A variety of links to articles/interviews on current topics that may, or may not, be of interest.

In short, the report on Abu Zubaydah reads partly like an attempt to glue together a lot of contradictory information–without assessing the credibility of any one piece of that information–and an either willful or unconscious effort to tell a narrative that justifies what those in charge of Gitmo were doing.

News from inside Libya remains chaotic. Gaddafi has phoned in a speech to Libyan television that repeated much of his earlier rant but added: “It is obvious now that this issue is run by al-Qaeda.”

The government is just writing its own novel about Gitmo detainees and the war on terror now.

Once extremely top secret telegrams prove, according to former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, UK complicity in torture. I’d add they prove the same thing about the U.S. government. The most amazing new piece of evidence is a memo by UK Foreign Office Legal Adviser Michael Wood that it was perfectly okay for the government “to receive or possess information under torture.”

When Was the Evaluation Written?

The report was almost certainly written in July, not long before it was passed to 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 prior to the drafting of the report (emphasis added).

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. Hell, the report never even mentions the “subject’s” age. [Correction: it does; it reports he's 31 years old. - JK]