible with basic standards of fairness. Yet for all but a few dozen detainees, the government does not have sufficient evidence to file charges even before its own kangaroo courts, let alone normal civilian tribunals.

The Washington Post recently reported the Obama administration was shocked to learn this, though it should not have been a surprise. The initial roundups were astoundingly haphazard, relying largely on payment of bounties for Arabs and other Muslim travelers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jumbled mess of the Guantánamo files is a testament to this.

What is shocking is how some commentators point to the paucity of reliable evidence as vindication of their position to hold people indefinitely without trial. This heads-we-win-tails-you-lose attitude came out during the fretting over the near-acquittal (on all but one charge) of Ahmed Ghailani, the only Guantánamo prisoner to be tried in the U.S.  For many in the U.S., the Ghailani verdict (which nevertheless yielded a life sentence) did not dispel fears of “terrorism”; it validated them and the idea that the rule of law is not to be trusted.

This embodies the deeper problem in the U.S. political debate over Guantánamo: near-total denial about the sheer incompetence of the world’s most expensive intelligence apparatus in the original detention decisions. Confronting this unfortunate fact is the only way to defuse the politics of hysteria that currently dominates debates over the fate of Guantánamo detainees.

4. The other prisons: As horrific as Guantánamo is, the incredible degree of scrutiny it has received also makes it probably the least terrifying part of the global network of extraterritorial prisons created by the US in the wake of 9/11. We still know next to nothing about detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as secret CIA prisons (allegedly now closed) that operated in those countries plus Poland, Romania, Thailand, and elsewhere. In the last decade, the US shuttled hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners around the world through a kind of sovereign underground of legal black holes, between military bases, CIA installations, and prisons of allied states.

As important as they are, the Guantánamo documents provide only a narrow view of one node in this complex network. Without any viable accountability mechanisms in the U.S. our main hope for learning more comes from investigations elsewhere, especially Britain, where a court recently ordered the Defence Ministry to release some details about detainees rendered from Iraq and Afghanistan.

5. The role of client states: The single most underappreciated fact about the “Global War on Terror” is the importance of repressive client states in doing most of the dirty work. Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco in particular have intelligence agencies experienced in dealing with militant “Islamists,” with even fewer concerns about legal oversight than their U.S. counterparts.

This collaboration is deep and longstanding. Since the Clinton years, the U.S. has orchestrated the abduction and forcible transfer of suspected “Islamists” to their homelands so they could be interrogated without apparent U.S. responsibility, a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.” We can infer that most Egyptian, Moroccan, and Jordanian captives were sent directly home, since very few of them ever arrived in Guantánamo. These intelligence agencies and many others even conducted interrogations at Guantánamo and are crucial for holding or monitoring detainees after repatriation.
In many ways, the most important files from the “Global War on Terror” are sitting in the secret police headquarters of U.S. proxy regimes in the Muslim world. Despite fears in Washington, it is too soon to tell how the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions will affect these relationships. The recent dissolution of the hated State Security (Amn al-Dawla) service in Egypt is a welcome step, but it seems to have handled the routine repression of the population, leaving the more sensitive CIA collaboration to the relatively unscathed General Intelligence Service (al-Mukhabarat al-‘Amma). In any event, these relationships remind us that the struggle over torture and detention in the “Global War on Terror” is not simply about the rule of law; it is also a story of the workings of global hegemony in the 21st century and how people seek to resist it.

Darryl Li is graduate of Yale Law School and currently a PhD Candidate in Anthropology & Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard and has worked on legal defense of Guantánamo detainees. The views in this piece reflect only his own.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

U.S. Recants Claims that Detainee Who Was One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Report, and Repeatedly Tortured, Was Involved in 9/11 or Even Al Qaeda

Washington's Blog

Abu Zubaydah was the first "high-value" detainee who was tortured, as the U.S. claimed he was a top Al Qaeda terrorist who knew a lot about 9/11.

He was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 alone.

In fact, Abu Zubaydah was one of the main sources of information for the 9/11 report.

Never mind that he was literally crazy. As the New Yorker noted a year ago:

The F.B.I.’s point man on the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, Daniel Coleman, had read Zubaydah’s diaries and concluded that he “had a schizophrenic personality.”

Indeed, the Washington Post noted in 2007:

Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida's information.

"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much."

***

Abu Zubaida ... was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.

***

Looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Abu Zubaida had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had severe mental problems that called his credibility into question. "They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaeda operatives. "You think they're going to tell him anything?"

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind writes that Coleman advised a top FBI official at the time:

"This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Now, Jason Leopold reports that the government is backing away from all claims that Abu Zubaydah had any role in Al Qaeda or 9/11:

For the first time, the government officially admitted that Zubaydah did not have "any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001," and was neither a "member" of al-Qaeda nor "formally" identified with the terrorist organization.

Heck of a job, guys.