September 07, 2006
Remember Abu Zubaydah?
Posted 12:35 pm | Printer Friendly
Probably the most important moment in the
president's speech yesterday dealt with his defense of torture. It was, perhaps, Bush at his most twisted.
"Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody — and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA...
The president was particularly fond of the Zubaydah anecdote. Bush went on to explain that when Zubaydah stopped talking — apparently because he'd been trained on how to resist interrogation — CIA officials used an "alternative set of procedures," which apparently is a new euphemism for "torture." The tactics worked, the president said, and Zubaydah once again became a font of useful information.
Snip...
There's just one problem — Bush was lying. Blatantly.
Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in March 2002. The White House has identified him as al Queda's chief of operations. The reality, as Ron Suskind explained several months ago, is that Zubaydah turned out to be
mentally ill. We were torturing a man who was, in effect, retarded.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality..."
Moreover, the president's claim yesterday that Zubaydah's interrogation tipped off the U.S. to the existence of Ramzi bin Al Shibh is just an
outright lie — officials knew about him long before they began torturing Zubaydah.
Let's not lose sight of the context here. The president, in what the media is making out to be a brilliant political speech, lied quite blatantly, hoping Americans wouldn't know the difference. The speech drew blanket coverage, and was thoroughly vetted by administration officials, and it was anchored by a claim that was obviously untrue. As
Spencer Ackerman said:
(M)ost Americans don't have access to Nexis. And most Americans don't remember–and can't be expected to remember–newspaper coverage of Al Qaeda for a seven-month stretch between the attacks and Abu Zubaydah's capture. Bush is exploiting that ignorance to tell the American people an outright lie in order to convince them that we need to torture people. As Bush once said in another context, if this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.
more...
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/8400.html
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