Andy Worthington: Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Further information about Zubaydah's treatment in Thailand has not emerged in great detail. In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer noted only that he was "held naked in a small cage, like a dog," and the ICRC report focused instead on his detention in Afghanistan, from May 2002 to February 2003. What we do know, however, from the Senate Committee's report, is that an FBI agent was so appalled by his treatment at the hands of CIA agents that he "raised objections to these techniques to the CIA and told the CIA it was 'borderline torture,'" and that, sometime later, FBI director Robert Mueller "decided that FBI agents would not participate in interrogations involving techniques the FBI did not normally use in the United States." We also know from Jane Mayer that R. Scott Shumate, the chief operational psychologist for the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, left his job in 2003, apparently disgusted by developments involving the use of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," and that "associates described him as upset in particular about the treatment of Zubaydah."

Moreover, although the ICRC report dealt only with Zubaydah's treatment in Afghanistan, it's also clear that the techniques to which he was subjected in Afghanistan, in the approximately two and a half months before the OLC memos were signed, also "constituted torture."

In his statement to the ICRC, Zubaydah explained how, even before the waterboarding began, he was strapped naked to a chair for several weeks in a cell that was "air-conditioned and very cold," deprived of food, subjected to extreme sleep deprivation for two to three weeks -- partly by means of loud music or incessant noise, and partly because, "If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face" -- and, for the rest of the time, until the waterboarding began, was subjected to further sleep deprivation, and kept in a state of perpetual fear.

This array of techniques undoubtedly appears less dramatic than the "real torturing" that followed (in which the waterboarding was accompanied by physical brutality, hooding, the daily shaving of his hair and beard, and confinement in small boxes), but, again, it is critical to try to imagine what two to three weeks of chronic sleep deprivation actually means, and to recall that, by the time Steven G. Bradbury, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, revised the approval for torture techniques in May 2005, it was noted that it was only considered acceptable to subject a prisoner to 180 hours (seven and a half days) of sleep deprivation.