Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now

We knew what goes on in Guantanamo—Belly slaps. Waterboarding. At worst. But what actually went down in the CIA’s secret holding facilities in foreign countries—the ones whose existence President Bush finally acknowledged in his recent speech? You know, the SECRET TORTURE DENS OF BLOOD-THIRSTY EVIL?

Well, David Johnston of the New York Times found out. He interviewed a bunch of people about what actually happened in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, which took place in Thailand. So here’s what happened:

Within days, Mr. Zubaydah was being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques — he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly loud music — the genesis of practices later adopted by some within the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.

And then a little later, there’s this. After explaining how the FBI had tried and officials decided that Zoobie was still hiding something, they withdrew the FBI interrogators and sent in a CIA team. That’s when things took a turn for the not especially brutal:

At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue. At other times, the interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sometimes, the interrogator would use simpler techniques, entering his cell to ask him to confess. “You know what I want,” the interrogator would say to him, according to one official’s account, departing leaving Mr. Zubaydah to brood over his answer.

It is my understanding that at certain clubs there in Thailand, strange people pay large sums to be treated in exactly this fashion.

I am actually listening to loud Red Hot Chili Peppers right now and it’s pretty cold in here. Let me take my shirt off and open the window. AHHH THE PAIN! I’ll tell you everything!

The shocking thing isn’t that we did these things to Abu Zubaydah. The shocking thing is that we didn’t do more. And another surprise is that these milquetoast interrogations yielded any useful information at all. That they did is a testament to the professionalism and prudence of the CIA interrogators who accurately gauged what Zubaydah could handle, and got he information with no more cruelty than was necessary. Even these little measures were controversial within the FBI:

F.B.I. agents on the scene angrily protested the more aggressive approach, arguing that persuasion rather than coercion had succeeded. But leaders of the C.I.A. interrogation team were convinced that tougher tactics were warranted and said that the methods had been authorized by senior lawyers at the White House.

The agents appealed to their superiors but were told that the intelligence agency was in charge, the officials said. One law enforcement official who was aware of events as they occurred reacted with chagrin. “When you rough these guys up, all you do is fulfill their fantasies about what to expect from us,” the official said.

Well, fulfill their fantasies, but also you extract information that enabled us to bring down a vast network of Al-Qaeda operatives across Southeast Asia who were planning terrorist strikes inside the USA, according to the President’s speech. So, yeah, there’s definitely a tradeoff. We were able to capture Bin-Alshibh, Hambali, and KSM, but Zubaydah’s feeling all self-righteous because we made him sleep naked on a cold stone floor and interrupted his REM sleep with emo-crap rock. I guess somehow I’ll just have to live with that.

It’s over. First Plamegate came up a bust. Now it turns out that the SECRET CIA OVERSEAS DEATH TORTURE CONCENTRATION DEATH KILL ARGLEBLAGHHH treat cutthroat Al Qaeda devils like fraternity pledges.

These are the issues that make the left tick. And now, they’re gone.

UPDATE: By the way, I have serious issues with the Times’ decision to reveal these facts. But more about that tomorrow. UPDATE: here ya go. it’s pretty angry.