There are clues, in the public record, to what really happened to the captives in US custody, but hardly any journalists will touch them.

Back in 2005 the Associated Press succeeded in getting some of its FOIA requests honoured, and acquired dossiers from 58 Guantanamo captives Combatant Status Review Tribunals. As an exercise I decided to read through all 58 dossiers. Frankly, I didn’t expect it to be so obvious that so many of the men were innocent.

As the DoD has been forced to honour more of its FOIA requests, over the last five year, I made the effort to read every transcript. And in one transcript I came across proof of what seems to be the real reason the CIA video-taped the torture of Abu Zubaydah. Back in 2004, a year before the tapes had been destroyed, and years before the director of the CIA told the US Congress that the tapes had once existed after all, some of the Guantanamo captives knew all about Abu Zubaydah’s torture. They knew because their interrogators bragged about it. Years before the CIA director told the US Congress they couldn’t see the tapes, because they had been destroyed some of the Guantanamo captives knew what the torture of Abu Zubaydah looked like — because their interrogators had shown them images of Abu Zubaydah being tortured.

The Director of the CIA claimed that Abu Zubaydah’s torture was recorded simply for “training purposes” — implying that future CIA interrogators would watch it to see what waterboarding consisted of. But, the testimony of this Guantanamo captive strongly suggests that “training purposes” was a euphemism for another war crime. Threatening to torture a captive is a war crime. Showing a captive who is undergoing interrogation pictures of other captives being tortured during their interrogations is a threat of torture — a war crime.

I know apologist for the Bush administration will respond — “Al Qaida trains its recruits to LIE about being tortured. That he claims the USA uses torture is proof he was trained by al Qaida to lie about torture — not proof we torture.”

But how could Guantanamo captive 761, Ibrahim Al Zeidan, know, in 2004, that the US Congress would learn in 2007 that a single individual, Abu Zubaydah, had his actual torture video-taped? Abu Zubaydah was in a secret CIA camp, half a world away. The only way he could have learned of the existence of these recordings is if other interrogators used them, or bragged about their existence.