Abu Zubaydah

The media is buzzing with the news that Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted in an open session of Congress yesterday that waterboarding –- a long-reviled torture technique, which produces the perception of drowning –- was used on three “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects in CIA custody in 2002 and 2003. The three men –- [...]

News that Jose Padilla’s lawyers are seeking to hold former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 59 other US officials responsible for “abusive and unconstitutional tactics used against Mr. Padilla while he was held in military custody as an enemy combatant from 2002 to 2006” has temporarily revived the story of the Chicago-born former gang member [...]

An article by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer is always a cause for celebration, and her latest, The Black Sites, is no exception. Beginning with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “confession” four months ago, during his tribunal in Guantánamo, that “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the [...]

Military psychologists and torture
In Rorschach and Awe (great title!), a must-read article in Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban explores how two military psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen –- trained in the secretive SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which conditions soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands –- were largely responsible for “reverse-engineering” the [...]