Commentary: Torture memos — Accountability, everywhere but here?

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Commentary: Torture memos — Accountability, everywhere but here?
By Jameel Jaffer and Larry Siems | The American Civil Liberties Union
Posted on Sunday, August 1, 2010

Eight years ago on Aug. 1, armed with two legal opinions that gutted the prohibition against torture, CIA agents and contractors began the month-long "enhanced interrogation" of Abu Zubaydah in a secret CIA dungeon in Thailand.

Throughout August, drawing from the specific menu of "techniques" the memos offered, interrogators slammed Abu Zubaydah repeatedly into walls, locked him in "confinement boxes," deprived him of sleep, shackled him naked in stress positions, and waterboarded him 82 times. They finally stopped when they concluded he was not concealing information — and then officials actually flew from Washington to Thailand and insisted on watching an eighty-third session.

Today, nobody argues that Abu Zubaydah wasn't tortured. Yet we have done practically nothing: no prosecutions or investigations of senior officials who oversaw the torture program, no meaningful acknowledgment or redress for the victims of our torture program.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, legal memo author John Yoo, and the other architects of the program brazenly discuss their crimes in public appearances, still pressing the memos' flawed line that the abuse was necessary, that it was justifiable as self-defense, or simply that the President can ignore the law during a national emergency.

~snip~

We now know that Abu Zubaydah's treatment in Thailand was the foundation of a kind of Ponzi scheme for torture, in which others were tortured to admit to plots he had invented for his interrogators. One of those caught in this scheme was Binyam Mohamed, who was tortured in Pakistan and then rendered to Morocco and tortured some more to press him to confess to participating in a fantastical "dirty bomb" plot with Jose Padilla. Mohamed was released from Guantanamo last year and is back home in the U.K., where everyone knows his story — thanks largely to the fact that U.K. courts refused to be bullied by the U.S. into suppressing evidence of his mistreatment.