Document a Day: Orchestrated Torture

In October 2006, four and half years after Abu Zubaydah disappeared into a CIA “black site” in Thailand, the International Committee of the Red Cross was finally allowed to visit him and 13 other “high value detainees the Bush administration had recently transferred from secret prisons to Guantánamo. The ICRC's subsequent report contained this account by Abu Zubaydah of his torture in Thailand.

We now know not only that his account was accurate and unembellished, but that the torture was approved and orchestrated practically blow by blow by the White House. Abu Zubaydah's account should be read side-by-side with this August 1, 2002 memo written by the Office of Legal Counsel's John Yoo (and signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee) that specifically describes every one of the terrors he describes legal — as it is in this video clip featuring David Cole and Art Spiegelman at an ACLU-PEN American Center “Reckoning With Torture” event in New York City in October 2009.

Documents:

• ICRC report: Abu Zubaydah account of CIA torture
• Yoo AZ interrogation memo, 8/01/02

To read more about and see documentary evidence of the Bush administration's torture program, go to thetorturereport.com.