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Home Front: WoT

‘The forever prisoner': Abu Zubaydah's drawings expose the US's depraved torture policy.

2023-05-14

Nota bene: the yellow highlighter belongs to comments from poster Hupainter Peacock1045, green is badanov, periwinkle is mine. Some of HP1045’s comments have been interrupted by badanov’s and/or my responses. HP1045 periodically retreads the same ground, using yet another article from a small stable of sources who can be relied upon to deliver his message.

—trailing wife

[TheGuardian] A detainee held in the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay who was used as a human guinea pig in the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program has produced the most comprehensive and detailed account yet seen of the brutal techniques to which he was subjected.

And of course every word he utters is the utter truth — this we dare not question lest the readers of The Guardian sneer at us as nekulturny Americans.

Abu Zubaydah

... Al Qaeda recruitment and training leader as well as member of Al Qaeda’s Pakistan-based Shura consultative council — whose real name is Zayn Abdeen al Husseini and once in the Rantburg archives as Zayne Abu Zubaydah. He was arrested in Faisalabad with several others in 2002...

has created a series of 40 drawings that chronicle the torture he endured in a number of CIA dark sites between 2002 and 2006 and at Guantánamo Bay. In the absence of a full official accounting of the torture program, which the CIA and the FBI have labored for years to keep secret, the images give a unique and searing insight into a grisly period in US history.

The drawings, which Zubaydah has annotated with his own words, depict gruesome acts of violence, sexual and religious humiliation, and prolonged psychological terror committed against him and other detainees. They were sketched from memory in his Guantánamo cell and sent to one of his lawyers, Prof Mark Denbeaux.

... a Seton Hall law professor who has been a prominent lawyer for Guantanamo detainees. His big thing is how few GITMO detainees actually fought against the US, which has nothing to do with whether or not they are evil members of a terror organization attempting to conquer the world for Islam, who therefore deserve to be locked up for the duration of that war. He also does not seem to address — nor does the Guardian op-ed — how many of those thus far released from GITMO have returned to the jihad.

I'm just waiting for the deranged responses to begin. "He deserved it!"
This is black letter international law. If you appear on a battlefield, armed without a uniform, and you are captured, you are at the mercy of whichever commander detains you. You have zero rights. The commander is free to execute you on the spot, hold a trial and execute on the spot, or interrogate you.

Not just on the battlefield — spies and saboteurs have the exact same zero rights. Being a law-abiding society is not intended to be a suicide pact, no matter how uncharmingly self-righteous The Guardian waxes in its determined ignorance.

Isn't America supposed to be the good guys? Torture is clearly evil. And who's doing it? The CIA and FBI? The deep state, hello?
The field agents and operatives in the CIA have a commission to capture battlefield illegal combatants and to extract as much information from them as possible by which ever means. Whether that means bribing the prisoner with hookers and blow, or enhanced interrogation techniques, that commission doesn't change.
Zubaydah’s sketches provide a unique visual record of the US government’s use of torture in the wake of 9/11. Videotapes of Zubaydah being tortured were filmed by the CIA but then destroyed in violation of a court order, while a 6,700-page torture report by the Senate intelligence committee remains secret almost a decade after it was completed.
Because when the CIA destroys evidence under subpoena, that's a sure sign that they're not afraid of what it will show.

Now we're going to chant, "Torture might be evil but it saved lives." Bullshit.

Torture is chancy — some will lie to stop the pain. But intelligent interrogation applying psychological and psychiatric discoveries can prove very useful indeed.

Though the full Senate report has never been made public, its conclusion is known: that the abuse of Zubaydah and other detainees failed to elicit any new intelligence. In other words, torture does not work.

Zubaydah, 52, was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and renditioned to several CIA dark sites in Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere. He was the first victim of what was to become the widespread use of torture by the US against terror suspects.

He was transferred to Guantánamo in 2006, where he has been held ever since.

The US initially claimed he was a top al-Qaida operative but was forced to concede he was not even a member of the terror group. "Everybody agrees, they tortured the wrong guy; they went ahead anyway so they could get permission to torture other people," Denbeaux said.
And now they've got it. Just like all the other weapons they built, this will now be used on us, the American people.

You’ve been nuked lately, Hupainter Peacock1045? Because I haven’t, nor has anyone shot a missile at me, nor even a basic scary black rifle. Possibly someone has bugged my phone, tracked my GPS, or explored my iPad, in which case they’ve wasted a great deal of time better spent on more interesting targets, but I’ve not seen evidence even of that. In short, your histrionics are not persuasive.

Posted by:Hupainter Peacock1045

#3 Is he releasing an NFT?

Posted by: Super Hose 2023-05-14 15:39

#2 Not feeling sorry for that one. Not sorry about feeling that way either.

Posted by: M. Murcek 2023-05-14 07:33

#1 Hard questions by hard men.

Posted by: Skidmark 2023-05-14 02:12

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