The Torture Timeline

[ProSense]

The Torture Timeline

By Annie Lowrey

Posted April 2009

Having trouble keeping track of all the memos, executive orders, and policy decisions that led the United States into the moral low ground? FP brings you the ultimate guide to the Bush administration's journey to the dark side.

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July 17: Rice meets with CIA Director George Tenet. She says the CIA may go ahead with its planned interrogation of Zubayda, if the Justice Department signs off.

July 26: Attorney General John Ashcroft concludes that waterboarding is lawful, allowing the CIA to go ahead and use the technique on Zubayda.

August 1: Jay Bybee, then head of the OLC and now a federal judge, sends a memo to John Rizzo, counsel to the CIA, about torture and Zubayda. He says 10 escalating techniques, leading up to waterboarding, do not constitute torture and may be used.

August 1: In another memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, largely written by Yoo and commonly called the "Bybee Memo," the OLC concludes that only acts which result in pain equivalent to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death," constitute torture; all lesser abuse is legal. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh called it "perhaps the most clearly erroneous legal opinion I have ever read."

August: Zubayda is waterboarded more than 80 times over the course of the month.

September 25: David Addington, counsel to Cheney, and other high-ranking administration lawyers travel to Guantánamo to review procedures and conditions.

October 7: Bush gives a speech making the case for the link between al Qaeda and Iraq. "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," he says. The information was false, given by a detainee under intense interrogation.

New reports suggest that the White House pressured interrogators to elicit evidence of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, leading to more and harsher "enhanced interrogations." No such link ever existed.

more

[natrat]

1. wtf does it matter? these scumbags in washington are just sweeping it under the rug as usual

[vaberella]

15. How so? This shit is a hot potato that is not going anywhere!! n/t

[AtomicKitten]

2. I think they are starting to become really afraid.

Keith O had a guest last night that advised Holder holding off appointing a Special Prosecutor for a while because she was worried sources would clam up, and I dismissed it.

But today it seems like a not particularly bad idea. Information is leaking out a more rapidly than I imagined. Some of this stuff is jaw-dropping.

[Muttocracy]

3. Good stuff. I like how Rachel and Keith have been paying attention to timelines too

'cause to me that's where people really get in trouble with some of this.

[EFerrari]

4. I have to go find the link but this isn't right. CIA started torturing in APRIL. n/t

[ProSense]

6. Did you go to the link? This is only a snip n/t

[EFerrari]

7. Sorry. At this too long I guess! Will do. ETA:

I was only looking for Abu Zubaydah's capture date anyway, which was Mar 2002. They started torturing him soon after that.

Okay, I did. This timelime makes it look as though the torture happened after the whole SERE project went down. It didn't.

In fact, people were severely abused in NYC right after the round up following 9/11. And they started torturing Abu Zubaydah before the SERE stuff and before the memos, sometime soon after his capture in March. Probably very early April.

[Ilsa]

9. Not just NYC. I remember watching a story on 60 Minutes about

a young Muslim couple. She was a US citizen, and her husand became one by marriage. He was picked up by the local police and hel for 6 months or so and tortured via sleep dep, temp extremes, etc in fugging Arkansas. I'm certain it occurred in other places in the US. There was some serious PTSD and hatred going on.

[EFerrari]

11. That's right. Many such stories.

A lady I worked with on the net told me, "My husband is afraid to leave the house". They were in Arizona. A terrible, terrible time.

[EFerrari]

10. Here is an amazing account of how CIA blew an FBI intelligence success

by torturing Abu Zubaydah when he had already started talking, btw:

07/17/2007 "The War on Terror: Rorschach and Awe," VanityFair.com

Abu Zubaydah was a mess. It was early April 2002, and the al-Qaeda lieutenant had been shot in the groin during a firefight in Pakistan, then captured by the Special Forces and flown to a safe house in Thailand. Now he was experiencing life as America's first high-value detainee in the wake of 9/11. A medical team and a cluster of F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents stood vigil, all fearing that the next attack on America could happen at any moment. It didn't matter that Zubaydah was unable to eat, drink, sit up, or control his bowels. They wanted him to talk.

A C.I.A. interrogation team was expected but hadn't yet arrived. But the F.B.I. agents who had been nursing his wounds and cleaning him after he'd soiled himself asked Zubaydah what he knew. The detainee said something about a plot against an ally, then began slipping into sepsis. He was probably going to die.

The team cabled the morsel of intelligence to C.I.A. headquarters, where it was received with delight by Director George Tenet. "I want to congratulate our officers on the ground," he told a gathering of agents at Langley. When someone explained that the F.B.I. had obtained the information, Tenet blew up and demanded that the C.I.A. get there immediately, say those who were later told of the meeting. Tenet's instructions were clear: Zubaydah was to be kept alive at all costs. (Through his publisher, George Tenet declined to be interviewed.)

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A's interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

http://katherineeban.com/article.php?id=52

[ProSense]

12. You have to take it for what it is.

These are mostly links to official documents or interviews.

This is absolutely damning evidence by itself.

[EFerrari]

13. Absolutely and having it organized helps. But, distributing a time line

that reinforces the idea that CIA waited for approval is not accurate. They tortured first and covered their rears later. Months later. That's all.

ETA: Here's Scott Horton on the sequence:

But even aside from that, there is a very strange factual issue here. President Obama says that we shouldn’t prosecute them because they relied on these memos. But a factual review is going to show that the CIA was using these techniques from April 2002, and these memos were commissioned and written, the first of them, in August 2002, so it’s quite clear, in fact, that CIA agents were out in the field doing these things, not relying on these memos, with the memos not even being in contemplation at that time. So, this argument is a fallacy.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/17/memos

[ProSense]

14. This is exactly why such things shouldn't be listed in an accounting of what's known

It's one thing to muckrake and do the investigative work, but it's a different thing all together to document known evidence.

"This bad faith analysis runs through the latest batch of torture memos."

That piece gives a pretty clear indication of timing.

[EFerrari]

16. Respectfully disagree.

Tamanaha begins with CIA asking for approval and not with CIA torturing which is where the real circularity begins.

Here's Katherine's piece as it appeared July 2007 in VF

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/torture200707

And in fact, we'll find that it started even earlier than April 2002 -- going back to Afghanistan 2001 as in the link I gave you and even further back, to NYC in Fall 2001. "Such things" force the official narrative to resemble something like reality.

[EFerrari]

5. And this toture story goes back to Afghanistan 2001:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30372670

[chill_wind]

17. ACLU FOIA archive-- investigations

of allegations dated as far back as Dec 2001. "NCIS have requested information from MLDU regarding 2 detainees who alleged abuse at Mazar-a-Shariff, Kandahar, Bagram, Egypt and an unknown hanger and tarmac during transport in Dec 2001 and Jan 2002."


http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/search/searchdetail.php?r=3151&q=

Just as a quick cursory glance when searching dates. Many more documents there indexed around those dates that I haven't looked at, but am looking thru now..

[EFerrari]

18. Excellent. For a narrative of Abu Zubayda, our friend Andy Worthington

has an article up at HuffPo today:

Who Authorized the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/who-authorized-the-tortur_b_190914.html#postComment

[jesus_of_suburbia]

8. ProSense, thank you for this. I have a few friends I'm going to email this to.

I also learned some things myself.

K&R ... we all need to read this.

[Supersedeas]

19. Waterboarding plus the number of times that it was AUTHORIZED ought to be clear to any reasonable

person.

[grantcart]

20. Thank you - book marked - will become a central point in the future