Magorn,
wmtriallawyer, and
land of the free have today already diaried Ron Suskind's account of the
torment of Abu Zubaydah, but I can't yet let it go.
The enormity of the crime committed against Zubaydah, and against the people of the United States, won't let me, yet, let it go.
So bear with me. I will try here to offer something other than those sentiments already expressed in those three fine diaries.
I suppose it was in some ways silly for so many of us to be so shocked by this latest in a seemingly endless progression of outrages to emerge from
"the dark side." After all, as Mark Crispin Miller
writes in
The Nation, we were already all too wearily aware of "the Bush regime's subversion of the Constitution; its open violation of the laws here and abroad; its global use of torture; its vast surveillance program(s); its covert propaganda foreign and domestic; its flagrant cronyism; its suicidal military, economic and environmental policies; and its careful placement of the federal establishment into the hands of Christianist extemists." How many times had we said that George II and his minions were capable of
anything, so long as they thought it necessary to perpetuate the
New American Century? I know I said it. Many times.
But I know today that I didn't really believe it. Until today, I didn't really believe that the president of the United States, even if that president were named George Bush, would personally encourage the repeated torture of a hapless, harmless, mentally ill man, in the vain hope that he might blurt forth some intelligence nugget that would justify the president's rash, public, false characterization of that man as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."
This is what Wikipedia, prior to the publication of Suskind's book, had to say about Abu Zubaydah:
Abu Zubaydah was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida and close associate of Osama bin Laden. He is currently in U.S. custody in an unknown location.
Born in Saudi Arabia, Abu Zubaydah has been close to al-Qaida all his life, helping to operate a popular terrorist training camp near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early 1990s. He became an associate of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and served as a chief recruiter for al-Qaida.
In the late 1990s, Abu Zubaydah played a lead role in one of the 2000 millennium attack plots, and a possible tangential role in a second. There were plans to bomb a fully booked Radisson hotel in Amman, Jordan, and three other sites. This targeted tourists from the United States and Israel. But on November 30, 1999, Jordanian intelligence intercepted a call between Abu Zubaydah and Khadr Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian militant, and determined that an attack was imminent. Jordanian police arrested 22 conspirators and foiled the attack. Abu Zubaydah was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court for his role. There is also evidence that Abu Zubaydah approved the Los Angeles airport bomb plot in 2000. This plot was also foiled.
In March of 2001, United States Condoleezza Rice was informed by the CIA that Zubaydah was planning a major operation in the near future. This was one of the first of many reports in the Spring of 2001 that increased the threat level and indicated that an attack was coming. Many of these reports mentioned Zubaydah by name. The attack finally came in the form of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The U.S. government believes he became al-Qaeda's top military strategist following the death of Muhammad Atef in November 2001. A later plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris failed, as did an alleged plot to attack a target in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Zubaydah was probably a conspirator in both of those plots.
While in U.S. custody, he has given a great deal of information about the 9/11 attack plot, detail that led to the indictments of over one hundred people, including Mohamed Harkat.
We now know these are all lies, from front to back, top to bottom. We now know that Abu Zubaydah "kn[e]w nothing about terrorist operations," but was simply Al-Qaeda's "go-to guy for minor logistics--travel for wives and children and the like." We also know that he "is insane, certifiable, [a] split personality."
But that is reality. And we know from an earlier Suskind report, that the Kingdom of George II is not bound by reality. "We're an empire now," a Bush senior advisor told Suskind in 2002, "and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."
How "things sorted out," when CIA Director George Tenet told George II that Abu Zubaydah was grievously mentally ill, with no useful intelligence embedded anywhere in his sadly disordered brain, went like this:
"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."
We knew--or at least we always suspected--that those eternally recurring "terror alerts" that so jangled and unnerved the people of this country (until, magically, just after the defeat of John Kerry in 2004, they faded wispily away), were based on something less than the full truth of the "threat" facing this nation.
But not until today did we learn that many (all?) of those alerts were based on the desperate phantasmagorical ravings of a tormented, mentally sick man, seeking to howl out something--anything--that would convince his torturers to stop tormenting his ravaged body and broken mind.
We knew about the legal malpractice of men like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, and Alberto Gonzales--redefining torture, rendering the Geneva Conventions "quaint," conferring unlimited "inherent" power upon the executive to do what he willed with any human being deemed an "enemy combatant" and thereby a threat to the State. (Although, as Gore Vidal observed iciliy on Ring of Fire: "The executive does not have inherent powers. He has enumerated powers.") We knew about Donald Rumsfeld's sneering note to the effect that he stood for ten hours a day, so why shouldn't the enemies of America? We knew about extraordinary rendition, about secret prisons overseas. We knew that the torture that migrated from Afghanistan to Cuba to Iraq, there to metastasize across the globe, was not the work only, as we were told so many times, of but a handful of hillbilly sick fucks with time on their hands, hate in their hearts, and not much of anything rattling around in their skulls.
But not until today did we learn that the president of the United States himself encouraged the torture of an innocent, mentally ill man, simply so as not to "lose face."
Early Monday morning, a brand-new Kossack, JeevesSL, a 17-year-old youth in Sri Lanka, debuted with a post in which he sought guidance on how to respond to a coworker ceaselessly repeating the George II line on Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. In response, BlaiseP, a self-described "old soldier who used to be a Republican," offered some thoughts that moved me very much. He said:
In the Democratic view of things, we may superimpose the Buddha's vision of life on all things. To live in this world is to suffer: we measure progress by how the poorest are doing, and often our constitutional liberties are defined by defending criminals.
Do not be ashamed to be a Liberal. For me, this was the hardest obstacle to overcome. Being a Liberal is hard work, intellectually, I repeat myself, our causes are most closely bound to the lowest and the least-likeable people. It is easy to hate, it is more difficult to love, especially when those we love do not love us in return. A criminal still has rights in law in the USA, and these rights are under attack. The Conservatives charge us with Loving Criminals and Being Defeatists, nothing could be farther from the truth, for those who love the law understand how easily the law may be abused.
Several hours later, I came across these words in Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection:
All this happened because all these people--governors, inspectors, police-officers and policemen--consider that there are circumstances in this world when man owes no humanity to man. They were thinking not of human beings and their obligations towards them but of the duties and responsibilities of their office, which they placed above the demands of human relations. If once we admit, be it for a single hour or in a single instance, that there can be anything more important than compassion for a fellow human being, then there is no crime against man that we cannot commit with an easy conscience.
Suppose a problem in psychology were set to find means of making people of our time--Christians, humane, simple, kindly people--commit the most horrible crimes without having any feeling of guilt, only one solution would present itself: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen and so forth; which means, first, that they must be convinced that there is a thing called government service which allows men to treat other men like inanimate objects, thereby banning all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this "government service" must be so conjoined that the responsibility for the results of their treatment of people can never fall on any one of them individually. Without these conditions it would be impossible in our times to commit such atrocious deeds as those I have seen today. The whole trouble is that people think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love, but no such circumstances ever exist. Once a man allows himself to treat men unlovingly, there are no limits to the cruelty and brutality he may inflict on others.
When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, Hunter S. Thompson reacted to the widespread GOP feeling that Nixon had "suffered enough" with a pen dipped in acid, but he also allowed the truth of the remark, in that "the name Nixon will seem to give off a strange odor every time it is mentioned for the next 300 years, and in every history book written from now on, 'Nixon' will be synonymous with shame, corruption and failure."
I believe that George W. Bush will suffer a worse fate. I believe that he will become Ozymandias in his own lifetime.
Out here on the far left coast, there is a talk-show host named Bernie Ward who for the last several years has said that he at last understands something that had always puzzled him: how the peoples of Europe and Asia had, at various times in their histories, willingly sacrificed their civil liberties and given themselves over to authoritarian rulers. Always before, he says, he did not understand how the Germans, or the Italians, or the French, or the Japanese, could have willingly, even eagerly, given up their liberty and allowed the proverbial authoritarian "man on a horse" to ride roughshod over them. But watching the people of this country in the days and weeks and months and years since September 11, 2001, Ward says, he now understands "how" all too well.
Those peoples--the Germans, the Italians, the French, the Japanese--today regret having given themselves over to the "man on a horse." So too do I believe that the American people will, one day, become so appalled at what George W. Bush did to this nation, and what this nation allowed George W. Bush to do to it, that they will wipe him clean out of our history. The long 2000-year history of the papacy is littered with anti-popes and unpopes, men who, while they reigned, reigned supremely, but who are today regarded as illegitimate, freaks, anathema. So too do I believe that one day the American people will regard George W. Bush as an anti-president, illegitimate, a freak, will believe, because they want to believe, and regardless of whether or not it is "true," that he stole the elections of both 2000 and 2004, because they will not want to believe that this nation actually, legitimately elevated, and then re-elevated, such a man to office. They will believe this because one day they will understand that what, for instance, was done to Abu Zubaydah, cannot be squared in any way with what we have always believed it means to be an American.
And on that day, what will be left of George W. Bush, and all his signing statements and faith-based judges and Operation Iraqi Fiefdoms and extraordinary renditions and Abu Ghraibs and FISA wiretaps and Patriot Acts and howling, screaming, pleading, weeping, mentally disordered victims, will be but "a shatter'd visage . . ./whose frown/and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command" lies upon "lone and level sands," "boundless and bare."
For BlaiseP is right: "we measure progress by how the poorest are doing," and "our causes are most closely bound to the lowest and the least-likeable people." "We," in these days of Empire, can no longer be cabined solely to those between our shores: "we" encompasses everyone on this planet. And among this "we," there is today no one poorer or lower than Abu Zubaydah.
And look what they did to him.
You cannot hurt people, like Abu Zubaydah has been hurt. You cannot hurt people like that for any reason, and you certainly can't hurt them like that when they are innocent and ill, and solely to "save face." We are Americans, and we do not countenance things like this. We can't even stomach them. And if this nation chooses to stand with the sick fuck who did this, a Charles Graner in the White House, then this nation deserves, like Ozymandias, to be reduced to nothing but "trunkless legs of stone."
But I believe better than that of our people. I have to. Every nation must eventually reach its "never again" moment. With this administration, with Abu Zubaydah, I believe we have reached ours.
I would like to believe that some enterprising lawyer in Spain or Belgium would, based on what was done to Abu Zubaydah, obtain a warrant for the arrest of George Bush for crimes against humanity, and on its authority take him into custody while he is over there this week embarrassing us in Europe. But I know that won't happen. Just as I know that this country is not yet mature enough to itself try George II, or to turn him over for trial in the Hague.
But I must believe that, at least in my daughter's lifetime, the name "Bush," in the Great Public Mind, will instantly spark a single word: infamy.
I have to believe this. I have to.