Leaked-Int'l Red Cross Report-CIA Techniques "CONSTITUTED TORTURE-With Intimate Involvement Of WH"

[kpete]

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530

Amid a slew of details on the treatment of Abu Zubaydah, the article describes Abu Zubaydah learning that he was the guinea pig for these techniques.

Understand what this means: the torturers were conducting their experiments on Abu Zubaydah before John Yoo wrote up an OLC memo authorizing torture (hell--Yoo may have excluded those methods they had decided were ineffective and that my be why they told Abu Zubaydah there were no rules). The torturers were conducting their experiments with the intimate involvement of those back at the White House getting briefed and approving of each technique. And the torturers were being videotaped doing so.

Those tapes--which in this context sound like a tool in their experimentation more than anything else--are the tapes that CIA destroyed in 2005.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/03/15/the-abu-zubaydah-experiment/#more-3775

I was then placed again in the tall box. While I was inside the box loud music was played again and somebody kept banging repeatedly on the box from the outside. I tried to sit down on the floor, but because of the small space the bucket with urine tipped over and spilt over me.... I was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before....

This went on for approximately one week. During this time the whole procedure was repeated five times....

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor....

I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.

................

5.

All evidence from the ICRC report suggests that Abu Zubaydah's informant was telling him the truth: he was the first, and, as such, a guinea pig. Some techniques are discarded. The coffin-like black boxes, for example, barely large enough to contain a man, one six feet tall and the other scarcely more than three feet, which seem to recall the sensory-deprivation tanks used in early CIA-sponsored experiments, do not reappear. Neither does the "long-time sitting"—the weeks shackled to a chair—that Abu Zubaydah endured in his first few months.

way more here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530

[Idealism]

1. Kubarak Counter-Intelligence Interrogation manual was way before this.

And as such, this stuff was all tried before:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm

[Supersedeas]

2. paging the Attorney General, Mr. Holder, what does the People's Attorney say?

[flyarm]

3. he prob will say we need another worthless commission white wash! eom

[spamlet2002]

4. he's too busy looking forward

history will not judge this administration well if they continue to cover up for w. what kind of tool covers for war criminals?!