About those destroyed CIA tapes...they were porn

I am in the middle of reading Jane Mayer's excellent book, The Dark Side, and something she reported has not been picked up yet by members of the traditional media. I am talking about the investigation of the interrogation videotapes that were allegedly destroyed by the CIA back in 2005 at the behest of Clandestine Services chief Jose Rodriguez.

According to Mayer, the CIA claims that the tapes were the only record of the interrogation and no verbatim transcripts exist at all.  I find that very hard to believe, given how torture enthusiasts within the Bush Administration touted the actionable intelligence that the tapes supposedly produced. 

The conventional thinking about why the tapes were destroyed was to prevent CIA officials from being prosecuted for war crimes. After reading The Dark Side, I have a different theory: the tapes were destroyed because what they show is Abu Zubaydah's penchant for autoeroticism.

As one CIA officer put it, and another confirmed, "He spent all his time masturbating like a monkey in a zoo. He went at it so much, at some point I heard he injured himself. They had to intervene. He didn't care that they were watching him. I guess he was bored, and mad." ((page 173)

I wonder how all those self-appointed moralists that demanded former Surgeon General Joyceln Elders be fired after she promoted masturbationas an alternative to risky sexual behavior at a UN  AIDS conference would react when they learned that not only did the supposedly effective torture program fail but it turned Abu Zubaydah into a serial wanker.

Reading in Mayer's book about some of the other "enhanced interrogation techniques" caused me to reexamine the focus solely on waterboarding. Clearly, waterboarding is a crime as it has been for more than 100 years in this country. Nonetheless, these other "techniques" which included sleep depravation and stress positions probably caused as much long term damage to prisoners. 

One thing that was common at Gitmo or Abu Gharib or Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan was the constant bombardment of the prisoners with loud music. Some prisoners swear they heard

babies or perhaps their wive's crying. Other prisoners complained of constantly hearing a buzzing sound in the ear even after they had been released from Gitmo.

Ask yourself if you could withstand days of either no sleep or constantly interrupted sleep. Ask yourself if you could live in a room with no light, not knowing whether it was day or night. Ask yourself if you could deal with extreme temperature fluctuations like freezing cold or sweltering rooms. Now combine all of those tactics and you end up with some who is claiming to be mentally incompetent as in the case of Jose Padilla.

What happened to Abu Zubaydah is probably not that different than Padilla. This is how someone who was at Gitmo described Zubaydah's behavior:

Another source said, "he masturbated constantly. A couple of guards were worried about it. He wasn't brazen about it — he wasn't facing the camera. He'd do it at night, facing the wall, but it was rigged so there was no place for him to not be seen. This was closed circuit. He would complain to the interrogator that he would never feel  a woman's touch again, and lament that he would never have children. He freaked though at one point  because there was blood in his ejaculate. He saved it for the doctors in a tissue, to show them in the morning . The doctor said not to worry." (Page 173)

And that is why the CIA destroyed the interrogation tapes. My sense is that had the tapes proven that these enhanced interrogation tapes actually worked, you would see them on cable news as much as that footage of the Al Qaeda training camp with the guys scurrying over the monkey bars.

The official rationale for videotaping the interrogations was that it was done to protect the CIA agents. Then again, the official rationale for destroying the videotapes was that it was also done to protect the agents. Which is it? Come on, this is Circular Reasoning 101. 

At the time former CIA agent Larry Johnson said that the rationales described by former CIA Director Michael Hayden didn't pass the" bullshit test." Moreover, Johnson pointed out that any 14 year old with a Macbook Pro could blur the faces of the CIA agents to protect their identity. 

Sadly, we seem to know the reason why the tapes were destroyed. They were literally torture porn, more disgusting than  Saw, Hostel, or any other of these films that have appeared coincidently during the tenure of the Bush Adminstration.