The insect memo

By Lisa Mascaro

Monday, April 20, 2009 | 12:31 p.m.

WASHINGTON -- The White House release of interrogation memos has again turned a spotlight on Jay Bybee, the former Bush administration Justice Department official and now a federal appellate court justice in Nevada.

Among the four memos released last week was one signed by Bybee that involves interrogators’ request to use a harmless insect to create discomfort for an Al Qaeda associate.

Apparently Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida feared creepy crawlies, the Washington Post reports:

“Interrogators told Justice Department lawyers that they sought to exploit Abu Zubaida's fear of bugs by telling him that they had put a stinging insect in a small, confined box where he was held for brief periods, when in fact they would introduce a harmless caterpillar instead.

“Intelligence officials said yesterday that they had not actually used the practice, which won approval from administration lawyers.”

That the government had discussed using a caterpillar to exploit a fear of bugs was new terrain, according to the New York Times.

In the days since the memos were released, the disclosure has drawn widespread scrutiny about the potential interrogation technique – which was never used.

Jeffrey Lockwood, a Wyoming University professor, wrote Sunday in the New York Times that “insects have been conscripted as weapons of war, tools of terrorism and instruments of torture for thousands of years.”

But “this appears to be the first case in which insects would have been used to inflict psychological terror,” said Lockwood, author of Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War.”

Lockwood goes on to suggest a golden-rule-inspired argument against torture techniques. Imagine, he writes, if terrorists unleashed disease-carrying critters on us.

“The chances of this happening are slim. The terrorists might even be bluffing. But terrorism — and torture — can be psychological,” Lockwood wrote.

A more pointed analysis in the Washington Post notes:

“Several experts, including Columbia Law School adjunct professor and commentator Scott Horton, noted that the Justice Department even approved of the modern equivalent of the Ministry of Love's Room 101 from George Orwell's ‘1984,’ where prisoners were forcibly threatened with physical manifestations of their greatest fears.

“In the book, Winston Smith's jailers threaten to place a cage of rats atop his head; at a secret CIA prison, U.S. officers were told, it was okay to place al-Qaeda member Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida, into a cramped box and pretend to insert an insect that he feared would sting him.”

The decision by President Barack Obama Justice Department to to release the Bush administration memos has been widely and politically debated.

Some believe the release of the memos is necessary to fully understanding the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics.

Detractors say exposing the memos puts national security at risk.

Bybee’s role in the Bush-era interrogation policies continues to confounds his colleagues at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law, where “his legal scholarship was considered rigorous and his positions well reasoned,” my colleague J. Patrick Coolican reported recently.

Among the memo authors, Bybee has been singled out by critics because he is a sitting judge. He serves a lifetime appointment to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a Senate-approved position.

Today, Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat and senior member of the Judiciary Committee, called for Bybee’s impeachment, Huffington Post reported.

Conceivably, Congress could impeach him, through proceedings that would originate in the House Judiciary Committee. But getting that past the Senate would be tough, others have said.

The New York Times also called for Bybee’s impeachment. Its editorial Sunday pointed not so much to the new insect memo, but his role in the broader debate over waterboarding.

“These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him,” the editorial said.