“They Tormented a Clerk” – UPDATED

If you read between the lines of Barack Obama’s answer to Jake Tapper’s question about waterboarding last night, it is clear that the issue of torture is not going to fade away any time soon. Here’s a clip.

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.

And then the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s — what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

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UPDATE: Commenter “reg” flagged this column from the London Times. It speaks specifically to the issue of the British in WWII, captured spies, and even the incidents of “ticking time bombs.”

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Then in this morning’s LA Times there is an Op Ed by Joseph Margulies, a lawyer for Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah, if you remember, is one of the handful of enemy combatants who has been used to justify the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a real big fish of terrorism—-and the first person to vanish into a CIA black site.

Or so we were told. Later, however, the WaPo and the NY Times interviewed DOJ officials and former intelligence officers who said that…actually Abu Zubaydah was far from being a leader or an insider; he was “a personnel clerk.” Our bad.

And how did we treat the personnel clerk?

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.

“They tormented a clerk,” writes Margulies. Then he goes on to explain the disintegrative effect that “enhanced interrogation” had on Zubaydah’s psyche.

“Already, he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name. Gradually, his past, like his future, eludes him.”
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PS: Remember when Barack Obama talked about things that are corrosive to a nation’s character….? That’s the kind of thing he meant.

PPS: Oh, yeah, and then there’s the Spanish judge who has just expanded his investigation of torture at Guantanamo. Details and more here on NPR’s Fresh Air.