Tag: torture report

Torture USA

torture
From August 2014: A cartoon that perfectly captured the moment

W.J. Astore

Five years ago, President Obama infamously said, “We tortured some folks.”  And no one was held accountable; indeed, as Tom Tomorrow put it in a cartoon from that time, “The only government official who went to jail for it [John Kiriakou] was the whistleblower who exposed it.”  In the cartoon, Tom Tomorrow has Obama say that, “Still, we must accept responsibility!  Which is to say. we must briefly acknowledge the unpleasantness in the upcoming torture report, and then quickly move on.”

And that’s exactly what America did: quickly move on, without consequences (except for Kiriakou).  And then candidates like Donald Trump emerged, boasting of how much he’d increase the use of torture.  And thus Trump as president could pick Gina Haspel, implicated in the torture regime, as the new head of the CIA.  Well done, President Obama.

Recently, one of my readers alerted me to concerted efforts to “unredact” the redacted CIA report released in December 2014, based on open source research and logical deduction by a number of British researchers, concerning extraordinary rendition and black sites.  Check out this link https://twitter.com/renditionprjct for further details; the full report (403 pages) can be downloaded as a pdf file at this link:

https://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/documents/RDI/190710-TRP-TBIJ-CIA-Torture-Unredacted-Full.pdf.

Here’s the first paragraph of the report, and an excerpt from the executive summary:

CIA Torture Unredacted presents the findings from a four-year joint investigation by The Rendition Project and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism into the use of rendition, secret detention and torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its partners in the ‘War on Terror’. We have focused our efforts on understanding the evolution, scope and human impact of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) programme, which operated between 2001 and 2009. During this time, the CIA established a global network of secret prisons (so-called ‘black sites’) for the purposes of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects – in secret, indefinitely, and under the most extreme conditions. As a result, scores of men were captured, at locations around the world, and disappeared into the programme for weeks, months or years on end, whereupon they were subjected to sustained torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

This report, and The Rendition Project’s website (www.therenditionproject.org.uk), provide, without doubt, the most detailed public account to date of CIA torture.

We are publishing here:

→ A detailed profile of the prisoners held within the torture programme, including
their nationalities; capture locations and dates; detention locations, dates and
treatment; and fate and whereabouts afterwards;
→ The identity of those prisoners held in the black sites in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Morocco, and Guantánamo Bay;
→ A detailed reconstruction of the shifting geography of secret detention operations in Afghanistan;
→ A granular account of the complex network of companies which provided aircraft to the CIA for rendition operations;
→ Extensive documentary evidence relating to over 60 rendition circuits by these aircraft, which involved over 120 individual renditions;
→ A detailed overview of complicity by a number of key states, including the United Kingdom and those which hosted the black sites.

CIA Torture Unredacted stands as a comprehensive public account of one of the most disturbing elements of the ‘War on Terror’: a global programme of systematic disappearance and torture, carried out by the world’s most powerful liberal democratic states. In the face of continued obstruction and denial by the governments involved, which refuse to allow for a full accounting of the crimes which took place, we hope that this report will stand as a central reference point for all those who still seek redress and reparations for the victims of CIA torture, as well as some measure of the truth for us all.

More on the Torture Report

An unrepentant Dick Cheney in 2008
An unrepentant Dick Cheney in 2008

W.J. Astore

Six years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney admitted that he had approved waterboarding as one of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Waterboarding had been defined as torture by the U.S. during World War II when the Japanese had employed it (although the U.S. had used the so-called water cure during the Filipino Insurrection in the early 1900s). An unrepentant Cheney claimed that torture had been necessary to keep America safe, and that valuable intelligence had been gathered as a result, a conclusion disputed by this week’s Senate report on the CIA and torture.

Since Cheney’s admission, it’s taken six years to render an incomplete accounting of crimes committed by the U.S. government in the name of protecting America. The American people will never receive a complete accounting of these crimes since much of the evidence, including videos of interrogations, has been destroyed. Other evidence is being suppressed (just as the worst photographs from Abu Ghraib were never shown to the American people), ostensibly in the name (yet again) of keeping America safe from the blowback that would result from a complete accounting.

Who is really being protected here? The American people? Or the people who authorized and carried out the torture?

I wrote the following article back in December 2008 on the futility of torture as a technique and also on the need to punish those accountable for ordering it. However, it already appears that the U.S. Department of Justice has no plans to prosecute anyone for these crimes.

So, after a week or so of media grandstanding and manufactured outrage, this story will fade from view, just as our government wishes it to. Look forward, not backward, as President Obama says. And so it is that the crimes will continue without any possibility of atonement or redemption. W.J. Astore

Cheney says he approved waterboarding. Is that the end of the story?

ASK THIS | December 20, 2008

The vice president gave the go-ahead for tactics commonly regarded as torture. Was that a war crime or not? William J. Astore provides some background on the issue and urges the press to show that it too can do aggressive interrogations. And do them now, without waiting for a new administration or a new Congress.

By William J. Astore

Is our sitting vice president a war criminal because he condoned torture?  In an interview on ABC News on December 15th, Dick Cheney coolly admitted he had approved so-called “harsh” and “aggressive” interrogation techniques, notably waterboarding, in an attempt to extract intelligence from known or suspected terrorists, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Vital intelligence gathered about Al Qaeda, Cheney claimed, vindicated his decision, though this is much disputed. Subsequently, Cheney claimed that waterboarding and other harsh techniques did not constitute torture; this categorical denial was balanced by a counterclaim that he would have been remiss had he not authorized aggressive techniques in an attempt to safeguard Americans.

For approving these techniques and for other practices, The New York Times has attacked Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other Bush Administration officials. Calls have been issued for war crimes investigations. Are such calls warranted? Did Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others authorize techniques that constituted torture, and, if so, are they complicit in the crime?

Here, the Holocaust survivor, Jean Améry, and the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, offer valuable insights. Améry, himself a victim of torture, wrote about it in At the Mind’s Limits (1980). Torture, he observed, was a monstrous immorality because it violated another person’s body, reducing it to a vessel of fear and pain. Under such distress, the victim confesses to anything, even the wildest fictions and fantasies, as Améry himself did when he was tortured.

In its simulation of death by drowning, waterboarding is intended to produce great fear and psychological dislocation. It may perhaps leave no physical traces, but the mental wounds it inflicts are something else altogether. Their insidious effects on victims were captured by Améry in his conclusion on torture:

Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained …. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him. Fear—and also what is called resentments. They remain, and have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.

Torture, in short, alienates its victims from humanity and generates (or strengthens) vengeful resentments. Améry carried his own resentments as a burden to remind himself—and us—of the moral enormity of any attempt to demolish another human being’s will through torture. For Améry, such attempts are both crimes and mistakes because they sow the seeds of future acts of vengeance.

A further disturbing insight comes from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964). Adolf Eichmann, desk-bound executioner and “Jewish expert” for the Third Reich, oversaw the deportation of Jews to their deaths during the Final Solution. A bureaucrat who never dirtied his own hands, Eichmann therefore judged himself to be less than fully responsible for the murder of millions. On this point, the judges at Eichmann’s trial reached a far different conclusion: “the degree of responsibility increases as we draw further away from the man who uses the fatal instrument with his own hands.” In crimes against humanity, degrees of separation from the dirty work only add to the offense.

Waterboarding is torture; Cheney and Rumsfeld approved it; and Améry and Arendt’s reflections suggest the immorality of, and culpability for, the crime. What now? Whether we find this distasteful or not, the press needs to show that it too can aggressively interrogate sources. Rather than waiting a month for an Obama Justice Department or a congressional investigation, the press should challenge incoming Obama administration officials now, together with new members of Congress. Outside legal experts should also be consulted. Does Baltasar Garzón—the Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet relentlessly—have an opinion? These are obvious leads for reporters.

To strengthen America’s moral authority, we need to reject the idea that demolishing our enemies’ resistance through torture is a necessary price of our safety. Let’s not balk at an expeditious and complete accounting of our mistakes—and of crimes committed in our name.

Would a better prepared U.S. have used torture?

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The so-called Senate CIA Torture Report is supposed to be released today.  Five years ago, I wrote an article for Nieman Watchdog on the Bush Administration’s decision to resort to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or torture in plain speak.  Torture, I wrote back then, was the refuge of the impatient and incompetent, an approach that abrogated America’s fidelity to international treaties even as it became habit-forming.  In other words, the resort to torture simply begat more torture, irrespective of results.  As President Obama said, “We tortured some folks.”  And so on.  W.J. Astore

COMMENTARY | May 18, 2009

Did a lack of trained interrogators with appropriate language proficiency lead Bush administration officials to embrace torture as a ‘short cut’? A former dean at the Defense Language Institute writes that America was unprepared to wage a patient and savvy war of counterintelligence against Al Qaeda – which may have made less humane and less effective methods seem like an attractive option. Seventh in a series of articles calling attention to the things we still need to know about torture and other abuses committed by the Bush administration after 9/11.

By William J. Astore

In a letter dated May 10, 2007, General David H. Petraeus wrote to American troops serving in the Multi-National Force in Iraq:

Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy.  They would be wrong.  Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.  Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone “talk;” however, what the individual says may be of questionable value.

Petraeus’s directive to the troops was unequivocal: Besides being illegal, torture is counterproductive, unnecessary, and generates “intelligence” of dubious reliability.

Evidence suggests the U.S. military was telling the Bush Administration these cold, hard facts all along.  Why then did George Bush and Dick Cheney approve torture under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques”?

To answer this question, I think we need to remember not only the immense pressure the Bush Administration was under in 2002 (the events of 9/11, after all, occurred on their watch), not only their idée fixe for a settling of accounts with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but also America’s lack of preparedness to wage a patient and savvy war of counterintelligence against Al Qaeda.

I witnessed this indirectly at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC), where I served as the Associate Provost/Dean of Students from 2002 to 2005.  Clearly, the U.S. lacked translators, interpreters, and especially trained military interrogators.  I recall interrogators being pulled from assignments at DLIFLC and reassigned to operational tours in the Middle East and Central Asia; the problem was that their language proficiency was often in Chinese or Korean or a Romance language – not, as one might expect, in Arabic, Pashto or Dari.

Few people understand how long it takes to produce a skilled military interrogator.  Attaining basic language proficiency in Arabic takes nearly 18 months of constant training at DLIFLC.  But attaining mastery of the language and the culture – the acuity and sensitivity to interrogate a suspect who’s deliberately trying to mislead you – takes years and even decades of study and practice.  From 2002 to 2005, it may be that our country simply didn’t have enough skilled and disciplined interrogators to take the indirect approach.

Torture, I’m suggesting, wasn’t used because of a simple Machiavellian calculus of “the ends justify the means.”  Rather, we lacked the most humane and most effective means to attain the ends that the Bush Administration so desperately wanted – “actionable intelligence” that could prevent yet another 9/11 from occurring on their watch.  So they deployed “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which carried with them not merely the risk but the certainty of excesses and mistakes.

As investigators look more closely at America’s resort to torture, they should ask if we decided to go rough because we couldn’t go smooth.  Because we lacked the language and cultural skills to play good cop, we played bad cop as a short cut.  The problem, of course, is that short cuts are habit-forming.  And in the name of results, they often sacrifice the essential for the expedient.  In the case of the Bush Administration, not only did torture apparently provide unreliable intelligence: It also abrogated America’s fidelity to international treaties that forbade torture, and compromised our own ethos of truth, justice, and the American way.

Here, the lessons of the French in Algiers continue to resonate.  Think back to the revelations of General Paul Aussaresses in 2001, which scandalized France.  Aussaresses unrepentantly confessed that, in attempting to suppress terrorism in Algeria in the 1950s, detainee abuse, torture, even murder became routine, first-choice, approaches.  The resort to torture simply begat more torture.

Investigators should look at whether this dynamic also applied to America in Afghanistan and Iraq.  How many of our counterterrorist experts became like General Aussaresses: Self-perceived patriots who believed torture and even murder were justified in the name of protecting the state?  After all, if the state’s essential purpose is to protect its citizens, and you’re dealing with an enemy that’s malevolently contumacious, as Al Qaeda appeared to be, what’s to stop avowed “patriots” from torturing suspects, especially when the state’s leaders have authorized harsh techniques and are pressing you for results?

Patriotism, it’s been said, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.  Is torture the last refuge of the impatient and the incompetent?  If so, how do we instill patience and competence?  Of the hundreds of billions we spend on national defense each year, surely we should dedicate more funding to training and retaining skilled and disciplined military interrogators.  Counterterrorism succeeds or fails based on human intelligence (HUMINT).  But to get the most reliable HUMINT, we have to be able to outsmart our foes.  And the best way to do this is to treat them as humans, not as vessels to be beaten until they voice the echoes of our worst fears.

Updated (12/9/2014, 11:50AM EST): The Executive Summary to the “Torture Report” has been released.  I’ve scanned the first 40 pages.  One remarkable data point is that supposedly the CIA did not brief the President on the full extent of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” until April 8, 2006.  In short, the CIA and its hired contractors used certain torture techniques on their own authority for four years.  Here’s an excerpt from the report:

On August 1, 2002, based on comments from White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the talking points were revised to eliminate references to the waterboard.  CIA records indicate, however, that the talking points were not used to brief the president. On August 2, 2002, the National Security Council legal advisor informed the DCI’s chief of staff that “Dr. Rice had been informed that there would be no briefing of the President on this matter, but that the DCI had policy approval to employ the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Records state that prior to the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah in 2002, the CIA did not brief Secretary of State Colin Powell or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, two members of the National Security Council, on the techniques. The Committee, including the chairman and vice chairman, was also not briefed on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques prior to their use.

It seems like the CIA is shouldering all of the blame here.  The failure (if it was that) to brief the president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee, constitutes a fundamental breakdown in Constitutional safeguards.  (Unless, of course, the “failure” to brief senior civilian leaders was all about protecting them and maintaining “plausible deniability.”)

Whatever else the report reveals, this violation of the Constitution is especially egregious.  If true, it would suggest that the CIA should be severely disciplined or even disbanded.

But I truly doubt whether the buck stops with rogue elements in the CIA …

Update (12/10/14): Eric Fair was a contract interrogator for the Army in 2004.  In an Op-Ed for the New York Times today, he writes:

I was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I tortured.

Today, the Senate released its torture report. Many people were surprised by what it contained: accounts of waterboardings far more frequent than what had previously been reported, weeklong sleep deprivation, a horrific and humiliating procedure called “rectal rehydration.” I’m not surprised. I assure you there is more; much remains redacted.

Most Americans haven’t read the report. Most never will. But it stands as a permanent reminder of the country we once were.