I prefer this older article on the subject and wonder when Mr. Bush
will be prosecuted as the war criminal that he is:
From The Sunday Times December 23, 2007
The torture tape fingering Bush as a war criminal
Andrew Sullivan
Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly
unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is
far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood
darkness.
There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and
destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of
scenario cooked up in Matt Damon's riveting Bourne series are fantasy
compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the
Potomac.
And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously
bad guy – someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply
involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March
2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.
President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president
also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was
withholding information, "used an alternative set of procedures",
which were "safe and lawful and necessary".
Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed
recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain
English word "torture" to describe what was done. But we know little
else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American
government about Zubaydah's interrogation, and considerable debate
about his reliability.
Ron Suskind's masterful 2006 book "The One Percent Doctrine" recorded
FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and
tangential to Al-Qaeda's plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded
information under torture - information that led law-enforcement
bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and
police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as
Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that
Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three
personalities, none of them his own.
A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel
Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda's leaders all
believed Zubaydah "was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn
phone. You think they're going to tell him anything?" Even though
preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good – though not unique
– information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to
torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.
The Washington Post reported that "current and former officials" said
the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that
the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep
deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these
"alternative procedures", as Bush described them, are illegal under US
law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And
they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were
perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of
torture in various American legal cases.
And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush
administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not
"torture" but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is
torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of
Zubaydah's incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the
dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president
of the United States authorised war crimes.
And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.
See what I mean by Hollywood? We know about the destruction because
someone in the government told The New York Times. We also know the
9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of
relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah's interrogation and was not
told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and
Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the
tapes - including David Addington, Cheney's right-hand man and the
chief legal architect of the administration'
interrogation policies.
At a press conference last Thursday the president gave an equivocal
response to what he knew about the tapes and when he knew it: "The
first recollection is when CIA director Mike Hayden briefed me." That
briefing was earlier this month. The president is saying he cannot
recall something - not that it didn't happen. That's the formulation
all lawyers tell their clients to use when they need to avoid an
exposable lie.
This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the
administration'
sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay,
Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.
The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been
killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret
network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The
policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in
Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West's
intelligence on jihadist terrorism.
But this case is more ominous for the administration because it
presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of
justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the
vice-president and their closest aides.
Because several courts had pending cases in which testimony from
Zubaydah's interrogation was salient, the destruction of such evidence
triggers a legal process that is hard for the executive branch to
stymie or stall - and its first attempt was flatly rebuffed by a judge
last week.
Its key argument is a weakly technical one: that the interrogation
took place outside US territory - and therefore the courts do not have
jurisdiction over it. It's the same rationale for imprisoning hundreds
of suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - a legal no man's land. But
Congress can get involved - especially if it believes that what we
have here is a cover-up.
What are the odds that a legal effective interrogation of a key
Al-Qaeda operative would have led many highly respected professionals
in the US intelligence community to risk their careers by leaking
top-secret details to the press?
What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that
could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks
against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had
never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such
waterboarding was torture?
What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new
attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed
waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president
had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.
Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any
bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the
president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a
prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally
destroyed.
Congresswoman Jane Harman, the respected top Democrat on the House
intelligence committee in 2003-06, put it as simply as she could: "I
am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up."
It's a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit
domestic burglary. It's a war crime that reaches into the very heart
of the Oval Office.
Yes, it is Hollywood time. And the ending of this movie is as yet
unwritten.
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