9/11, crime & punishment

The Forever Prisoner: The Full and Searing Account of the CIA’s Most Controversial Covert Program

Author: Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 452 

Price: Rs 699 

This month, The Guardian published an exclusive series of 40 illustrations prefaced with a warning: “The images and descriptions of torture in this articles are extremely graphic”. Sketched by Abu Zubaydah, incarcerated for over two decades in the notorious Guantanamo Bay, they were recreations of the brutalities that the CIA inflicted on him—also known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.

These drawings were sent to one of Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers, who compiled a report titled “American Torturers: FBI and CIA abuses at Dark Sites and Guantanamo”. The severe reportorial prose set against the powerful lines of Abu Zubaydah’s sketches is disturbing enough. For a closer understanding of how the US, signatory to the Geneva Convention against torture and self-appointed defender of freedom and democracy, came to be associated with the worst kind of human rights abuses then Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy’s The Forever Prisoner is the book to read.

The former foreign correspondents have specialised in “terror” non-fiction, turning painstaking reportage and research into explosive page-turners. Elements of the CIA’s excesses will be familiar from the US media’s revelations of abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay (known as Gitmo). Ms Scott-Clark and Mr Levy show how the Bush administration colluded to make it happen. “Official records show that at least thirty-nine CIA detainees were subjected to enhanced interrogation, while twenty more were never properly documented and disappeared,” they write.

Caught napping on 9/11 — in part because of a turf war with the FBI — the CIA was eager to get ahead of the game and gather intelligence on a rumoured second wave of attacks. The CIA touted as a great success the fact that this attack never materialised. Ms Scott-Clark and Mr Levy show that no such attack was planned.

As the first “high value detainee” Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in March 2002 and deemed to be “number three” in the Al Qaeda hierarchy, was the guinea pig of torture techniques learnt on the fly. Lacking interrogation personnel and skills, the CIA turned to “Doc Mitchell” (Dr James Mitchell), a retired US Air Force psychologist who earned in excess of $80 million to reverse-engineer the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) programme that taught survival techniques against torture.  

Central to this programme was the concept of “learned helplessness,” a psychological condition that instilled “a sense that because resistance is futile, cooperation is inevitable”. Ways to get the subject to this state included “walling” (collaring a victim and slamming him against a wall), cramped confinement, body cavity check, waterboarding and dousing the subject with icy water. “Learned helplessness” was controversial, with studies revealing that it caused mild to severe psychological problems, issues that Doc Mitchell suppressed when he was pitching his programme to the CIA. 

Also, SERE torture techniques were applied with caveats. In waterboarding, the manual specified the number of allowable pours and the time taken for each. Inevitably, when applied on West Asian prisoners captured after 9/11, the gloves were swiftly discarded. Abu Zubaydah, who was severely injured during his capture and lost an eye during his torture, was water-boarded for far longer more than 80 times. Confined at a black site obligingly provided by a Thai general, he was shaved, subject to mock executions, buried in a coffin, holed up in a dog kennel, sexually humiliated, burned with cigarette butts, walled and confined in brightly lit rooms with loud music. None of this was authorised by the SERE programme.

The legal cover for the torture programme was fashioned by a Justice Department lawyer who stated that the law of armed conflict did not apply to War on Terror detainees. Also, Ronald Reagan had signed the UN convention against torture in 1988 but did not sign the second part that outlawed “cruel and unjust punishment,” providing CIA leeway to use controversial techniques.

Ironically, the CIA’s programme revealed that torture is a sub-optimal technique for credible intelligence-gathering since detainees are likely to alleviate their suffering by admitting to whatever their torturers want to hear. Contrary to the dramatic scenes in Zero Dark Thirty it was painstaking humint gathering that revealed Bin Laden’s whereabouts. Self-declared 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was, among other things, waterboarded 183 times by Doc Mitchell and delivered 30 confessions. He later recanted all of them. Ibn Sheikh Al-libi, emir of the training camp at which Abu Zubaydah worked, was outsourced in a coffin to the Egyptians, and gave up false information about Saddam Hussein working with Al Qaeda to produce weapons of mass destruction. The US invasion of Iraq was predicated on this bogus information, disrupting West Asia in profound and lasting ways. Yet the Bush administration’s legal justification has become a template adopted by authoritarian regimes worldwide, including in South Asia, for treating inconvenient opponents.

Gradually, it dawned on the CIA that Abu Zubaydah was what he had said he was: A low-level safe house facilitator for mujahideen fighters. Palestinian by origin, he had knocked unhappily around India before finding a reluctant vocation in one of the oldest mujahideen training camps in Afghanistan. His personal Great Satan was not America but Israel, which had dispossessed his family of their homestead, and he, like many other jihadist groups, fell out with Bin Laden over the killing of innocent people after 9/11.

He languishes in Gitmo for undisclosed reasons, communicating through his lawyers. Doc Mitchell, though reviled by the media, paid no price. He lives in a vast mansion covered with priceless Persian rugs and artefacts. Gina Haspel, who covered up evidence of excesses against Abu Zubaydah, became CIA chief under Donald Trump. There’s lots of bitterness over patriotic Americans being trashed for doing their duty and saving American lives. In the post-9/11 hysteria, the question of respecting other human lives became irrelevant.