The Pentagon Papers Of The CIA Torture Program

“The Pentagon Papers Of The CIA Torture Program”
By Jason Leopold – The Public Record – 14 December, 2012

A lawyer for the most high-profile resident of Gitmo sheds light on what a voluminous secret report on the CIA’s torture program approved by a Senate panel Thursday may contain.

On a cold day in February 2009, Brent Mickum arrived at the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility in Washington, DC and went into a room that houses two large safes: One holds materials the government has deemed “secret;” the other contains secrets more secret than that.

The lawyer turned the combination on the top-secret safe and pulled from one of four drawers about a dozen drawings – art that is said to document the art of torture.

Mickum brought his secrets into a room where staff members on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were preparing to launch an investigation into the CIA’s torture program. He took his seat at a horseshoe-shaped table and prepared to answer their questions about his notorious client and the meaning of his art.

On Thursday, nearly four years after that meeting, the Senate Intelligence Committee met behind closed doors and, by a vote of 9-6, voted to approve the classified report, the product of its investigation into whether so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were effective and produced actionable results, and if they went beyond what the Department of Justice had authorized.

One Intelligence Committee staff member told Truthout the resulting document could be characterized as “the Pentagon Papers of the CIA torture program.” But the report will remain secret and it’s unclear if a declassified version ever will be released.

The CIA would not comment on the committee’s report or the vote taking place later today. However, Mickum’s story may shed some light on what a small portion of the report reveals.

The Washington, DC lawyer represents Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah – a Guantanamo detainee the US government has claimedfor more than a decade to be “one of the highest-ranking members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization” and “involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by al-Qaeda,” including the 9/11 attacks.

Nonetheless, in an extraordinary court filing in March 2010, the Obama administration’s Justice Department quietly recanted virtually every major claim leveled by the Bush administration against Zubaydah.

The high-value detainee, who has been held at Guantanamo since 2006, plays a starring role in the nearly 6,000-page torture program report, according to several Senate Intelligence Committee staff members, who asked Truthout not to reveal their identities because of the sensitivity surrounding the issues it addresses.

Zubaydah has the dubious distinction of being the first post-9/11 prisoner subjected to the drowning technique known as waterboarding, as well as a dozen or so other extreme methods of torture.

The infamous “torture memo,” drafted in August 2002 by then-Justice Department attorney John Yoo, was created specifically to authorize the CIA to torture Zubaydah, whom CIA contractors and officers had claimed was holding back critical intelligence about pending attack plans. Zubaydah’s interrogation sessions, including several that depicted his waterboarding, were videotaped and later destroyed, sparking a criminal investigation conducted by a special prosecutor that ended without any charges being filed.

Zubaydah, who has been held in a section of Guantanamo reserved for detainees formerly in the custody of the CIA, drew pictures of the torture techniques he says he endured and Mickum said the alleged terrorist is a “pretty good artist.”

Mickum, who has represented Zubaydah since 2008, told Truthout this week that in lieu of the torture tapes, the drawings Zubaydah made – some on smaller pieces of paper – contain the best-known description of the torture techniques CIA interrogators used against Zubaydah.

Although he was unable to describe the drawings due to the classified nature of the materials, Mickum, who holds a top-secret clearance, said the drawings “show oxygen deprivation can happen in different ways.”

Truthout filed what is known as a mandatory declassification review for Zubaydah’s drawings, as well as for poetry and short stories the prisoner wrote last year. But the CIA issued a Glomar response to our request – meaning the agency would not confirm or deny their existence.

If Zubaydah’s drawings and writings do exist, the CIA said, they would be part of the agency’s “operational files,” which means ”records and files detailing the actual conduct of [CIA’s] intelligence activities.”

According to Mickum, they not only exist, he presented them to Intelligence Committee staff members on that cold February day. And he told them what they represented.

He noted that some of them were not just of Zubaydah, but of two other prisoners who also apparently were tortured. …more