The Truthout article was noted by numerous news outlets, including Associated Press, the UK Daily Mail, and Wired Magazine. Kevin Gosztola also interviewed me about what the Inspector General report, "Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees" (PDF), was really all about.
If you're not done wanting to know more about the IG report and the whole issue of drugging the "war on terror" detainees, you might also want to listen to Scott Horton at The Scott Horton Show interview Jason on the latest revelations.
For more penetrating, original commentary on the IG report and the drugging issue in general, see Andy Worthington and Marcy Wheeler's recent blog postings.
Jason Leopold was interviewed on RT's The Alyona Show on May 30, talking about his big Truthout investigation published the other day. The story is pure Americana, circa 21st century, as the courts, immigration, the FBI, Army CID, and even a problematic ex-wife all descend upon a man who just happened to be the brother of one of the three or four most famous "terrorists" known, Abu Zubaydah. An innocent man persistently hounded by police agents is something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but here it really happened.
The word "terrorists" above is in quotes, because one, no charges have ever been filed against Zayn Al-Abidin Muhammed Husein, who sits rotting in solitary confinement in Guantanamo these past six years. (His lawyers have demanded the government charge him.) And two, it is not clear that whatever actions Abu Zubaydah took, they were not merely the actions of a person involved in a civil war, undeserving of the nebulous label of "terrorism," which is more of a political label than it is anything else.
And why at this point can anyone be so uncertain about who this man actually is? (And it is a piquant irony in Jason's article that Zubaydah's own brother cannot say exactly who the man is the government holds called Abu Zubaydah, that he really doesn't recognized him.) Well, for one thing, the government has reneged on its accusations that he was a high Al Qaeda figure, and offered zero explanation for why they thought that, or why they changed their minds. Then, there is the little matter of the horrendous torture of Zubaydah and many, many others, throwing real doubt on the veracity of whatever supposed revelations came from such criminal abuse.
Zubaydah was the first of the CIA torture victims to be waterboarded, and not once, but 83 times. He was the "high-value detainee" for which John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote a legal memo to the CIA redefining torture and the legal understanding of "pain" so the CIA could put, for instance, Abu Zubaydah in a confinement box, or deprive him of sleep, or repeatedly slap him, or waterboard him, etc.
Jason Leopold's article is not about the Abu Zubayah we "know." It is about his brother, Hesham. Watch the two videos below, both the Alyona interview and one of Jason Leopold interviewing Abu Zubaydah's brother himself (originally posted with the Truthout article). Besides the inherent human interest of such a story, there is much to ponder from what is revealed: about how informants are recruited by the FBI via pressure, false promises or blackmail; how the full story about what the government saying and what it was really doing in the "war on terror"; on the lies and secrets still withheld from the American people about 9/11, and much more.
(An important related side story about how the FBI tried to get Hesham Abu Zubaydah to drop his permission to let Jason Leopold have access through FOIA to his FBI files is something Jason wrote up separately, and is a disturbing story in and off itself.)
Hesham opened the envelope at the bar, expecting a green card. Instead it was a subpoena from a federal prosecutor, which would force him to testify--against his brother.
He thought about fleeing to Norway or Poland with his wife and daughter. But it would be much easier to cross the border into Canada in his Cadillac Escalade and avoid the hassle of airport security and the possibility that his name would pop up on the no-fly list.
Hesham Abu Zubaidah speaking to Truthout in November 2011 at his home in Florida. (Photo: Lance Page / Truthout)
In Canada, he could start over again. Raise farm animals or something. Change his name. Never look back. Hesham had played this fantasy out in his head dozens of times since he had quit working as an informant for the FBI.
"This is what you wanted from me all along, isn't it?" Hesham asked the FBI agent who handed him the envelope. "You guys used me."
When he'd been living in Portland, Oregon, Hesham had agreed to infiltrate mosques and spy on other Muslims because his FBI handler led him to believe she could help him obtain a green card. She didn't, and he cut off contact with the agency when he moved to a small town in Florida. But they had found him again.
Of what we know, there are 779 prisoners who were sent to Guantanamo Bay under the Bush administration. Today, 171 remain. Some have been transferred or released; only one has been brought to trial in the US and sentenced to life in prison, and 8 died at the prison. The circumstances surrounding some of these deaths are mysterious, and a cause for debate and investigations. Truthout contributor Jeffrey Kaye discuss the deaths of two detainees.
The original story, Recently Released Autopsy Reports Heighten Guantanamo "Suicides" Mystery, examined the autopsies of two of the six Guantanamo "suicides" and found irregularities, unanswered questions, and startling new facts the government has withheld from the public for years. For instance, one detainee, Abdul Rahman Al Amri, was found hanged with his hands tied behind his back. The other deceased prisoner, Mohammad Al Hanashi, was said to have strangled himself to death with a type of underwear not used by detainees at the time.
There's more in the video and the Truthout article. Meanwhile, I will be continuing this investigation over the next weeks and months.
I was pleased to be asked to appear on the successful RT news program The Alyona Show earlier today. The interview was offered as a follow-up to an investigatory article published at Truthout last week, which showed that all protestations by Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. government authorities aside, the U.S. military did engage in torture remarkably similar to waterboarding, if not waterboarding itself. An accompanying article was also posted here at The Dissenter.
Alyona Minkovski is one of a handful of broadcasters who have been following the torture scandal and the ongoing US wars abroad, bringing on experts with a point of view seldom or never heard on other mainstream news programs. Keith Olbermann also did a segment on August 4 for Current TV, with commentary by Jeremy Scahill, on my investigation into DoD water torture, remarking that "our understanding of our history of torture by this country has just been advanced by this story."
My investigation, based on multiple detainee accounts, news reports, doctor review of selected Guantanamo medical records, testimony before a Congressional committee, and Department of Justice and Department of Defense investigations, revealed that a number of detainees at different DoD sites, including Guantanamo, were held down and had streams of water from a hose directed for minutes at a time between their mouth and nose. Other detainees had their heads stuffed into toilets or buckets of water. The Truthout article also detailed instances in which military officials -- and in one case, former Vice President Dick Cheney himself -- requested or directed that waterboarding take place.
More Rumsfeld Lies About Whether He "Approved" Waterboarding or Not
Donald Rumsfeld claims that he rejected the use of waterboarding when it was suggested to him in a memo in late 2002, writing in his recent memoir, "When military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay sent up their chain of command a request to use waterboarding in late 2002, I rejected it."
But the truth is DoD's legal counsel, William Haynes, recommended in a memo in November 2002 a number of coercive interrogation techniques, noting that waterboarding "may be legally available", though he advised against its use, as well as a few other highly coercive torture techniques "at this time." Rumsfeld signed off on the memo. He did not reject Haynes' characterization that waterboarding "may be legally available." Yet Rumsfeld must have been aware that numerous legal experts within DoD itself and its various service branches had serious doubts about its legality.
Given that the US public has been told to accept the narrative that waterboarding was restricted to the CIA, and to only (!) three victims of CIA torture, I've decided to continue with this investigation with the aim of correcting this faulty narrative. As I wrote in my Dissenter piece, "the use of water torture and waterboarding or quasi-waterboarding can only represent a pattern of such kinds of torture, which has been kept out of the public eye through a combination of secrecy, and artfully framing the issue around a definition of waterboarding that is meant to exclude examination of the full use of such water-drowning torture."
Meanwhile, since I wrote the original Truthout story, I've found at least four more cases of DoD "water treatment" or "water torture," which involved the submersion of DoD prisoners into water, or the forced choking of detainees with application of water. I'll be posting more on this in an upcoming article. But I should note that even formal, CIA-style waterboarding may have also taken place.
In an interview with The Talking Dog in May 2007, one of the attorneys for the Guantanamo detainees, Brent Mickum, who also represents Abu Zubaydah, explained what he heard about waterboarding at Guantanamo:
After my recent C-Span appearance, someone called me and spoke to me at length, telling me (without giving his name) that he was a guard at the GTMO camps. He told me that he and other guards were instructed to brutalize prisoners. He confirmed that water-boarding, which he called “drown-proofing” took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity.
In the video accompanying this post, I explain to Alyona why the US government has played around with the semantics of what is waterboarding, why this issue has not been investigated officially, and why it is Congress has refused to act on this information, even when it was formally presented before them. -- I should add that it was a pleasure to be interviewed by someone as well-informed and also passionate about the issue as Alyona clearly was.
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I am a psychologist, living in Northern California. Over the years I have written about torture, national security, civil rights and other topics. Most of my stories, including major investigatory pieces, some co-written with Jason Leopold, have been published at Firedoglake, Truthout, and The Public Record.
A full backlog of my pre-Invictus writing, going back to May 2005, can be found at my Daily Kos page.
E-mail me at sfpsych at gmail dot com.
This documentary, by award-winning producer Sherry Jones, details how the secret U.S. military interrogation program - "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" - or SERE - became the basis for many of the harshest methods used in interrogating prisoners in U.S custody.
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