Government Admits Abu Zubaydah Suffered from Cognitive Impairment

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Jason Leopold has made the full filing revealing the scope of the government’s claims about Abu Zubaydah here. I’ll be reading through it today, but I wanted to point to one more clear admission that would seem to undermine the claims the government made in justifying his torture.

The government admits that AZ suffered from “cognitive impairment” due to the shrapnel wound he had in his head.

Respondent acknowledged in the factual return that [Zubaydah’s] diaries indicate that he suffered cognitive impairment from a shrapnel injury for a number of years.

Yet in the Bybee Two memo, John Yoo asserted (based on this psychological evaluation) that AZ had no pre-existing mental conditions or problems that might make him unfit for things like waterboarding.

According to your reports, Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from your proposed interrogation methods. Tbrough reading his diaries and interviewing him, you have found no history of mood disturbance or other psychiatric pathology[,]” “thought disorder[,] … enduring mood or mental health problems.”

Which is probably why, beyond the narrow admission that AZ’s diaries made it very clear he had had a head injury that caused lasting damage, the government doesn’t want to provide any further evidence of mental illness or cognitive impairment.

Further evidence that Petitioner suffered any mental illness or cognitive impairment (Request No. 54) would not be relevant without any indication that one of the specific diary passages relied upon by the Government was actually linked to the mental or cognitive impairment.

Now, there are actually redacted passages in both the Bybee Two memo and AZ’s psychological evaluation that might include admissions of this injury (in the long redacted section on page 17 of the Bybee Memo and at the end of the first paragraph on Emotional/Mental States/Coping Skills in the psychological evaluation). But one way or another, CIA and/or John Yoo found ways to dismiss any concerns about waterboarding a guy with a known significant head injury.

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53 replies
  1. BoxTurtle says:

    Well, it ain’t like their case against AZ hasn’t already fallen apart. And it ain’t like we didn’t already know that Yoo and Bybee had lied.

    Boxturtle (Mr. President, here’s another item for the Looking Forward list)

  2. plunger says:

    EW: I suspect you won’t allow this to be viewed, but you ought to see how the government’s cyber attacks work, so when they come for you, you’ll recognize them:

    “Radio Free America” – King World News Site Brought Down By Sophisticated Attack – JP Morgan Chase Suspected

    http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/38500

    • Skilly says:

      Am I the only one who wonders why plunger keeps trying to hijack threads? Dude, please stop it.

      • BoxTurtle says:

        Do not feed the troll. The mods here are perfectly aware of plunger and keep him/her more or less in line.

        When on topic, plunger has occasionally (if perhaps unintentionally)provoked some very good discussions.

        Boxturtle (But what if plunger is right? :-) )

  3. orionATL says:

    there are no laws or rules that cannot be made to not apply to the u.s. central intelligence agency, yet the nation very rarely benefits from cia activities, but is frequently severely harmed (as with cia’s enthusiasm for torturing) by them.

    neither the executive, legislative, nor judicial branches will mend this hole in the fabric of american law and society.

  5. behindthefall says:

    It just makes me feel so warm and fuzzy to know that my government is concerned that people whom it intends to torture be in good mental health. *spit*

    • BoxTurtle says:

      If they AREN’T, it screws up the results of the experiment. Those poor torturers probably spent HOURS normalizing the data to allow for his condition once they became aware of it.

      Really, we should make our victims fill out a medical form prior to torture so we can record the results properly.

      Boxturtle (It’s said that the first person to say “Nazi” loses the argument, but I keep thinking of Mengele)

      • behindthefall says:

        Yeah; I’ve been known to write that in comments, too. Why can’t we see whom we have become?

      • bobschacht says:

        So can Yoo and others be charged with practicing medicine without a license?
        That is, after all, what they were doing, in effect.

        Bob in AZ

  6. Frank33 says:

    Torture causes mental illness. Who could have predicted? I do not thank you for each of these posts revealing a deep, sick “heart of darkness”. It is very difficult to read some of these, but folks such as EW and Leopold have done a great service. It is not hijacking a thread to say that. Thank you.

  7. JTMinIA says:

    My guess is that – if Yoo thought this through at all – their argument goes something like this. “Even if AZ had some brain damage (and it sounds like temporal lobe and/or some hippocampus damage), that does not constitute a pre-existing condition that would reduce the safety and/or effectiveness of torture … er, I mean enhanced interrogation. After all, there is no clear evidence that the brain damage suffered by AZ would make the EITs unsafe or ineffective.”

    In other words: because there have never been controlled experiments on torture, there’s no evidence that AZ’s brain damage was an issue.

    Note how this matches the wording. They didn’t say he didn’t have “issues” – in fact, they admit this. The claim is that he doesn’t have issues that would invalidate the torture.

    • emptywheel says:

      Thanks. That’s sort of what I think might be going on behind the redactions. And I was hoping the resident experts might weigh in on how someone could claim this wasn’t an issue.

    • emptywheel says:

      And remember that this assessment is one of the things faxed to Helgerson at the start of the IG investigation. So it had to have been an issue in some way or another. Plus, by the time they wrote the assessment, they were already worried about the severe mental suffering they had caused him.

      • JTMinIA says:

        Thanks, but please keep in mind that the “defense” I gave above would only really work for a lousy scholar like John “what is Youngstown?” Yoo. It took me about five minutes to locate several good empirical and review articles (in peer-review, tier-1 or -2 journals that speak directly to the role of the temporal lobes and/or hippocampus in protecting a person from the adverse effects of psychological stress. This is an issue these days because soldiers with PTSD often have open or closed-head injuries, as well.

        • emptywheel says:

          And are you saying that the temporal lobe/hippocampus injury CAUSES the PTSD? Or just exacerbates it?

          Somewhere, one of the OLC trolls (for some reason I think it was Yoo, which would be of particular interest if true, but I need to go check the reference) actually said that PTSD could be considered a symptom of severe mental suffering.

        • Jeff Kaye says:

          Yes, Yoo did say that PTSD is a kind of “prolonged harm”. From a FAQ produced by supporters of the APA referendum to remove psychologists from torture sites:

          Yoo argues that torture can only take place if the perpetrator intends to cause prolonged mental harm:

          “If a defendant has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture. A defendant could show that he acted in good faith by taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts, or reviewing evidence gained from past experience.”

          http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/yoo_army_torture_memo.pdf

          Thus, by consulting with a psychologist an interrogator demonstrates that his or her intent is to extract information and not to cause harm; if the interrogator is a psychologist he or she can demonstrate good intent by reviewing the literature before an interrogation. Of course members of other professions — say sociology — could also perform this same role but there is an advantage in using clinical psychologists since Yoo argues that one has only suffered ‘prolonged mental harm’ if the victim suffers from PTSD or (untreated) depression and psychologists can diagnose these disorders while other social scientists cannot:

          “the development of a mental disorder such as posttraumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression, which also can last for a considerable period of time if untreated, might satisfy the prolonged harm requirement”

          http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/yoo_army_torture_memo.pdf

          Psychologists hold the keys to these abusive settings because the clandestine services need psychologists to tell them that they are not torturing.

  8. JasonLeopold says:

    Great reporting, Marcy! Do you think medical records, the ones they refuse to turn over, would indicate any of this?

    Separately, I sort of chuckled at this passage (P. 27 of the actual filing) because it read to me as if the govt was trying to do everyone a favor:

    Petitioner and other detainees have argued that information obtained under torture is inherently unreliable…and in the interest of streamlining this case and avoiding litigation of such issues, in this case the Respondent has forgone any reliance on statements the Petitioner made while in U.S. custody

  9. JTMinIA says:

    His main issues seem to be memory.

    On the positive, this might actually serve to “protect” him from repeated torture, since, to him, it wouldn’t be repeated.

    On the negative side, he would have difficulty reconciling that this is being done to him, as opposed to him doing it to himself, so it could be worse.

  10. JTMinIA says:

    The brain damage that is often found in soldiers suffering PTSD probably exacerbates the problem, as opposed to being the cause. (But this is exactly the sort of question some people are working on.) One idea (and I’ll try to get you a reference from a good journal) is that not being able to control the rehearsal process doesn’t let you break out of a downward spiral of rumination.

  11. JTMinIA says:

    ew –

    My guess is that you don’t have free access to journal articles (as I do). Is there a way for you to give me an email address that I can send pdfs to? I can post the citations for good papers, but that might not help people not linked to universities to read them.

    – JTM

  13. Jeff Kaye says:

    You say tomayto and I say tomaato.

    Through reading his diaries and interviewing him, you have found no history of mood disturbance or other psychiatric pathology[,]” “thought disorder[,] … enduring mood or mental health problems.

    While these people are liars, and then there are the redacted portions of the psych report on AZ, they probably thought they could get away with distinguishing between psychiatric disorders per se and physical brain damage. This happens in the medical community all the time, where victims of TBI find they don’t get help in mental health settings. Same goes for epilepsy cases. Meanwhile in the mental health community, labeling a case as one of brain damage means they are generally seen as untreatable by regular MH clinics. In both cases, this mean they are given drugs, by either neurologist or psychiatrist, depending on in what area their debility is judged to reside. These are the patients — and many of them there are, of TBI, of PTSD — who “fall through the cracks” of the system, because the field is still dominated by a mind-body dualistic approach, and has yet (though it is trying) to conceptualize how to think about these very complex cases involving brain pathology (which intersects other kinds of pathology, and are mediated through the patient’s existing social networks, their personality, their sense of identity, etc.).

    • bobschacht says:

      Jeff,
      You’re trying to summarize here a number of different paradigms of mental health research. In what follows, I am just trying to re-state what you said, but in different language. I may be off base.

      There’s one MH paradigm that comes from psychiatry and is based on the Medical Model/Neurology perspective. That’s the paradigm that basically looks at the brain as a bunch of nuts and bolts represented by actual biological structures, and is based on decades of research about brain injuries and other biological experiments. In recent decades this paradigm has been infused by genetic studies (e.g., schizophrenia is all about genes and the cure is drugs). Practitioners of this paradigm tend to have MDs as well as PhDs.

      Another MH perspective based on historic talk therapy that views the Mind as something that transcends the organic brain. This paradigm resists the idea that every thought can be reduced to some kind of biological activity in the brain. There is some interesting reification of this POV by recent work on the holographic brain.

      I’m not trying to make a particular point about AZ here, but rather to alert readers who may not be familiar with the very different models of mental functions floating around these days, and unless you have some idea of what these paradigms are, it can be very confusing to figure out what the mental health literature is saying about people like AZ these days.

      Bob inAZ

  14. Jeff Kaye says:

    I am unfortunately unable to participate much in this discussion, and am still relatively out of things until this weekend. However, in the little time I’ve had to review the government’s filing, what has caught my attention is this (emphasis added):

    Petitioner’s request for evidence that the diary was written in “multiple voices” (Request No. 56) is equally puzzling. The best place to look for information about the content of
    [redacted] diaries or any aspects of the writing style [redacted] used in composing them is in the diaries themselves. Petitioner and his counsel are already fully able to evaluate and make arguments based on the content and style of the diaries, and in any event, evidence that the [redacted] wrote the diary in “multiple voices” would not necessarily suggest that the diary was not an accurate account of events.

    Now, I doubt that Zubaydah, who has gone by a number of names over the years, wrote his diaries as some kind of Joycean or Conradian experiment in narrative. Instead, the issue of “multiple voices” speaks to the presence of dissociative functioning and possible existence of dissociative identity disorder. This is of a great deal of interest because, first, it is a serious mental disorder, thought to be produced by trauma. Secondly, the creation of dissociative identity disorder iatrogenically, i.e., on purpose, was a major component of the Bluebird/Artichoke/MKULTRA studies.

    The idea of creating “Manchurian candidates” is not an insane idea, but it appears the government was in the past, and possibly now, been able to create individuals whose dissociated states were used to have them undertake actions outside their awareness.

    This is not tinfoil, and god I wish it were. You might remember my writing how the CIA psyschiatrist Morgan in one of his studies measured rates of dissociation under those subjected to mock torture. And this in the early 2000s or late 1990s.

    I am not saying that AZ was a guinea pig or victim of mind control, but the presence of “multiple voices”, and the government’s indication that essentially such exist in the diaries and that evidence derived from diaries written by what are multiple personalities “would not necessarily suggest that the diary was not an accurate account of events,” means we have to take it seriously, and try and understand what this means.

    One thing it certainly means is that Mr. Zubaydah was a very ill individual. Dissociative Identity Disorder is not something that comes about through TBI, in my understanding. It is either something produced early in life, through massive trauma, or it is iatrogenically introduced to suggestible patients by certain kinds of therapists, or it is malingered, or… it is deliberately produced by a kind of controlled traumatizing, by use of hypnosis, drugs, and various kinds of torture. This is the kind of thing that Dr. Cameron was working on in Canada, with CIA funds, even into the 1960s (read The Shock Doctrine).

    Jason, do you know more about the “voices”? Could they have been the writing down of command hallucinations? Are they the production of dissociated selves? Other?

    In any case, something to follow up.

    • emptywheel says:

      Two things.

      First, in this context, the request would refer to the earlier diaries–pre capture.

      And what I think they’re after (but probably not getting) is Dan Coleman’s judgment that the diary was written in three different Hani voices. The reason you’d want it would be to discredit the veracity of the things in the diary (again, pre-capture, the stuff they’re using for the factual return).

    • JTMinIA says:

      >> “One thing it certainly means is that Mr. Zubaydah was a very ill individual. Dissociative Identity Disorder is not something that comes about through TBI….”

      Agreed, in general. But there’s that patient studied by Molly Treadway in the 1980s who seemed to “save a copy” of everything after falling off a swingset when a child (TBI?). Then, at a much later date, another event caused said patient revert to the “saved copy,” forgetting everything – including all skills – learned since.

      Sorry I can’t find the ref. It’s called temporally-specific, information-general amnesia. I think Treadway’s patient is the only example. My point is that TBI might be able to do something semi-related to dissociative disorder. But, in general, it’s psychogenic.

      • Jeff Kaye says:

        Yes, I think you can have cognitive or neurological syndromes that are very like the classic psychiatric categories, and yet different. Oliver Sacks likes to write up these kinds of cases.

        To Bob @33, yes, thanks. That’s something very like what I was referring to. All of these kinds of “diagnoses,” syndromes, etc. talk can get quite slippery. That’s something quite on my mind as I prepare to finish something of a popular column sort on waterboarding and “Learned helplessness.” Because the latter was a central component of the EITs, yet, what is is really? How does it get defined from a medical standpoint, and then, from a legal standpoint?

        To EW, yes, thanks, that’s important re the reason for the request, and I do remember Coleman’s take on AZ. The three different Hani voices, though, what does that refer to. Three different styles of composition, three different tenses, three different “voices,” i.e., seemingly different authorships?

        • JasonLeopold says:

          The personas he wrote his diaries in were as Hani 1, a boy who was 10 years or so younger than Zubaydah (I believe that it would make him a teen if he started writing in 1992 when he was in his early 20s), Hani 2, who was the same age as Zubaydah, and then there was Hani 3 who was about 10 years older. Coleman explicitly said he thought Zubaydah was “certifiable” and “insane” based on his review of the diaries and his poems.

          Back in September 2006, when GW Bush gave a speech where he talked about Zubaydah in the context of 9/11 and military commissions and even though his torturers had already apologized to him Bush still maintained he was a top al-qaeda official and gave up info that stopped an attack in the US (my emphasis). From the speech:

          Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. Our intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived to liberate that country. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody — and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.

          After he recovered, Zubaydah was defiant and evasive. He declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information — and then stopped all cooperation. Well, in fact, the “nominal” information he gave us turned out to be quite important. For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — or KSM — was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and used the alias “Muktar.” This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM. Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States — an attack about which we had no previous information. Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location. Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained — one while traveling to the United States.

          We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why — if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.

          Zubaydah was questioned using these procedures, and soon he began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th. For example, Zubaydah identified one of KSM’s accomplices in the 9/11 attacks — a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

        • 1boringoldman says:

          Thanks. In the Wikipedia timeline:

          Abu Zubaydah moved to Afghanistan in 1991 to assist the mujahideen in their fight against the Afghan and Soviet Communists. In 1992, while fighting for the mujahideen Abu Zubaydah was injured from a mortar shell blast which left shrapnel in his head and caused severe memory loss, as well as the loss of his ability to speak for over one year.

          That is no light injury. I think the point I was trying to make above is that his diaries are reported to have begun in 1992. The report of the severity of his initial brain injury and his journaling beginning then suggest that the diaries had something to do with his dealing with a cognitive deficit. While the multiple ‘voices’ sounds kind of crazy and has suggested psychosis [schizophrenia] or dissociative disorders to many, it would not be surprising to find that kind of thing in a brain injured person. Many of the symptoms described by the Lawyer – seizures, headaches, hypercousis [sounds], and difficulty evoking imagery [mother] are the kind of thing seen in chronic brain syndromes.

          I think one might amplify on EW’s point. Why is Yoo going into things about Zubaydah’s mental state if they weren’t worried about it? In the comment she quotes him:

          According to your reports, Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from your proposed interrogation methods. Tbrough reading his diaries and interviewing him, you have found no history of mood disturbance or other psychiatric pathology[,]” “thought disorder[,] … enduring mood or mental health problems.”

          He’s using words that describe the functional psychoses – Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder [“thought disorder[,] … enduring mood or mental health problems.”]. He’s saying that as if only such people would be harmed by whatever torture-du-jour he was talking about. While most sane people would say that the SERE techniques wouldn’t be good for anybody’s future mental health, to say that a chronic brain syndrome patient would be okay with such things is way beyond absurd.

          Just a note about the “psychological evaluation.” It’s oddly written, more like a personality assessment. The expected comments about cognitive functions, certainly to be expected in an evaluation of a man with a history of brain injury, just aren’t there.

        • emptywheel says:

          And remember that psych eval is/was considered a draft. I sort of wonder whether they weren’t massaging the document to make sure it made sense and accomplished what they wanted it to.

          Hold on!! I’m doing a post on this…

        • Jeff Kaye says:

          Re the psych eval, I looked in a little depth at it in two articles here at FDL last August. I’m quite proud of them, and I’d note that I have experience evaluating torture victims for courts, so I know something of which I speak. — EW also wrote at the same time an excellent article before on the psych eval report, which noted, among other things, the failure to mention AZ’s head injury!

          Those earlier articles:
          Torture: The Real Reason for the Psychological Evaluation of Abu Zubaydah

          It is clear the evaluation was written specifically to get permission for waterboarding, and not to undertake a serious psychological evaluation of the prisoner. The report lacks details related to relevant past history that any psychologist would find important in a psychological evaluation, e.g., the quality of his family relationships, the existence of prior traumas, his actual work and school history, etc….

          The man presented in the report, in a most amateurish fashion, cannot be in fact a real person. They present him as a superman-terrorist (he wrote the Al Qaeda resistance manual, ran the Al Qaeda training camps, was their “coordinator” of foreign communications, was their chief of counterintelligence, “no one came in and out of Peshawar, Afghanistan without his knowledge and approval,” but still had time to be involved in every major Al Qaeda operation, and still had time to direct the start-up of an Al Qaeda cell in Jordan!). Additionally, he was supposed to have developed the Al Qaeda interrogation resistance techniques (a claim later contradicted in the report…), and taught them to many others. A real busy guy.

          The discussion of his personality at times sounds like it was cribbed from a printout of a computerized personality assessment. There are also a number of contradictions in the portrayal, e.g., Zubaydah “wrestles” with idea of killing civilians, but “celebrated” 9/11; he has the discipline, drive, creativity and pragmatism of a good leader, but is private and vigilant of others’ intentions, and doesn’t trust people, and oh, yes, wants to be one of the guys. Supposedly he felt anything outside of jihad was “silly.” But at the same time he chafed against the constrictions of “radical salafist environments” and was very independent minded.

          Only for a moment does what is probably the real Abu Zubaydah emerge from the report: a man who wanted to go to college, become a computer expert or engineer, who felt homesick, who wanted a traditional career and family life.

          Experiment in Terror: The Psychological Evaluation of Abu Zubaydah and Its Role in Designing Torture

          The report was almost certainly written in July 2002, not long before it was passed to the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It likely was part of a packet of material used to present the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” including waterboarding, as potentially “safe” to use.

          There are plenty of indications in the report that Zubaydah had been under observation and interrogated (tortured) for some time prior to the drafting of the report[.]

        • 1boringoldman says:

          Excellent points all. Thanks for pointing us to your articles. I think you’re dead on about this psychological evaluation. Instead of the observations followed by some interpretation of their meaning, it’s just a story leading the reader to a foregone conclusion – as you say “cribbed.”.

        • Jeff Kaye says:

          To all, I wasn’t putting down Coleman, to whom I am very grateful for letting us know early on some of the truth about the AZ case. I was only trying to say that we should not settle with the idea that he was “crazy” or insane. We need to know how he was mentally ill, and if possible, why.

          Hey, 1boringoldman, you’re absolutely right re use of functional psychoses terms, as if having a TBI or neurological disorder wouldn’t be worsened (or cause a functional psychological disturbance) by use of SERE EITs.

          I do take issue with the idea that his head injury could have caused a full-blown dissociative identity disorder. DID is manifested by the appearance of complex and enduring structures of different identities, and this is not typical of the direct physiological effects of a brain injury (although profound personality changes can occur after a brain injury, but not the formation of multiple identities; and also, some of the symptoms can overlap, such as the appearance of seizures, although in the DID they are frequently pseudo-seizures.)

          From the DSM-IV, we know that DID cases can have “frequent gaps in memory for personal history, both remote and recent.” “Individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorder score toward the upper end of the distribution on measures of hypnotizability and dissociative capacity. There are reports of variation in physiological function across identity states (e.g., differences in visual acuity, pain tolerance, symptoms of asthma, sensitivity to allergens, and response of blood glucose to insulin.)” — The latter I can imagine would be of much interest to an experimental torture research program.

          We do not really know, medically, much about this reported head injury. We are without access to AZ’s medical records. Nor do we probably know about AZ’s history of treatment. I wonder just how early he came to the notice of the Americans. Was it when the CIA was working with the muhajadeen?

          To EW, what interests me is that the govt essentially admits (or practically admits) the presence of the different personalities, and then claims it is not relevant. Like hell it isn’t.

        • Jeff Kaye says:

          Thanks much for the description of the Hanis. Of course, Coleman is not competent to judge “insanity”, and such labels prevent us from understanding what really was going on. This definitely sounds like DID/multiple personality disorder, and raises a host of questions. Do you know how early we have evidence of the different Hanis?

        • JasonLeopold says:

          true about Coleman. But in fairness, he wasn’t stating that in medical terms. My understanding about the diaries and when he started adopting these identities was late 1993. I am going to double check

        • emptywheel says:

          Well, that’s sort of the point. It’s not clear Zubaydah’s lawyer is seeing the three voices, so having something from Coleman to explain it would help. Otherwise they’re going to have to make an analysis on voice basically on a translation, which only works if the translation is really good.

  15. 1boringoldman says:

    Jason’s article quotes Suskind, “Abu Zubaydah’s diaries spanned ten years and recorded in numbing detail ‘what he ate, or wore, or trifling things [people] said.’” That sounds like brain injury to me – recording the details in a narrative in hopes of repairing his memory. An everyday example is the ‘circumstantiality’ of dementia, giving way too many details as a way of holding on to the thread of a story. A similar cognitive aspect of brain damage is ‘confabulation’ which is filling in cognitive ‘blanks’ with imagination. Jason quotes Dan Coleman, “Zubaydah ‘claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.’” While that’s presented as something like playing the big shot, it’s compatible with ‘confabulating.’ Later, from the Lawyer’s op-ed, “Abu Zubaydah’s mental grasp is slipping away. Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures. Already, he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name.” Every piece of that sounds like chronic brain damage to me.

    Finally, if you want to make a person with a chronic brain syndrome worse. It’s easy. Put them in situations of sensory deprivation or sensory overload. Abu Zubaydah has had both, compliments of our initialed agencies…

  16. KrisAinCA says:

    I feel a little sheepish, posting here and not adding to the discussion, but I just wanted to point out to EW and the others commenting here that this is by far the most fascinating thing I’ve read on the interwebs in recent memory. The ideas being put forth about the nature of AZ’s injuries or MH issues and the depth of explanations and the citing of references make this an incredibly engaging read.

    Thank you all for contributing to my entertainment and the expansion of my knowledge on what was shaping up to be a very mundane afternoon.

  18. booyah says:

    Bastards.

    I wonder how Yoo and Bush, and their simpering smirks, would feel if the same was done to them?

    I still reel at the torturing and brain destruction done to Jose Padilla…

  19. emptywheel says:

    I hate to move all you smart people to a new thread, but I could use some help understanding what they mean by “hard” dislocation in this thread. Because they also happened to tell us it happened in session 63–and had already happened when they wrote the eval.

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