A former U.S. intelligence agent said in a report published Monday that terror suspect Abu Zubaydah was subjected to simulated drowning months before the Bush administration’s Department of Justice had written memos approving the use of waterboarding.
The claim strikes a serious blow to repeated Bush administration arguments that no laws were broken in the torture of prisoners because legal guidelines had been closely followed.
Former Central Intelligence Agency officer John Kiriakou, speaking with BBC’s Panorama, said that internal communications detailed Zubaydah’s torture beginning “at the very end of May or the very beginning of June 2002.”
Bush administration lawyers did not issue memorandum supportive of torture — a war crime under the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war — until August of that year.
Kiriakou said that President Bush had personally given written authorization for Zubaydah’s torture.
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