It’s been six months since the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report on the torture of Al Qaeda suspects, and I can’t stop thinking about Abu Zubaydah’s eye.
His left eye, to be precise, which he lost while being held in one of the C.I.A.’s secret prisons.
Abu Zubaydah, an alleged Al Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan in 2002, was suspected of being a senior member of the group and a plotter in the 9/11 attacks. A Saudi Arabian citizen, Abu Zubaydah was the first suspect who was officially subjected to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by President Bush.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make you feel sorry for Abu Zubaydah, but his C.I.A. interrogators demonstrated a combination of brutality and incompetence that actually manages to achieve this. Even though Abu Zubaydah surrendered plenty of information to F.B.I. interrogators without coercion, and even though it wasn’t clear how much more he knew—it turns out that he wasn’t even a member of Al Qaeda—the C.I.A., convinced that he was harboring knowledge of future attacks, subjected him to twenty days of torture. (The F.B.I. refused to take part.) They stripped him, deprived him of sleep, slammed him into the prison wall, and played music at deafening volumes. They waterboarded him eighty-three times, driving him into fits of hysteria and involuntary spasms; at one point, they feared they might have killed him.
After several waterboarding sessions, Abu Zubaydah was so broken that, when a C.I.A. agent snapped his fingers twice, he would lie down on the waterboard, naked and dirty, to await his torture. As the Senate report makes clear, the C.I.A. interrogators knew that what they were doing was possibly illegal. In fact, they were so worried about being found out that they told their superiors that if Abu Zubaydah were to die during his interrogation, he would have to be cremated. In the event that he lived, they asked, in a cable, for “reasonable assurances that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” They did, indeed, receive such assurance. (For a succinct, if gruelling, description of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation, read pages 32 through 57 in the Senate report. It’s drawn from the C.I.A.’s own records. ) While the torture of Abu Zubaydah produced a number of intelligence reports, there’s no evidence that these brutal means were necessary to obtain them. After all that, Abu Zubaydah provided no actionable intelligence on future plots.
Still, I want to talk less about Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation than about his missing eye. When a team of American and Pakistani agents moved in to capture Abu Zubaydah, in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in 2002, he fled across a rooftop, where he was shot and wounded in the groin. A photo of Abu Zubaydah, apparently taken moments after his capture, and which his lawyers say is accurate, does not show any obvious problem in either of his eyes. His lawyers say that he had no eye condition. Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, told me that when Abu Zubaydah was apprehended he appeared to have some sort of eye condition, perhaps an infection. “His eye was pretty bad,’’ Soufan said. John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who participated in the capture, has also said that there appeared to be something wrong with one of his eyes.
In any case, the C.I.A. was so concerned that Abu Zubaydah was going to die from his gunshot wound that they flew in a doctor from Johns Hopkins University to treat him. He appears to have received excellent medical care, if only so that he could live in order to surrender information. “He got the best medical treatment anyone could have,’’ Soufan said.
In 2006, four years after he was captured, Abu Zubaydah was transferred out of C.I.A. custody to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A photo from that time, made available by WikiLeaks, shows Abu Zubaydah with a pirate-style patch over his left eye. His lawyers say that, by then, his eye was gone. That is, sometime between when he entered exclusive C.I.A. custody, in 2002, and when he left it, in 2006, he lost his left eye. In that four-year period, Abu Zubaydah was held in several C.I.A. secret prisons, also known as “black sites,” including those in Thailand, Lithuania, and Poland.
What happened to Abu Zubaydah’s eye? We can confidently guess that the still-classified version of the Senate’s report delved deeply into this question. This is also likely true of a review of the documents turned over to the Senate by the then C.I.A. director, Leon Panetta, which remains secret as well. Dozens of videotapes that the C.I.A. made of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation were destroyed. To top that off, Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers are prohibited from revealing any contents of any conversations they have had with their client, on the grounds that any disclosures could threaten national security. Do you get the feeling that the “classified” designation is being used to protect people who may have broken the law?
“There is absolutely no question that on the night he was captured he had two completely functional eyes,’’ Brent Mickum, one of Abu Zubaydah’s attorneys, told me. “And at some point thereafter, we don’t know exactly when—he has some idea when, but I can’t say, because nothing that he tells me I can reveal to you, which is ridiculous. This is the game I have to play. He doesn’t know how he lost his eye. He’d like to know.”
I am not the first person to raise the question of how Abu Zubaydah lost his eye. Jason Leopold, of Truthout (now of Vice News), wrote about this issue soon after the photo of Abu Zubaydah with an eye patch was released), in 2011. But the Senate torture report provides a few pieces of information that shed light on what happened. The first clue is in a section about Abu Zubaydah’s physical condition in August, 2002, when he was subjected to the most intense torture. At the time, he was being kept naked in his cell and fed a “bare-bones” diet. After eleven days of this, the report says, “medical personnel described how Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation resulted in the ‘steady deterioration’ of his surgical wound from April 2002.” In other words, the interrogation was making him worse.
Five days later, medical officers wrote that Abu Zubaydah’s wound—presumably the gunshot wound he suffered during his capture—had undergone “significant” deterioration. At some point after this, the report says, medical personnel noticed that “one of Abu Zubaydah’s eyes also began to deteriorate.” Then, on page 397, a footnote says, “Records indicate that Abu Zubaydah ultimately lost the eye.” The footnote is drawn from a C.I.A. cable dated October, 2002.
What can we conclude from this handful of facts? A lot, I think. First, it appears that Abu Zubaydah’s medical condition took a backseat to his interrogation; the C.I.A.’s doctors were evidently willing to watch Abu Zubaydah’s “deterioration” even as his torture carried on. A C.I.A. cable, quoted in the Senate report, confirms this. In a memo to Abu Zubaydah’s interrogators, a C.I.A. official wrote that “the interrogation process takes precedence over preventative medical procedures.”
Second—and, for the purpose of this discussion, more important—the report makes clear that the “deterioration” of Abu Zubaydah’s eye began after he was captured in Pakistan and treated by medical personnel, and during the time that he was being tortured.
What caused Abu Zubaydah’s eye to “deteriorate?” We don’t know. When I asked a C.I.A. spokesman about it, he told me the following: “Abu Zubaydah had a pre-exisiting eye condition when he was captured. American medical personnel treated the condition, but he ultimately lost the eye.” This doesn’t tell us why he lost it. When I pressed the C.I.A. for more, they came back with another answer of greater depth: “Although it was possible to treat an infection in Abu Zubaydah’s eye, the more serious underlying pre-existing condition meant that the eye was not salvageable. The eye continued to disintegrate on its own and was eventually lost. Suggestions that he lost the eye as a result of interrogation are flat wrong.”
So, the most charitable explanation is that Abu Zubaydah entered C.I.A. custody with some sort of eye condition and that doctors treated it, but then, at roughly the same time they were torturing him, they allowed the not-completely-healed condition to worsen to the point where they had no choice but to remove his eye. Being subjected to near-drowning, while naked and sitting in your own filth—these are not exactly conditions conducive to healing.
But, of course, there are darker possibilities. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan citizen who was captured in Pakistan and taken to Guantánamo in 2002, was released five years later without being charged. While in detention, he permanently lost vision in his right eye. Deghayes has said that during his captivity, guards gouged both his eyes. In 2003, John Yoo, then a senior lawyer at the Justice Department, wrote a memo, now declassified, in which he said that “to put out or destroy an eye” could be legal as long as no specific intent to cause the prisoner severe pain could be proved.
In all likelihood, we won’t know the full story of what happened to Abu Zubaydah’s eye until some of the documents surrounding his confinement are declassified. Barring that, there are some people out there who could shed some light on what happened. For one, there is the physician from Johns Hopkins University who was retained to treat Abu Zubaydah after his capture.
That doctor would know a lot. Maybe he or she would even be able to solve the mystery of Abu Zubaydah’s eye.
Jania Matthews, a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins Medicine, wrote in an e-mail, “We cannot verify the report.”
Who is the Johns Hopkins doctor who treated Abu Zubaydah? The public has a right to know.
