Jay Bybee, in thanks for his being the loyal soldier to the Bush administration’s policies of torture, was nominated and confirmed by the US Senate as a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he sits to this day in his lifetime appointment. Jay Bybee, an author of torture, reportedly has a placard in his home for his children that reads, “We don’t hurt each other.” Alyssa Peterson, for saying no to torture, is dead, perhaps by her own hand.
BY ANN WRIGHT
Truthout
INTERNATIONAL
Posted by (Bulatlat.com)
As a Bush administration political appointee Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, Jay Bybee, a Mormon, wrote one of four torture memos released last month.
Bybee’s August 1, 2002, 20-page memorandum laid out in excruciating detail the interrogation techniques he was authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use on al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.
Bybee authorized ten “enhanced interrogation techniques” to encourage Abu Zubaydah to disclose “crucial information regarding terrorist networks in the United States or in Saudi Arabia and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against US interests overseas.” The torture techniques authorized were (1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap, (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress position, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box and (10) waterboarding.
The current Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder has stated that waterboarding is torture, while the previous Attorney General Judge Mukasey refused to comment on whether waterboarding is torture.
From recently released CIA documents, we know the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times.
But, we know that from March through June, 2002, according to FBI interrogator Ali Soufan in an op-ed to The New York Times on April 23, 2009, FBI interrogators had already gotten “actionable intelligence” from Zubaydah using traditional, nontorturing interrogation techniques, including that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 and that Jose Padilla was planning to be a “dirty bomber.”
Ninety of the 92 interrogation videotapes the CIA admits it destroyed were interrogations of Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah’s British attorney Brent Mickum, in the most detailed account the public has had of Zubaydah’s life, states that after all the waterboarding and other torture methods used, the CIA finally recognized Zubaydah was not the senior al-Qaeda leader they had portrayed him to be. According to Mickum, the military commissions at Guantanamo are now “airbrushing” his name from the charge sheets of other Guantanamo prisoners. Mickum reveals Zubaydah was severely wounded in Afghanistan in 1992 while fighting communist insurgents after the withdrawal of Soviet forces. He has two pieces of shrapnel in his head, which have affected his memory to the extent that “he cannot remember his mother’s name or face.” Mickum states that Zubaydah was shot and severely wounded when he was picked up in Pakistan. His life was saved by a John Hopkins surgeon flown to the region. After being saved from death, he was almost tortured to death by CIA operatives. Mickum says that Zubaydah is a stateless Palestinian with no country to argue on his behalf and a United States government now embarrassed at being caught in its own illegal conduct.
We know that combinations of the other nine techniques authorized by Jay Bybee can be classified as torture, as the Convening Authority of the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Susan Crawford declared when she dismissed the charges against Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani, in January, 2009, in the last days of the Bush administration.
