I Gotta Stop Reading Andrew Sullivan--UpdatedTonight he points me to
this article in the NY Times with a frenzied cry:
Yet another harrowing account of a terror detainee tortured in a secret prison by Pakistani and American soldiers.
(Article snippet)
These are now the values of the United States of America. The president continues to lie about what he is sanctioning and has sanctioned. The least we should demand is an honest public debate: what techniques are now permissible for the CIA and other agencies? Do they constitute torture?Now let's go to the article:
Mamdouh Habib still has a bruise on his lower back. He says it is a sign of the beatings he endured in a prison in Egypt. Interrogators there put out cigarettes on his chest, he says, and he lifts his shirt to show the marks. He says he got the dark spot on his forehead when Americans hit his head against the floor at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.Well, of course, and I got this here bruise on my knee when John Kerry ran into me on the ski slopes the other day. I swear it! He even called me a son-of-a-bitch!
But let's get to know Mr Habib a little better, shall we?
There is a part of his experience that Mr. Habib will not address, the months before the Sept. 11 attacks when Australian intelligence officials say Mr. Habib trained at two camps for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The officials also said Mr. Habib told his wife in a phone call just days before Sept. 11 that something big was going to happen in the United States. Mr. Habib said he planned to sue the Australian government for not protecting him, and then, "I will answer every single question in a court."
American officials said he admitted to training some of the Sept. 11 hijackers and to having prior knowledge of the attack, but they never charged him. Mr. Habib said any confessions he made were a result of torture and were not genuine.Ah, so he's an Al Qaeda operative who may have been involved in 9-11 training. I bring that up not to say he deserved whatever he got (however much some of us may feel that way), but to point out that he's hardly a credible source to anybody except Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times.
And the torture he describes also strains credulity:
Mr. Habib said he was taken to a room with hooks on the wall and a barrel, set sideways like a roller, on the floor. His arms were stretched out, he said, and each wrist was handcuffed and fastened to a hook on the wall. By his description, the only way not to be left hanging was to stand on the barrel; an electric wire ran through it. Mr. Habib said he believed the interrogators in that room were Pakistani.
Mr. Habib said that when he refused to confess to being part of a 1995 terror plot, one man turned on the current. He lifted his feet to avoid the shock, he recalled, and he was suspended from the wall."I lost everything," he said. He doesn't know how long he was unconscious, but he said that when he came to, he again refused to confess to terrorism.Run that by me again, Mamdouh. Your hands are handcuffed to hooks on the wall and when you lifted your feet you lost consciousness why? I don't deny that it sounds painful to hang that way, but so painful that you blacked out?
Or how about this:
Three or four times, he said, when he was taken to an interrogation room, there were pictures doctored to make it appear that his wife was naked next to Osama bin Laden. "I see my wife everywhere, everywhere," he said.That's actually pretty funny. Hard to believe, certainly, but pretty funny nonetheless.
But the
coup de grace comes later:
He said that during one interrogation session, a woman wearing a skirt said to him, "You Muslim people don't like to see woman," he said. Then she reached under her skirt, Mr. Habib said, pulling out what he described as a bloody stick. "She threw the blood in my face," he said.Oh, yeah. She pulled out a Kotex and spattered him with it? I suppose we have Lynndie England to thank for the fact that it's even conceivable.
Look, this is 2005. If we want to get information from people there are all sorts of methods, tortuous and otherwise that we could use. Gravy for the brain, as a movie of a decade ago put it.
I'm not defending torture here. I'm saying that this man is not particularly believable on balance unless you start from the standpoint that Bush is evil and so is the United States and its military.
Update:
More incredible charges from Habib here.
