Probably the most important moment in the president’s speech yesterday dealt with his defense of torture. It was, perhaps, [tag]Bush[/tag] at his most twisted.
“Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu [tag]Zubaydah[/tag]. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes 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 after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody — and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.
“After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information — and then stopped all cooperation. Well, in fact, the ‘nominal’ information he gave us turned out to be quite important. For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — or KSM — was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and used the alias ‘Muktar.’ This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM. Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States — an attack about which we had no previous information. Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location. Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained — one while traveling to the United States.”
The president was particularly fond of the Zubaydah anecdote. Bush went on to explain that when Zubaydah stopped talking — apparently because he’d been trained on how to resist interrogation — CIA officials used an “alternative set of procedures,” which apparently is a new euphemism for “torture.” The tactics worked, the president said, and Zubaydah once again became a font of useful information.
Hearing this, one is led to believe the Zubaydah example is a real triumph. Indeed, it was the only anecdote the president discussed in real detail yesterday, suggesting that it’s probably the best example the White House has of a) the efficacy of torture; and b) the administration’s effective intelligence-gathering operation.
There’s just one problem — Bush was [tag]lying[/tag]. Blatantly.
Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in March 2002. The White House has identified him as al Queda’s chief of operations. The reality, as Ron Suskind explained several months ago, is that Zubaydah turned out to be mentally ill. We were torturing a man who was, in effect, retarded.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3” — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. […]
“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.”
Moreover, the president’s claim yesterday that Zubaydah’s interrogation tipped off the U.S. to the existence of Ramzi bin Al Shibh is just an outright lie — officials knew about him long before they began torturing Zubaydah.
Let’s not lose sight of the context here. The president, in what the media is making out to be a brilliant political speech, lied quite blatantly, hoping Americans wouldn’t know the difference. The speech drew blanket coverage, and was thoroughly vetted by administration officials, and it was anchored by a claim that was obviously untrue. As Spencer Ackerman said:
[M]ost Americans don’t have access to Nexis. And most Americans don’t remember–and can’t be expected to remember–newspaper coverage of Al Qaeda for a seven-month stretch between the attacks and Abu Zubaydah’s capture. Bush is exploiting that ignorance to tell the American people an outright lie in order to convince them that we need to torture people. As Bush once said in another context, if this is not [tag]evil[/tag], then evil has no meaning.
Dems on the Hill should be apoplectic about this, not only because decency demands it, but on a more crass note, because politically it’s necessary. Yesterday’s speech was about seizing political high ground and putting Dems on the defensive. But these remarks were not only morally offensive, they were demonstrably [tag]false[/tag].
As Andrew Sullivan put it, “On one of the gravest moral matters before the country, this president is knowingly stating an untruth.”
At this point, mainstream news outlets seem unwilling to pursue this. Dems have to step up and expose the president’s lies.