"Lately, we've heard and read much about torture memos, waterboarding and insects in a box. It has been the occasion for somber reflection on our past and serious deliberation about our future. This is as it should be. It was Arizona Sen. John McCain, in talking about torture, who rightly reminded us that "it's not about who they are. It's about who we are."
But perhaps we also should remember that there was a human being strapped to that board. His name is Zayn al Abidin Mohamed Hussein, known to the world as Abu Zubaydah...
...First, they beat him. As authorized by the Justice Department and confirmed by the Red Cross, they wrapped a collar around his neck and smashed him over and over against a wall. They forced his body into a tiny, pitch-dark box and left him for hours. They stripped him naked and suspended him from hooks in the ceiling. They kept him awake for days.
And they strapped him to an inverted board and poured water over his covered nose and mouth to "produce the sensation of suffocation and incipient panic." Eighty-three times. I leave it to others to debate whether we should call this torture. I am content with the self-evident truth that it was wrong.
Second, his treatment was motivated by the bane of our post-9/11 world: rotten intel. The beat him because they believed he was evil. Not long after his arrest, President Bush described him as "one of the top three leaders" in Al Qaeda and "Al Qaeda's chief of operations." In fact, the CIA brass at Langley, Va., ordered his interrogators to keep at it long after the latter warned that he had been wrung dry.
But Abu Zubaydah, we now understand, was nothing like what the president believed. He was never Al Qaeda. The journalist Ron Suskind was the first to ask the right questions. In his 2006 book, "The One Percent Doctrine," he described Abu Zubaydah as a minor logistics man, a travel agent.
Later and more detailed reporting in the Washington Post, quoting Justice Department officials, said he provided "above-ground support. ... To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous." More recently, the New York Times, relying on current and former intelligence officers, said the initial assessment was "highly inflated" and reflected "a profound misunderstanding" of Abu Zubaydah. Far from a leader, he was "a personnel clerk."
So two legs of the stool are fixed: They tormented a clerk. But there is a third leg that should not be left out. No one can pass unscathed through an ordeal like this. Abu Zubaydah paid with his mind."
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