The CIA Waterboarded the Wrong Man 83 Times in 1 Month

[GMDino]

Well, this is awful if not unsurprising.

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-cia-waterboarded-the-wrong-man-83-times-in-1-month/

 

Quote:None of the allegations against Abu Zubaydeh turned out to be true. That didn’t stop the CIA from torturing him for years.


The allegations against the man were serious indeed.

• Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in Al Qaeda.
• The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps…. He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.”
• CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25 percent of all the information his agency had gathered about Al Qaeda from human sources “originated” with one other detainee and him..
• George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” claiming that “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” so they would not be captured by US military forces.
  
  

None of it was true.

This article originally appeared atTomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah—with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials—is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror.

So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname, Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in Guantánamo.

A Saudi national, in the 1980s Zubaydah helped run the Khaldan camp, a mujahedeen training facility set up in Afghanistan with CIA help during the Soviet occupation of that country. In other words, Zubaydah was then an American ally in the fight against the Soviets, one of President Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.” (But then again, so in effect was Osama bin Laden.)

Zubaydah’s later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature. He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA “firsts”: the first post–9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the Agency’s “ghost prisoners” (detainees hidden from the world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush administration on what the CIA could “legally” do to a detainee without supposedly violating US federal laws against torture.


Zubaydah’s story is—or at least should be—the iconic tale of the illegalextremes to which the Bush administration and the CIA went in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And yet former officials, from CIA head Michael Hayden to Vice President Dick Cheney to George W. Bush himself, have presented it as a glowing example of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to extract desperately needed information from the “evildoers” of that time.
Zubaydah was an early experiment in post–9/11 CIA practices and here’s the remarkable thing (though it has yet to become part of the mainstream media accounts of his case): it was all a big lie. Zubaydah wasn’t involved with Al Qaeda; he was the ringleader of nothing; he never took part in planning for the 9/11 attacks. He was brutally mistreated and, in another kind of world, would be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of America’s top leaders and its major intelligence agency.

Yet notorious as he once was, he’s been forgotten by all but his lawyers and a few tenacious reporters. He shouldn’t have been. He was the test case for the kind of torture that Donald Trump now wants the US. government to bring back, presumably because it “worked” so well the first time. With Republican presidential hopefuls promising future war crimes, it’s worth reconsidering his case and thinking about how to prevent it from happening again. After all, it’s only because no one has been held to account for the years of Bush administration torture practices that Trump and others feel free to promise even more and “yuger” war crimes in the future.

Much, much more at the link.

[BengalHawk62]

I can hear it now.


That got dammed Obummer! This is all his fault.  What a got dammedable mess he's gotten us into now.  This country is in shambles.  If the Almight Reagon could see all this now, he'd be rolling in his grave, got bless his soul.   

[*michaelsean*]

(04-26-2016, 05:52 PM)BengalHawk62 Wrote: I can hear it now.


That got dammed Obummer! This is all his fault.  What a got dammedable mess he's gotten us into now.  This country is in shambles.  If the Almight Reagon could see all this now, he'd be rolling in his grave, got bless his soul.   

Well he is letting this poor soul remain isolated in Gitmo.

[fredtoast]

Just one guy was waterboarded 83 times in one month?

I bet the CIA get good deals on neti pots by buying in bulk.

[Belsnickel]

(04-26-2016, 05:53 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Well he is letting this poor soul remain isolated in Gitmo.

Quoted for mother ***** truth. One, if the claim that this dude was innocent is accurate and he is still being held in Gitmo then Obama has spent almost 8 years imprisoning him after all of this. It may not be waterboarding, but it's still absolute bullshit and should be rectified.

(04-26-2016, 06:14 PM)fredtoast Wrote: Just one guy was waterboarded 83 times in one month?

I bet the CIA get good deals on neti pots by buying in bulk.

If I remember correctly from another article, when they count the number of times it is the number of time water was poured over their face. So one session could have 10 or so times occur.

[Benton]

(04-26-2016, 06:32 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Quoted for mother ***** truth. One, if the claim that this dude was innocent is accurate and he is still being held in Gitmo then Obama has spent almost 8 years imprisoning him after all of this. It may not be waterboarding, but it's still absolute bullshit and should be rectified.


If I remember correctly from another article, when they count the number of times it is the number of time water was poured over their face. So one session could have 10 or so times occur.

Not defending Obama because he claimed to be the guy who wouldn't use them, but it's still the same people in charge, as far as the war goes. Cent comm still gets told what to tell. Same with most of our intelligence.

At the end of the day, whoever is in the white house is irrelevant in this regard. It's the same handful of military and intelligence guys spooning up the same bs.

Aaaaaand now I sound like DA.

[Rotobeast]

(04-26-2016, 07:53 PM)Benton Wrote: Not defending Obama because he claimed to be the guy who wouldn't use them, but it's still the same people in charge, as far as the war goes. Cent comm still gets told what to tell. Same with most of our intelligence.

At the end of the day, whoever is in the white house is irrelevant in this regard. It's the same handful of military and intelligence guys spooning up the same bs.

Aaaaaand now I sound like DA.

Aaaaaand it's the same for every puppet president that is placed in office by the few jerks that fake an election.

[*michaelsean*]

(04-26-2016, 07:53 PM)Benton Wrote: Not defending Obama because he claimed to be the guy who wouldn't use them, but it's still the same people in charge, as far as the war goes. Cent comm still gets told what to tell. Same with most of our intelligence.

At the end of the day, whoever is in the white house is irrelevant in this regard. It's the same handful of military and intelligence guys spooning up the same bs.

Aaaaaand now I sound like DA.

They are all puppets of the Birkenstock Society. You know it really is a shame that name is taken by a hippie footwear company. That really would be a great secret society name. "You think Bush led us into war? Do me a favor and look into the Birkenstocks and then get back to me. Or better yet, google Birkenstock and any major event of the last 500 years."

[Belsnickel]

(04-26-2016, 09:01 PM)michaelsean Wrote: They are all puppets of the Birkenstock Society. You know it really is a shame that name is taken by a hippie footwear company. That really would be a great secret society name. "You think Bush led us into war? Do me a favor and look into the Birkenstocks and then get back to me. Or better yet, google Birkenstock and any major event of the last 500 years."

Germans are too orderly to be hippies.

[GMDino]

(04-26-2016, 10:05 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Germans are too orderly to be hippies.

http://peopleofshambhala.com/bohemian-groves-the-19th-century-roots-of-the-hippie-movement/

Quote:Bohemian Groves: the 19th century roots of the Hippie movement


The world’s first self-conscious “youth” movement sprang up in response to, and as a rejection of, urban life and the cold, impersonal mechanics of modernity. It’s members wanted to reunite themselves with nature. They went vegetarian, sometimes favored nudism, hiked and even camped out in the wilderness, creating alternative societies to the mainstream. It was a romantic, spiritual movement. Many saw themselves as pagans, worshipping the sun, conceived of as an ancient Teutonic deity. The young men grew their hair long, sang songs and played guitars around campfires. But this movement did not emerge in 1960s California, but the proceeding century, during the 1890s, in Germany.


Original Hippies: Maximillian Sikinger (left) and advocate of nudism Karl Wilhem Diefenbach and Fidus, 1887 (right).

Known as Bohemians, as members of the Wandervogel (Wandering Birds) or Lebensreform (Life Reform) movement, these spiritual radicals engendered a proto-Hippie worldview and style that was transferred to the USA, and developed there, by German immigrants between the 1890s and the beginning of the First World War. In their new homelands they began to make converts of the locals. Professor Arnold Ehret, who arrived in California in 1914, promoted raw food diets, fasting, and nude sun bathing. He also believed that men should let their hair, and their beard, grow long. Ehret’s Rational Fasting (1914) and Mucus-less Diet (1922) gained wide acceptance during the 1960s, in the Hippie circles of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Maximillian Sikinger arrived in the USA somewhat later, in 1935, at the age of 22. He settled in California, inspiring many of the young Americans around him to become “Nature Boys.” One of those who did so was Gypsy Boots. He was born to Russian-Jewish parents in San Francisco, in 1916. He met Sikinger in 1935, and began experimenting, under the German émigré’s tutelage, with natural diets, fasting, and Yoga. He opened his Health Hut in Hollywood in 1958, and quickly gained a reputation as a health instructor, appearing more than two dozen times on the Steve Allen show during the 1960s.

Another influence from the German Bohemians was art, especially the work of Hugo Höppener (1868-1948), who used the pseudonym Fidus. Depicting nude figures among the natural landscape, not sexualized, but in harmony with nature and working in cooperation with each other, Fidus gained wide recognition during his day, and inspired the psychedelic art style of the 1960s. Several of his works show a male-female couple embracing, not out of lust, but in a kind of Tantric reaching for Deity

[Belsnickel]

(04-26-2016, 10:17 PM)GMDino Wrote:

http://peopleofshambhala.com/bohemian-groves-the-19th-century-roots-of-the-hippie-movement/

Well. Scheisse.

[Rotobeast]

(04-26-2016, 10:17 PM)GMDino Wrote:

http://peopleofshambhala.com/bohemian-groves-the-19th-century-roots-of-the-hippie-movement/

Europeans=Druids
All else=Hippies

[*michaelsean*]

(04-26-2016, 10:17 PM)GMDino Wrote:

http://peopleofshambhala.com/bohemian-groves-the-19th-century-roots-of-the-hippie-movement/

How long you been holding on to that one?

[Bilbo Saggins]

Who's losing their job over this one?  Or better yet, who's getting prosecuted for torturing an innocent man?

*crickets*

[GMDino]

(04-26-2016, 10:59 PM)michaelsean Wrote: How long you been holding on to that one?

I just wondered if their was a hippy movement in Germany after Matt made his joke.  Took about 20 seconds to find it.