Spencer Ackerman reacts to former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen's reiteration that Abu Zubaydah "thanked" his interrogators for torturing him:
As for Thiessen… My boss forwarded me this Crooks & Liars link of the guy claiming with a straight face that Abu Zubaydah thanked his torturers for waterboarding him. It's a claim that can never truly be disproven, and even if one day Abu Zubaydah comes forward to deny it, we'll inevitably hear all about how we're gullible for believing a terrorist. But it's indicative of something sick that Thiessen would feel the need to say that Zubaydah was somehow grateful for the torture. Degradation inflicted on a helpless man — no matter how evil, as al-Qaeda is — becomes something redemptive, a gift we bestow, rather than a punishment we choose to inflict. That is righteous fanaticism right there.
I think it's actually irrelevant whether Zubaydah said it or not. Let's say for a moment it's true: Thiessen's larger argument is that, because of this single dubious anecdote, torturing Muslims we suspect of being terrorists is necessary because that's the only way interrogators can get them to talk. There's a word for the process of drawing broad conclusions about entire religions, cultures, and ethnicities from such minute contact -- it's called prejudice.
As for having to torture those detainees we know are terrorists in order to get information -- well, we know this isn't true. We know it's not true of Abu Zubaydah. It's instead a thinly veiled pretext for a conclusion Thiessen has already reached about Muslims, their savagery, and their fanaticism. Thiessen is merely groping for a retroactive justification of his own bigotry. For some reason, he believes this prejudice to be an exoneration of his old boss, rather than an indictment of his own moral character.
For what it's worth, I've also never heard this story sourced to any intelligence official or even anyone other than Thiessen, except in this August article from his new employers at the Washington Post, months after he recited the story in a column for the same paper. In an act of extremely strained sourcing, it cites a "former U.S. official (not intelligence, not national security) with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out," which is how Thiessen might describe himself.
UPDATE: Correction, the description does appear in the May 2005 Bradbury memo. -- A. Serwer
