Title: Ep 5610 — The Torture of Abu Zubaydah
Show: Scott Horton
Date: 2021-10-11
URL: https://youtu.be/xJ-wWaoF9iw
Duration: 34:00

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[00:03] [Music] all right shall welcome to the scott horton show i'm the director of the libertarian institute editorial director of antiwar.com author of the book fool's aaron time to end the war in afghanistan and the brand new enough already time to end the war on terrorism and i've recorded more than 5 500 interviews since 2003 almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scotthorton.org you can sign up

[00:36] the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at [Music] scott horton youtube.com all right you guys i got john kiriakou on the line and uh as you know he's a former cia officer but he went to prison for confirming the names of some cia torturers to the uh um journalist parenthesis question mark uh matthew cole and so now he's a committed

[01:07] one of us fighting against the national security state writing the truth in this case for responsible statecraft and uh it's called supreme court to hear whether abu's a beta's torture is secret and check out this uh i know it's not called really this the sub headline there's a better name for this the slug i witnessed it all 20 years in gitmo without charge his story remains our country's greatest shame and boy john when you say i

[01:37] witnessed it all you really mean welcome back to the thing how are you doing thanks for having me good to be with you man so um you led the raid to capture abu zabeda in pakistan go ahead and first of all just tell us all about that so especially for people who aren't that familiar with you so they get a little bit of a taste of who they're listening to here sure we we believed at the time that abu zubaydah was the number three in al qaeda that turned out to not be true but he was a bad man he was he was a

[02:08] logistician for al qaeda if you wanted to um go home you were tired of the fight abuza beta would get you a fake passport and a ticket home he created and ran al qaeda's two training camps in southern afghanistan he created and ran the house of martyrs safe house in peshawar pakistan so bad guy but we thought he was the number three incorrectly at the time i was the head of cia counterterrorism operations in pakistan

[02:39] and we got word one day that he was in pakistan we had to catch him it took us about six weeks to track him down but we finally did and we caught him he was severely wounded during the capture a pakistani policeman shot him with an ak-47 three times no less and uh i sat with him for the first 56 hours of his captivity then a cia plane flew in picked him up and took him to the first of what was a series of secret prisons and then he's been in guantanamo

[03:11] since 2006 but one of the main points that i make in this piece is that the man has never been charged with a crime that's after undergoing merciless uh torture at the hands of the cia 83 times he was waterboarded his heart stopped he drowned he had to be revived so that he could be tortured some more um he underwent sleep deprivation he was put in a coffin for 11 years slow down just a second there and just i just want to remind you we got a little

[03:42] bit of time here so i don't want you to feel you're going so fast it sounds like you feel like you're gonna have to summarize too quickly but you have time to go ahead and elaborate especially about this part like for example what how much of this you know firsthand from being in the cia at the time compared to what you learned in the senate torture report all these things we want to know right almost all of it i learned at the cia when i got back from pakistan in the

[04:12] middle of 2002 i got promoted and on the strength of yabuza beta capture and they made me the executive assistant to the cia's deputy director for operations so in that job i had access to literally everything that the cia was doing around the world and um you know absolutely was talking to the fbi he was he was giving us information that was new and fresh and it was information on al qaeda that we had never had before but the cia was angry

[04:43] and jealous that the fbi was taking the lead uh george tenet asked president bush to expel the fbi and and let the cia take over for reasons that we don't understand bush agreed to that and on august 1st 2002 the cia began torturing him so you know they were supposed to start with just a shove right or you grab him by the lapels and give him a shake that was the plan the program but that's not where

[05:14] they began they began with the most serious torture technique and that was waterboarding and then it just got worse for him from there yeah and so now it's funny because if you watch you know some idiot reenacting this on youtube uh waterboarding doesn't seem so bad i saw one guy recently did a thing where they had the cloth over his face folded so many times i don't even think his lips got wet you know right uh what is it waterboarding is you're

[05:45] drowning a guy almost to death over and over again but in this case they actually did kill him and had to shock him back to life is that what you just said exactly right his heart actually stopped and he had to be revived that's how bad it was yeah and then talk about the coffin too because you know they have said in the past bugs but you're a bit more specific here yeah in the course of his interrogation uh abazo beta said that he had this what amounted to an irrational fear of bugs he was just

[06:17] freaked out by bugs i don't know why he said it but he did and so the cia put him in this in this coffin-like box there were several different boxes there was a dog cage they would just open the door of the dog cage and and he would whimper and just climb into it it was you know that learned helplessness but then they there was this coffin they slept a diaper on him and they put him in the coffin and then they dumped a box of cockroaches in on top of him and then closed it and they would open it

[06:50] each day only long enough to change his diaper and to throw some food in there with him and and with the cockroaches but they did it just to make him insane they knew that it would drive him insane yeah but wait a minute i'm sorry it sounds like you're talking about some anecdote from the 1940s in nazi germany i thought we were talking about something that the americans hadn't done the cia to abu zubaydah did i'm sorry i must have spaced out for a second and lost track yeah seriously

[07:21] seriously and you know what in 1946 scott we executed japanese soldiers who had waterboarded american pows that was a death penalty offense and i know i've said this before so forgive me if i'm repeating myself but in january of 1968 the washington post ran a front page photograph of an american soldier waterboarding a vietnamese prisoner the day that that picture ran robert mcnamara the secretary of defense

[07:52] ordered an investigation the soldier was arrested he was charged with torture and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison well the law never changed so why was this a death penalty offense in 1946 and worthy of 20 years in prison in 1968 but then in 2002 no problem we can do it we'll do a double zubato we'll do it to a couple of other guys hey ed niece ed meese uh the attorney general under ronald reagan prosecuted the texas sheriff for it in 1983.

[08:24] see it's against the law it's against the law and i say this all the time but we are supposed to be a nation of laws a nation ruled or or governed by the rule of law and we can't just decide that we're going to ignore the laws that we don't like or the laws that don't fit into our personal ideologically the anti-torture laws especially uh yeah i don't know little war crime statute

[08:55] how does that measure up against the do whatever you want as long as you cash a federal government paycheck statute um now so now when you say you know this from being there and all of this just when you're there in thailand you're telling me you didn't torture the guy but you were there or you were in the office next door listening through the wall or what i'm i'm proud to say that i um i refused uh all trips to the secret sites to all

[09:26] of them i wanted no part of this at all and it's funny you know a friend of mine told me years later i said you know everything got so hard when i blew the whistle on the torture program and he said no buddy he said your problems began in 2002. when you refused to be trained in the torture techniques and they started referring to you as the human rights guy he said in the post-911 era at the cia that was not a compliment you binko it's true though that's what they

[09:58] thought i was not willing to to you know go along i was trouble all right but then so in other words you're sitting in the cafeteria and your friends are going yeah here's what we did to him or what yes no i like i say in that position i had access to to everything happening around the world and this was a special compartment it was a very highly restrictive compartment so you know nobody nobody could talk about it because most people didn't know about it when when the torture program was

[10:30] first created it was fewer than two dozen people in the world knew that it was happening that's how highly classified it was and so you know it was it was happening and they were reporting back to headquarters here's what we did this is what happened this is what how we how he reacted but they were lying to us and they were telling us that he was providing this actionable intelligence in fact what they had done

[11:01] is they knew that the cia and the fbi reporting channels were incompatible so they took all of the fbi's reports about what he had said during their their interrogations they rewrote it in cia channels and said well we waterboarded him one time and here's what he said look what he gave us he gave us everything it's the whole kitchen sink here that is just incredible isn't it for and and the thing is you got to rewind in

[11:31] your brain the fox news narrative the george w bush administration narrative at the time of oh man how crucial this was that and it was zubaida above all who bush invoked over and over again and this is the number three guy in al qaeda he knew all this stuff and we tortured him we don't torture but we beat it out of them all right or whatever you call it and um so uh that was why it was so crucial and then of course it's ron suskind tells the story that he obviously got from

[12:03] george tenet the chief of cia that he told george bush in a briefing hey it turns out this ubeda guy isn't who we thought he was in fact right remind me to ask you in a minute if i bite and brain and forget it about the cousin situation and all this stuff but he he says to w bush this isn't uh you know what we had told you before about you know sorry boss and bush said to tenet well you're not gonna make me lose face on this are you i said he was important in fact he had

[12:33] said he was important over and over again he was the number one main public justification for the torture program if they hadn't tortured zubaida they wouldn't have been able to stop all those plots they stopped and of course in fact i need you to talk about this part too um because there's very little about this you know we can it's pretty easy to find about sheikh al-libi but they tortured lies about saddam hussein out of abu zabada too didn't they oh yeah sure they did you know let me tell you real quickly about the conversation between between bush and tenet

[13:06] that account is true and condoleezza rice was was in the meeting of course and when tenet objected and said that you know he we owed it to the public to tell the truth about abu zubaydah that he wasn't the guy we thought he was um condi rice chimed in george meaning george tenet she said george you're just gonna have to take one for the team and i don't think i have ever seen george tenet as angry as he

[13:36] was that day that condi rice had spoken down to him and told him he's gonna have to take one for the team he was livid yeah well then and let me tell you a little bit about the cousin that you mentioned a second ago um well wait uh hang on just on that for a second you know the cia has a reputation because of the neoconservatives and the pentagon lying us into war digging through the cia analyst trash and you know repurposing it all and funneling all the lies from the israelis and the uh the iraqi national congress and all of this

[14:08] stuff that yeah the poor old cia got caught up in this or whatever but the cia tortured lies about saddam hussein out of at least two guys zubaida and libby and and and these were used to lie us into war and and i'm not certain about zubaida maybe you can tell me but al libby's lies were featured in almost certain bush's state of the union in them absolutely they were certain that they were featured in colin powell's u.n address in january of 2003.

[14:38] that's right a libby said under torture exactly what the cia wanted him to say and that was that there was a connection between al-qaeda and saddam hussein of course there was no connection al-qaeda hated saddam hussein as much as they hated the united states but he gave us uh false information that there had been a meeting in uh in prague between the iraqi station chief there and muhammad atta the the head hijacker

[15:11] we were supposed to believe that there was this this connection whether it was financial or logistical or whatever uh between iraq and al qaeda it just simply wasn't true and so we went to abu zubaydah to try to get the same information and of course under under torture under duress he confirmed the information and everybody knows that when you're torturing somebody they will admit to anything you want them to admit to you

[15:41] just so that you can get them to stop you don't just stop the the torture they just can't take it anymore hey y'all check out my new book enough already time to end the war on terrorism at enoughalreadybook.net early reviews are that people either think it's hilarious or they get so angry that they put it down but it's the iranian revolution the 80s afghan war the iran-iraq war iraq war one iraq war one and a half and then afghanistan iraq

[16:11] war ii somalia pakistan libya syria iraq war iii yemen and all the special operations wars throughout africa in the aftermath of the war in libya it's all there for you might change a friend's mind enough already time to end the war on terrorism at enoughalreadybook.net hey guys scott horton here for expand expanddesigns.com harley abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing building and maintaining my sites and they'll do

[16:42] great work for you you need a new website go to expanddesigns.com scott and say 500 bucks hey guys check out listen and think audiobooks they're listenanthink.com and of course on audible.com and they feature my book fools aaron time to end the war in afghanistan as well as brand new out inside syria by our friend reese ehrlich and a lot of other great books mostly by libertarians there reese might be one exception but essentially they're

[17:13] all libertarian audio books and here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks just donate 100 to the scott horton show at scotthorton.org donate of course right like what would you do seriously some of the things in here you talk about and you know there's a excellent book by alfred mccoy where he talks about how you know they claim here well they copied this from the seer methods that were copied from the communists to protect our guys from the communists

[17:44] when mccoy says no the truth is the communists and the americans copied these torture techniques from the nazis and that's where all of this stuff comes from and a lot of it is this kind of no-touch torture oh gee all we did was force him into the most uncomfortable stress position and leave him tied up like that for hours all we did was freeze him almost to death over and over again all he did was keep him up for weeks and weeks and weeks but it's not like we pounded nails under his uh or you know spikes under his fingernails or screws in the knees

[18:14] so you know therefore it's you know all we did was give him a mega dose of lsd and play new metallica and strobe light and him drive him out of his goddamn mind but it's not like we beat him up or anything but i mean this stuff gets really extensive right especially the freezing i mean i'm cold as hell if it's in the low 40s you know i don't know seriously and and what we did that's a technique they called the cold cell which i actually think is worse than

[18:46] than waterboarding we we killed several prisoners with the cold cell but what they do is they they chain a a prisoner to an eye bolt in the ceiling so that he can't get comfortable in any way he can't sit or lay down and um and they strip him naked they uh chill the cell to 50 degrees fahrenheit and then every hour a cia officer goes into the cell and throws a bucket of ice water on him and you know you can't withstand that kind of treatment people died they died of hypothermia

[19:17] yeah that's crazy and i mean there's one that they admit to this guy gol ramen that they killed they froze to death in the salt pit but you're telling me you know for a fact that there's more than him oh yeah there's more than gold ramen yeah so now i mean to be clear here man i mean the the official record is that two men uh ramen and um god damn it i knew his name one moment ago um uh jamadi uh right in abu ghraib was

[19:48] hung from the ceiling with his arms behind his back till it suffocated him to death right did i get his name right yes and and so these are the two that officially the cia were they were investigated by durham the guy who's doing the sort of quarter-ass job of prosecuting the russiagate conspiracy right now is the same guy who let the cia get away with that and actually you told me before john that there were more people who sort of disappeared people who died in custody but nobody ever you know you guys keep

[20:18] your secrets so you don't even tell each other exactly how people die or whatever but they just go away and we know from um an eight you know uh independent ap reporting and also the claims of colin powell's former chief of staff lawrence wilkerson that there were 108 who died in military custody and you know maybe some of those were heart attacks but many of those were tortured to death you know what i mean those are you know whatever illnesses so many of them but how many how many more people

[20:49] died in cia custody that you know about like capital n know about not read in the torture report but that you know were because again that's those are the only two in the torture report so who else to be honest to god's truth i probably shouldn't answer that um but you gotta tell me that you know it's can you tell me you know it's more than five or ten for fifty you know i i don't want you to go back to prison john but god dang man that's kind of important

[21:19] i would i would point people to to um joe hickman's book about his experience at guantanamo oh yeah see i left that out those three aren't admitted to but we do know about those and it's the other scott horton by the way when people look up this story that's not me that's the uh international human rights lawyer uh the other scott horton uh law professor at columbia university and um some sort of editor i forgot the exact title editor at harper's magazine who wrote the incredible series of stories for

[21:51] harper's about what joe hickman witnessed and just very quickly in 2006 the cia murdered three guys at their secret black site at guantanamo bay not the military prison but the other one over the hill uh it's called penny lane or camp no and so there's that so there's five but you don't want to tell me about it anymore because because if you read that in harper's so did i and i interviewed other scott about it at the time and it was important but and and hickman's a hero for telling that story but hero i agree i agree but you know

[22:21] something else come on more secrets well or at least tell if you can really say that you know for a fact that there were other people tortured to death by the cia in the black sites beyond the five that we've now you know discussed back and forth here today then can you please tell us that or not well i'll tell you one of the things that the cia does is it turns people over to other countries and then they're never heard from again

[22:51] right but if i put it that way yeah hey well that's easy enough i mean and we already know that from robert bear too so if you want to be interrogated you send them to jordan if you want them tortured you send them to syria bashar al-assad and if you want him to disappear forever you send him to egypt exactly right yeah and i think he was even talking about the clinton years i don't even i don't even think he was talking about during w bush yeah because he he left during the clinton years yeah i mean that was in the new statesman so

[23:24] um and i should say though that guy makes a lot of claims that are completely ridiculous lies and including on russia gate and including accusing the ayatollah of doing 911 and whatever so but on that he was i'll buy it sounds right to me uh otherwise confirmed by multiple sources too all right now so wait a minute now tell me about the cousin here sorry yeah so one of the things that that

[23:54] made us get the abuse of beta situation so bloody wrong was that abu zubaydah has a cousin also named abu zabeda and um and you know in the cia we didn't know that there were two abu zubaidas with the same name and so when you put both files together this looks like a terrorist superman right like how can this guy it's amazing right yep this guy is everywhere he's in different countries and

[24:25] carrying out operations and planning new operations it's incredible well it turns out it's because they're two different people yeah and once word got out that quote unquote abu zubaydah was of interest to the cia that was in time magazine in early 2002 the the cousin abu zubaida fled uh he he was in the united states and he fled to jordan

[24:55] and then just kind of disappeared and nobody's ever seen him or heard from him again now we looked for him for ages but couldn't find him uh and then never publicly admitted you know what we made a mistake we put these two files together it's two different guys never admitted it so joe and i wrote this book called the convenient terrorist and like i'm you know compelled to do i sent it to the cia for clearance

[25:27] and they cleared it with no changes so take that for what it's worth huh i don't i don't know exactly how to take that at all well i have a few different ideas of how i could take it like one there was a really cool clearance guy who liked you and your story and your work that week or um lady or whatever he got nowadays i don't want to pre-judge you know um uh or

[25:58] um you're giving us a limited hangout but it sure doesn't sound like it so uh yeah no i don't know man um very interesting and i'm sorry that i have not read that book yet i have it here on the pile of course one of these days i'm going to stop time and spend a year catching up on all these books i should have already finished reading all right i'm the same way um but um all right and listen i'm sorry because now we're running out of time and i just realized that we haven't really talked about this court case going on in the state secrets and we also i forgot to um uh ask you project

[26:30] to talk about how they took his eye out without his permission that was part of the torture that we missed it's this is this is a crime against humanity um abu zubaydah when we caught him one of the first things that i noticed was he had a a brown eye and then a very pale glassy light blue eye that was clearly blind and um it turned out that he had been wounded by a piece of shrapnel

[27:01] uh in afghanistan when he was fighting the soviets so the eye never bothered him right like he never said anything about it he never complained about it and then one day during his captivity uh he was sedated he was taken into an operating room and and his eye was taken and when he woke up he had one eye

[27:32] so the cia gave him a glass eye which he has steadfastly refused to wear uh because he had never consented to having the eye removed so now he wears a patch over his eye but you know this is a very clear case of of a crime against humanity you just can't operate on someone against his will you can't remove an eye against the guy's will and again you know as a policy we never

[28:02] ever apologize for anything right oh man um and so okay now he's still in guantanamo bay they're never going to put him on trial because anything they do have on him is essentially negated by the brutality and the torture that they put this guy through and so they can't give him a trial they still in 20 years haven't figured out how to slap together this ad hoc thing uh to hold real military tribunals for these people either so they're apparently just going

[28:34] to hold them indefinitely but now he's trying to sue the he can't sue the cia they've got sovereign immunity like a british king or something like that but he's trying to sue their contractors who tortured him and it says here in your piece that a federal appeals court had ruled in his favor and said that he could sue and now the cia is appealing to the supreme court trying to say that because of national security and the state secrets privilege they need to be able to

[29:05] not even have a trial at all not have secret testimony that only the judge with top secret clearance can see back in his chambers but not even have the trial at all because that would reveal secrets and then you're kind of summarizing here the rebuttal to that from the point of view of his lawyers part of which is that we do have this torture report and as you mentioned here we have i didn't even know this that that porter goss michael hayden george

[29:35] tenet and john mclaughlin all put their names on a book called the rebuttal to the cia uh the senate's torture report here so yeah people read it yeah oh i'm sorry i think about eight people read it oh yeah no i i'm sure i i didn't even know the thing existed for crying out loud um but so it sounds like he's got a pretty good case here what you're saying is that this stuff is already declassified all that he needs to be able to prove his

[30:06] case in court is already declassified he's not even is am i right he's not even necessarily asking for more things to be declassified in his case or what exactly that's exactly right what he wants is the two contract psychologists uh bruce mitchell or j bruce and j and james anyway mitchell and jessen right uh he's asking that they be deposed right under oath to confirm what they've already said in their memoirs what george tenet and porter goss and mike

[30:38] hayden at all have already said in their rebuttal what the senate torture report has already said using declassified cables he's just asking for them to confirm that yes indeed they tortured him yeah so and then and then that's it right it's not like he's gonna open up a new bank account with his uh winnings of punitive damages here or anything like that he's just trying to get force them to what admit it and say sorry or what pay them a dollar

[31:09] and yeah admit it he doesn't even want a sorry he he wants to be charged with a crime he wants he wants some kind of of finality to this thing you know the guy's been incarcerated now it's going to be 20 years on march the 22nd 20 years and i don't mean 20 years at a at club fed i mean 20 years of torture and solitary confinement and secret prisons and it's time for us to fish or cut bait

[31:40] either charge for the crime or let him go man we're we're still having this conversation about guantanamo bay in 2021 man it's just unbelievable you know the bush people said they wanted to close it on the way out and then they didn't but some of them even said that they support i think robert gates um you know wally was under obama said he supported closing it they just never did it they tried to move some of them to trial in new york and then they all back down and that was the original that was the

[32:11] original plan you know when when i was still in pakistan uh my my pakistani counterpart came to me one day it was brigadier general and he said listen our jails are full because every time we'd catch al-qaeda people we would just stick them in the local jail raul pindi lahore you know peshawar wherever we happen to catch him we just stick him in jail and and we filled the jail the jails so he said you guys are going to have to do something with these al-qaeda people we can't hold any more of them so i cabled headquarters and i said the

[32:42] jails are full here what do you want us to do with the prisoners and they said put them on a c-12 and send them to guantanamo and i said guantanamo cuba and they said yeah we have an idea we're going to hold them in guantanamo for three or four weeks until we can figure out what federal district to charge them in either boston new york or washington uh-huh and i said yeah that's a great idea and here we are 20 years later

[33:14] and they still haven't been charged with any crimes yep man it's just and you know but the biden people have said that they want to close it you take that seriously at all or we're just going to have the same conversation another 20 years from now no i i think that biden wants to close it and i think obama wanted to close it but you know the congress under the republican congress under obama passed a law that obama was pressured into signing saying that that the federal government can't appropriate any money for the purpose of shutting down guantanamo

[33:45] so it's not going anywhere yeah man all right well there you go and that's the other interview today is gareth porter on the self-licking ice cream cone and exactly military projects that can never end and must never end so there it is all right well thank you so much for your time john great to talk to you great to talk to you thanks for having me not you guys that's john kiriyaku he used to be a cia analyst then he was the cia actual uh officer out there and then uh he went to jail and now he's

[34:17] an author and a journalist and he wrote the convenient terrorist with joseph hickman the same guy who was the heroic whistleblower from the cia murder of those three men in 2006 down there at guantanamo as well so uh go and read that stuff thanks oh this one i'm sorry is uh responsiblestatecraft.org supreme court to hear whether abu's debate is torture is secret the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in la apsradio.com

[34:50] antiwar.com scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org
