Published on Monday, December 24, 2007 by The Times Online The Torture Tape Fingering Bush As a War Criminal

by Andrew Sullivan

Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.
There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.
And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy - someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.
President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.
Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.
Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrinerecorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.
A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good - though not unique - information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.
The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions. They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.
And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorized war crimes.
And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

yea, but if he was charged with war crimes he would plea insanity on the fact that he has downs syndrome and should have never been elected in the first place.

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Sm0ke BluntS
Dont Click here

He should be hung in the street by his feet, while we throw stones at bush,
and not only him...I have a pretty long list of TRADERS to my country.

China(I might be worng) killed the CEO of the dog food co not to long ago.
I bet the next CEO is doing one hell of a good job.
While that might be alittle over the top, this CEO now knows that a price
will be payed for his actions, you will NEVER hear that any pet is dieing from
dog/cat food made from China, this CEO is bet'n his life on it..

The U.N. is a fucking joke without backing of America-$$, I wouldnt even
think are goverment would hand over any ex pres to a world court
without by force(actions of war)
millions,, 10s of millions would die before that even came close, as we would
shield them with are own lifes.

We can only point the fingers at are selfs at this point.