Bush memos parallel claim 9/11 mastermind’s children were tortured with insects
Published: April 17, 2009
Updated 1 week ago
Bush Administration memos released by the White House on Thursday provide new insight into claims that American agents used insects to torture the young children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
In the memos, released Thursday, the Bush Administration White House Office of Legal Counsel offered its endorsement of CIA torture methods that involved placing an insect in a cramped, confined box with detainees. Jay S. Bybee, then-director of the OLC, wrote that insects could be used to capitalize on detainees’ fears.
The memo was dated Aug. 1, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children were captured and held in Pakistan the following month, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
While an additional memo released Thursday claims that the torture with insects technique was never utilized by the CIA, the allegations regarding the children would have transpired when the method was authorized by the Bush Administration.
At a military tribunal in 2007, the father of a Guantanamo detainee alleged that Pakistani guards had confessed that American interrogators used ants to coerce the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed into revealing their father’s whereabouts.
The statement was made by Ali Khan, the father of detainee Majid Khan, who gave a detailed account of his son’s interrogation at the hands of American guards in Pakistan. In his statement, Khan asserted that one of his sons was held at the same place as the young children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
“The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs and were denied food and water by other guards,” the statement read. “They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.” (A pdf transcript is available here)
Khan’s statement is second-hand. But the picture he paints of his son’s interrogation at the hands of American interrogators is strikingly similar to the accounts given by numerous other detainees to the International Red Cross. The timing of the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s son — then aged seven and nine — also meshes with a report by Human Rights Watch, which says that the children were captured in September 2002 and held for four months at the hands of American guards.
“According to eyewitnesses, the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while U.S. agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts,” the report said.
The use of insects isn’t mentioned in a recently leaked International Red Cross report, in which Red Cross officials questioned detainees about their treatment at the hands of US forces and ultimately judged them to have been tortured. A second memo released Thursday, dated May 10, 2005, says the CIA told the White House insects were never actually used in interrogations.
“We understand that — for reasons unrelated to any concerns that it might violate the [criminal] statute — the CIA never used the technique and has removed it from the list of authorized interrogation techniques,” Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a footnote.
It’s worth noting, however, that the Red Cross was denied access to individuals held at CIA black sites. Khan’s son, Majid, was among those President Bush moved from the CIA’s secret prison network to Guantanamo Bay.
The techniques Khan says were employed against his son also match those approved in the Bybee memo.
“What I can tell you is that Majid was kidnapped from my son Mohammed’s [not related Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] house in Karachi, along with Mohammed, his wife, and my infant granddaughter,” Khan said in his military tribunal statement. “They were captured by Pakistani police and soldiers and taken to a detention center fifteen minutes from Mohammed’s house. The center had walls that seemed to be eighty feet high. My sons were hooded, handcuffed, and interrogated. After eight days of interrogation by US and Pakistani agents, including FBI agents, Mohammed was allowed to see Majid.
“Majhid looked terrible and very, very tired,” Khan continued. “According to Mohammed, Majid said that the Americans tortured him for eight hours at a time, tying him tightly in stressful positions in a small chair until his hands, feet and mind went numb. They re-tied him in the chair every hour, tightening the bonds on his hands and feet each time so that it was more painful. He was often hooded and had difficulty breathing. They also beat him repeatedly, slapping him in the face, and deprived him of sleep. When he was not being interrogated, the Americans put Majid in a small cell that was totally dark and too small for him to lie down in or sit in with his legs stretched out. He had to crouch. The room was also infested with mosquitoes. The torture only stopped when Majid agreed to sign a statement that he was not even allowed to read.”
Later in his statement, Khan alleges that the Pakistani guards revealed other abuses by American agents.
“The Americans also once stripped and beat two Arab boys, ages fourteen and sixteen, who were turned over by the Pakistani guards at the detention center,” he said. “These guards told my son that they were very upset at this and said the boys were thrown like garbage onto a plane to Guantanamo. Women prisoners were also held there, apart from their husbands, and some were pregnant and forced to give birth in their cells. According to Mohammed, one woman also died in her cell because the guards could not get her to a hospital quickly enough. This was most upsetting to the Pakistani guards.”
One blogger notes, “The first indications the children may have been tortured were reported in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine.”
“When KSM was being held at a secret CIA facility in Thailand, apparently the revamped Vietnam War-era base at Udorn, according to Suskind, a message was passed to interrogators: ‘do whatever’s necessary,’” Kevin Fenton writes at History Commons. “The interrogators then told KSM ‘his children would be hurt if he didn’t cooperate. However, his response was, ’so, fine, they’ll join Allah in a better place.’”
Fenton has two questions: “Did the Khans invent the allegations or garble them in some way and then ‘get lucky’ two years later, when it was revealed the CIA was, at least, contemplating the techniques they alleged it used at the time in question?” and “Given that nobody heard of the CIA using insects for another two years, why would they invent these specific allegations, which sounded bizarre when they were made?”
13 comments
We have become them.
That’s not a suspect, that’s a patsy. Need for false confession is the reason for torture.
Or maybe they have become us? Yes, I too was taught as a child that America, the United States was the country where the most free, nicest, kindest, most moral human beings on the planet live. We never did occupy the highest moral ground, however. We are people just like any other, with a revolution against power long ago, led today by people of little or no integrity who treat other peoples of the world as if they were expendable except for our use of them for our own corporate purposes. Monsters of all kinds walk the earth, and we are blind to their presence, especially when they are us.
The real questions I have are, why are the children of suspected terrorists detained at all? What person or persons ordered the torture of children? What were these children supposed to reveal, or was this torture done exclusively to break down the father? Even John McCain said any man will confess to anything if tortured enough. (While he helped to rename and redefine torture to allow Americans to delude themselves that cruelty is not torture as long as there is no threat of death.)
If the Obama Administration does not institute formal investigations into these crimes, we need to know the reason why. Going forward? How can we go forward with this hanging over our heads? I resent being rendered powerless to hold those accountable who have murdered and tortured innocent people in my name. I resent the Obama Administration’s protection of these low-life Fascists who will do anything for a buck or a bucket of oil.
If we do not hold these people accountable, nothing will change. Just because Obama is in the White House, Cheney and his known and unknown cohorts are still running America. The only difference is now they can do it full time, instead of having to pretend to serve the people, and show up for photo opts.
9/11: Distinguishing The Propaganda From The Smoking Guns
http://www.checktheevidence.co.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=199&Itemid=60
oh look, but guess WHO is BLOCKING prosecution of these traitors to the Constitutional Republic: oBUSHma!
No excuse, NONE whatsoever. IF this saga surrounding the release and need for prosecution has not displayed to all you well meaning oBOMBa supporters, that he is NO different than Bush, I do not know what will.
It is one thing to openly commit a crime, it is a whole new level of arrogance to publicly promote and doublespeak your way into covering up what criminals have done.
And what the hell is this overwhelming PTA-feel good BS of “moving on” or “agree to disagree” in America? This is not some cookie sale fundraiser and kiss and make up. YOU are either RIGHT, or WRONG. This sort of immaturity leads to unbearable asinine policy when these mooks grow up to be in gvt. That level of petulant psychosis zeitgeist starting in developing yrs as a child, leading to mass obnoxious criminality once these bozos grow up to take on any effectual profession in their adult yrs, should be obvious to any Psych101 student, or acute observer of human behavior.
In cases of crime, this would be like being part of a murder conspiracy, knew who did it, participated in it, yet the criminals have a judge and a prosecutor on the take, that says he committed no crime, so will not pursue.
Only barely 3 months past inauguration, before even his first pardon, oBOMBa in legal diction is committing misprison of treason. And who in their moronic mind ever awarded this idiot with the title of a “Constitutional scholar?” What from Harvard Community College? HE IS KNOWINGLY covering up crimes committed or one in progress. But he himself has now just become an accessory after the fact with this course of action.
A bunch of criminals hijacked our gvt, post 2000 and 9/11 coup (okay debatable, most would argue post JFK, but be that as it may, for the sake of discussion…), while our nation is deeply flawed, years of propaganda or media pop cultural ubiquity, there were no other nation in modern history, despite our history of Native genocide and slavery, that had better overwhelming international reputation than the United States of America. And these bastards in a very short span of less than 8yrs, defaced and dragged our good name through the mud. Now we’re undeniably known as an empire, but more accurately for those in the know, we have clearly become the military enforcement arm of off-shore bankers.
Everything that is happening in this nation, now, has been committed by the same international banking coterie who control IMF and World Bank, BIS, in Switzerland that blow out economies, make unpayable loans to nations and take all their resources as collateral, as clearly described by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. As Native American hero and activist Russell Means has said so succinctly, “America, itself, has now become an Indian Reservation.” We reap what we sew, but only if it really were the ones committing it, may be apt. But in reality, the current crime and coverup being committed are BECAUSE oBOMBa is a puppet of the financier oligarchs, just as all previous Pres. before him.
I hope this is becoming clearer and clearer to most of you by now.
It doesn’t sound like Obama is the puppet of anyone when he goes against his own cabinet’s advice and makes this information public anyway.
This doesn’t sound like a coverup of a Harvard community college grad, but rather the insight of someone who recognizes that these are crimes of a constitutional magnitude, requiring the action of Congress and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Hopefully Republicans in Congress will use their minority status to press those in their very party be brought to justice for High Crimes.
I am ashamed to be called American.
Well isn’t that nice of Obama not going after these guys. SICK SICK SICK!!
Actually, it is Obama himself who authorized the release of this information.
Obama is in the executive branch, not the judicial. It is up to judges to try and convict those in the Bush administration who violated the law.
Obama is who made public the information to prosecute them.
Congress is who has the authority to prosecute High Crimes of the Republican administration. These are crimes of a constitutional magnitude, and it will be Republicans in Congress who will try to block any Democratic attempts to try those in the Bush administration who ordered these atrocities.
remind me again why we violated one of the most basic principles of American democracy by allowing covert activities to continue outside wartime? (And let’s not kid ourselves, the 9/11 vendetta was no war, it was pure animal vengeance leveraged for personal gain on the part of a few rich people. Let alone the protracted ideological insanity of the Cold War).
so it comes to this. torturing children. what do we have to do to end the tolerance of this manifest evil? isn’t it our most basic responsibility to do so?
little children, screaming in fear and pain, while our clinicians watch with interest, and their parents are made to watch in horror.
the great satan. how can we deny it. worse than our enemies. where they kill thousands, we slaughter millions. we torture children and call it legal. we have become an abomination.
I’m starting to wonder if the previous administration found out something about Obama and told him they would release it unless he pays ball with them. If Obama, aka Bush II, doesn’t do something about what happened at Gitmo and in Iraq, then he is going to be a one term president, and guess what woman from Alaska is just waiting to take his place.
It doesn’t sound to me like Obama is playing ball with anybody when he goes against his own cabinet’s advice and makes this information public anyway.