Abrash (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ad_kay) wrote,@ 2006-06-20 14:27:00 |
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We create our own enemies, Part 2: Tortuing the mentally ill
Remember Abu Zubaydah, al Qaeda's Number Two man? He was captured in Pakistan in 2002.
He's mentally ill, probably schizophrenic. He was no mastermind--he ran errands. The CIA tortured him until he made shit up, according to Ron Suskind.
From Barton Gellman's review of Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine:
"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co
Remember Abu Zubaydah, al Qaeda's Number Two man? He was captured in Pakistan in 2002.
He's mentally ill, probably schizophrenic. He was no mastermind--he ran errands. The CIA tortured him until he made shit up, according to Ron Suskind.
From Barton Gellman's review of Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine:
"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co
