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All right, introducing Ken Klippenstein.
He has done great work in the past and here's some more like that and co-authored with Joseph Hickman as well.
We can talk a little bit about that, who he is, if you want, later on.
It's called CIA Documents Expose the Failed Torture Methods Used on Guantanamo's Most Famous Detainee.
Welcome back to the show, Ken.
How you doing?
Hey, I'm doing all right.
Thanks for having me back on.
Very good to have you back on the show here and to read this great piece of work.
It's co-authored with Joseph Hickman, the author of the book Murder at Camp Delta, and of course, the major source behind the other Scott Horton's great work on the so-called Guantanamo suicides there at Harper's.org.
He was the Guantanamo guard who was witness to the murder after the fact.
Not the actual murder, but the circumstances surrounding the murder of three men at the Penny Lane, the CIA black site there at Guantanamo.
So here, very interesting to see him co-authoring this great report with you here.
And the bottom line is you've got some new documents.
You even beat Jason Leopold to the punch on this one, huh?
Yeah, he's a big specialist on FOIA.
And on Zubeda.
Yeah, he does great work on Zubeda.
So this is over 100 pages of documents that were obtained via the discovery process in the course of the trial that weren't released to the public.
The defense team has their own political considerations and things like that.
But I was provided it by a source who thought that this should be in the public record and the public needs to know exactly how it was treated.
Because when you look at the Senate Torture Report, that doesn't cover everything by any stretch.
There are all sorts of practices and, you know, really controversial events that never made it in the public record that hopefully these pages can try to help inform people about.
Right.
Yeah.
Of course, all they ever released of the Torture Report, the Senate Torture Report, was the declassified version of the summary, the 500-page massive volume.
That's just the summary of the 6,700-and-something page or 6,800-and-something page entire study, which remains classified, calling all whistleblowers with access to that.
Can't be too many, but a few at least.
All right.
So now I mentioned the name Zubeda here.
So this is the guy that they claimed forever and ever was the No.
3 man in al-Qaeda, who, of course, the CIA themselves later admitted that was incorrect.
There's the famous quote of George W. Bush, the president, telling George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, what?
Well, you're not going to make me lose face on this, are you, George?
Because Bush had used Zubeda as his example over and over and over again why torture was necessary.
We got this guy, Zubeda.
We had to torture him.
But don't call it torture.
We never tortured him.
But when you're defending us for torturing people, this is our example of why it was so necessary.
People maybe forget that then, but this was the poster boy, Zubeda.
They had to.
So, in fact, on the show, we just talked again with John Kiriakou the other day, who was the FBI agent who was originally interrogating Zubeda and was getting all kinds of stuff.
Apparently, everything.
And I guess that's my first question for you here.
The way you guys write it here makes it sound like they really never learned any single fact from this guy that he hadn't already told the FBI through all of the years that they held him.
As you report here, four years he was held at CIA black sites undergoing I don't know what through that whole period of time.
That's why you're here.
But that was before he ever landed at Guantanamo Bay.
They had him for four years.
But did they ever actually learn anything or are there any substantial claims that came from him during the time that they had him?
And maybe you want to parse between which claims were true and which claims were false.
Not that we can tell from the public record.
Obviously, when you're under torture, as any serious psychologist will tell you, you'll say anything to make the pain stop.
And so he agreed to things that probably didn't happen.
But from what we can tell from the public record, of course, the government can always claim, oh, there's more things that are classified that you don't know about.
But from what we can tell, I don't think so.
And there are some reports.
I'm sorry, I don't have the footnote off the top of my head.
But there were some that I don't know if he originated the claims, but he at least had, quote, substantiated claims about Saddam Hussein and his involvement with al Qaeda under torture.
Right.
Of course, the hated enemies, you know, Saddam and al Qaeda hated each other.
Right.
And of course, it was Sheik al-Libi who had come up with the biggest tall tales there also under torture about Saddam teaching them how to make chemical weapons and all that.
But apparently, Zubaydah had chimed in on some of that as well.
Right.
It's incredible the amount of accusations and allegations the government ultimately had to vacate about Zubaydah.
I mean, I don't think Zubaydah was totally innocent.
I think he probably, you know, had sympathies with al Qaeda and probably provided some form of support or maybe material support for them.
But this falls far short of what the government initially claimed, you know, that he was number three, that he was some sort of mastermind.
He was in touch with bin Laden and they ultimately had to drop all of those.
And really, the strategy has been to try to downplay this as much as possible, because that's, I think, a devastating indictment of the government's handling of the war on terror.
Yeah, I mean, I think the way they characterize him mostly now is that he was sort of a travel agent who would arrange for people's families to come visit and this kind of thing, that he was far from an operative, although he did have access to people who were real members of al Qaeda.
He never was.
That's the way I say it.
And that's when they're finally conceding it under cross-examination by whatever Senate investigators or whoever, I guess.
That's their narrative now against interest.
So it's the most plausible, I guess.
Right.
It was kind of a comical progression where they, first of all, claimed, oh, he's the big head on show.
And then sort of over time, it moved, well, maybe he was a mid-level guy.
Well, you know, I'm not sure he was mid-level, but he was definitely in there.
And now it's, you know, I mean, it's just the allegations have evolved so much, it really destroys the government's credibility, I think, in this case, anyways.
All right.
So you got some new stuff in here.
We really do, about some of the torture methods that were used on Abu Zubaydah.
So I guess the scene is a torture dungeon in Thailand.
The FBI agents led by Kerry, no, he was the CIA agent, was the FBI agents who were interrogating him.
They were pushed out of the way by the CIA who came in.
And so then what happened?
Well, I mean, they use a lot of practices that I quote in the piece, someone from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who himself is an expert on interrogation for the military.
And he characterizes a lot of these practices as torture.
Bear in mind, this was a, you know, high level government official himself, who is an expert on these things.
And what was interesting is that in the general media portrayal, what's described as torture is just the waterboarding.
But there are many practices short of that, that by any reasonable person would be considered torture.
For example, being put in a very small confinement cell.
And bear in mind that Mitchell, the CIA psychologist who was sort of orchestrating all these things, he made it very explicit in the documents that the goal of this is to break him, break him psychologically.
And the kind of research and ideology behind this, I think, is pretty spurious that it would work.
But that was the idea to try to to try to crush him mentally.
So that.
Yeah.
And that's important, right?
That this didn't come from any interrogation science, right?
This was he the the method was how to break a dog so that it's it's so confused.
It doesn't know when the shock is coming.
It basically just gives up on life or whatever.
Let's see if we can get a human into that state.
But then it was just the presumption was that then that'll make them useful in some way, which I guess if what you really want is accusations about Saddam Hussein, maybe so.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, certainly like anybody who saw ever saw Sam Jackson movie knows that the way you negotiate is you pretend to be the guy's friend, right?
That's what the FBI was doing at first.
Here's some ice chips.
Here's some promises that will take care of your family, etc.
Exactly.
And that's where you find most of the information, most of the credible information that you get coming from that.
And any again, any serious interrogator, just like the NCIS official I mentioned before, will tell you that that's how you do it.
Actually, Mitchell, he started a private firm that he made millions of dollars off of these, I think, snake oil claims that he would be able to find the interrogation practices that would amount to a truth serum to extract all these juicy details and critical information for the government.
The government was all too happy to try to do that.
And Mitchell did pretty well for himself off of that.
Who knows if he believes it or not, but he made a killing off of it.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Well, it's amazing.
I mean, it's amazing that you describe from the documents here in your article.
Again, it's at Alternet.org.
You talk about how when he's in solitary confinement, that part of making and we saw traces of this with the treatment even of Jose Padilla here in the United States, held in CIA custody, I guess.
No, I guess it was military custody in a naval break.
But he was, the CIA had access to him anyway, and it was under all their protocols, apparently.
And so there are some pictures of the blackout goggles and the gunshot ear protectors that were used to keep him in total isolation.
Even when he was being taken to the dentist, they're leading him by a chain attached to his straitjacket or whatever, rather than even having their hand on his shoulder to even have that much human contact.
And in here, you talk about, well, go ahead and describe about what they did with the medical professionals to basically prevent their humanity from coming across to Zubeda in any way.
It's pretty chilling because this is, these are practices that I don't think we've really seen.
I mean, interrogation, or let's call it what it is, torture, is something that it's a sort of technical practice.
It's not something you just go in there and slap a guy around.
This is something that's been developed over centuries and centuries.
And really the breakthroughs, if you want to grimly call it that, that took place in the CIA now, informed by some types of research, was that physical pain isn't necessarily the best way to mess someone up psychologically.
The best way to do that is, you know, we're a social species.
The best way to do that is via total isolation from other people.
And that's really, I think, the most cruel aspect of the practices, all of the crazy physical things.
I mean, they did slap him around and things like that.
Let's not be around the bush about that.
But the main thrust of the practice was to cut him off from all contact such that he would just go nuts.
And the moment he saw someone, he would just spill it all.
And it didn't have that effect, at least with respect to him spilling any sort of facts.
I find it hard to believe that it didn't break him psychologically, because what they did was, like you described, they wore goggles, they wore suits, not just suits, they had to wear black suits.
They wanted to try to keep any light out.
They weren't to speak to him, they were supposed to gesture and things, basically just cut him off from any sort of human contact, not even sitting down and having a conversation, but like any human, any even visual contact, which the effect that that would have on someone, we don't know from psychology, because you're not allowed to do that.
You're not allowed to research at civilian settings, because it's well understood that this is absolutely cruel and untrustifiable.
But that was the thrust of the- And that was part of the MKUltra program before, and trying to create mind control slaves was sensory deprivation to the point of complete insanity.
But then, yeah, again, to what end?
Other than it's fun to be a sadistic torturer if you're a sadistic torturer, or again, if you need some lies.
But then, see, that part never made that much sense to me, because they could just make up whatever lies they want, and in fact, they could just smash the guy in the finger with a hammer a couple of times and say, tell me about Saddam, and he's going to tell you.
So why go to these lengths?
That's the thing, other than just, you know, cool, we got the contract to push these experiments as far as we can, you know, short of injecting blue dye into the twins' eyes.
Right.
Right.
Well, I mean, I think there's a few reasons, and I can only speculate, of course.
So what you see from the records is an elaborate attempt to try to describe this breakthrough method that Mitchell came up with.
So I imagine a good part of it had to be trying to bamboozle the CIA and the Defense Department into thinking that he had some sort of cutting edge new technique that no one had thought of before.
And if you're going to smash someone's hand with a hammer, that would work for the information, but that might not convince the CIA and the DOD that this is some sort of novel technique, since anyone could do that.
And the other thing is, I mean, this could just be bloodlust.
I mean, this was post 9-11.
People had a lot of rage about certain things, and whether or not Zubeda was any sort of like high up guy in al-Qaeda, maybe they thought, maybe this was some kind of catharsis for them, I can only speculate.
But between those two reasons, I think that would account for a lot of it.
And by the way, I should mention, when I was thinking of Sam Jackson as the negotiator, that was some movie where he was a cop in the 1990s.
But there's one from the early teens where he's the CIA contractor torturer.
He's Mitchell.
And it's all very justified.
And in fact, the nuke goes off and kills a bunch of people at the end anyway.
But anyway, it's still justified.
And so shame on him for that, you know?
I didn't see that film.
I appreciate the fact that he wants the world record for man in most movies ever or whatever.
That's cool.
You could skip the one where your job is making torture perfectly all right.
And in fact, the guy's torturing is an American in the movie too.
But he's a traitor who's gone over to the terrorist side.
All right.
So now you talk about the legality in here.
I'm interested.
I'm sorry.
Do you remember offhand the date of when all of this started, according to the documents here?
I can't recall the date.
You know, when I was doing this story with Joseph Hickman, who himself was a Guantanamo guard turned whistleblower, he emphasized to me the significance that he says, no one looks at the dates in the press when the press covers these things.
They don't look at the dates.
And we need to focus on that.
And he was exactly right.
Because what you find when you look at the dates is that a lot of these practices that amount to torture actually predated the Office of Legal Counsel's official authorization, so-called for the torture practices.
So I find that interesting because it shows that if there's the political will within the White House, they can engage in these things without even the fig leaf of legal justification from their own lawyers.
And also it goes to highlight the sweet deal that Barack Obama gave all these guys that we're just not going to do anything about this, even though the fig leaf of that legal counsel memo that you talk about wasn't even operative as a fake excuse as that would be to hide behind anyway, wasn't even signed till August of 2002.
Any of these crimes that took place before then are fully prosecutable without even that excuse that, well, geez, Your Honor, they were told it was OK.
Exactly.
And that's, you know, to say nothing of prosecuting them from authorizing something that itself was illegal.
I mean, you can't authorize torture because torture is illegal.
Right.
And that was why they worked so hard to say anything short of the pain equivalent to organ failure isn't torture.
Right.
Which, of course, wasn't true.
And here they crossed that threshold plenty of times, right?
Right.
You look at the documents and what they show you is that there were plans for cremating his body so there would be no remains, presumably to hide evidence, in the event that he died.
And so if they were so sure that it was safe, why are they drafting plans for what should happen in the event of his death during the interrogation practices?
That's right in the documents, too.
Yep.
Yeah, they say I quote that in my book soon on your virtual shelf at Amazon.com is a quote from the memo where they say, yeah, basically, more or less, even if you kill him, it's all right because we know that you were trying to prevent greater harm.
That's right in the memo.
Even if they die of your abuse here.
Yeah.
So there you go.
There's the Republicans for you.
All right, now, oh, here's something that I've always wondered about that I think you answered, Ken, in your piece, which is that whatever happened to Abu Zubaydah's eyeball, he seemed to be missing one.
The government can't seem to get its story straight on that.
As far as we can tell, if I recall correctly, he had one when he, you know, when he was first arrested and now he doesn't have one anymore and obviously he's been under custody since.
I should ask Kiriakou about that.
I'm trying to remember because, you know, I'm not saying this is true, but I think I may remember that it was claimed that he had lost it in the original firefight when they captured him, that he was wounded, shot twice and maybe had lost his eye then.
But I don't know if that's true.
In fact, that kind of doesn't sound true, does it?
Yeah, that's I think that's what they had claimed, too.
But I mean, obviously, there's a lot there's a lot of disagreement about that.
Yeah.
Huh.
So that's if I can remember it, that's something to ask Kiriakou, I'm sure.
In fact, yeah, John would certainly John would certainly know that.
Yeah, I'm sure he'd be happy to answer you or me if we asked him to.
So all right.
I didn't have a chance to go through the actual PDF file myself, but it's all here are quite a bit of it.
The article is at Alternet dot org CIA documents expose the failed torture methods used on Guantanamo's most famous detainee.
And that's Abu Zubaydah, of course, being referred to there, the supposed number three guy in Al Qaeda, who never was.
It's by Ken Klippenstein and Joseph Hickman, again, Alternet dot org.
And you can find it in the more viewpoints page there at Antiwar dot com as well.
We got the link to it and and at the bottom they have embedded the PDF file of all these documents.
One of these moments, I'm going to get a chance to to go through there.
Was there anything else I missed that you wanted to highlight here, Ken?
Oh, I suppose the title was a bit of a misnomer.
It said it was failed.
It worked pretty well for Mitchell.
He made a lot of money off of it and seems to have gotten off scot free.
So yeah, we're pretty well for Dick Cheney.
He got a bunch of orange alerts to scare everybody's mom to support the war with Iraq.
Got reelected.
Right.
Exactly.
All right.
Well, thanks again.
I really appreciate Ken.
Oh, of course.
Thanks so much for having me on again.
All right.
You guys.
That is Ken Klippenstein.
He is at Alternet dot org.
Here he is with Joseph Hickman again.
CIA documents expose the successful torture methods used on Guantanamo's most famous detainee there.
Yeah.
OK.
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