Dec
30, 2014 http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/30/new-politics-torture/
New York Review contributor Mark Danner has been writing about
the use of torture by the US government since the first years after September
11. Following the release this month of the Senate’s report on the CIA torture
program, Hugh Eakin spoke to Danner about some of the most startling findings
of the investigation and what it reveals about the continued political debate
surrounding the program.
Hugh Eakin: Nearly
six years ago, you published the secret
report by the International Committee of the Red Cross
documenting the CIA’s torture of more than a dozen “high value” detainees. And
now we have the Senate’s extensive investigation of the torture program itself.
What are some of the most revealing findings of the Senate report?
Mark Danner: There is a lot in the executive summary that
we already knew but that is now told in appalling detail that we hadn’t seen
before. The relentlessness, day in day out, of these techniques—walling,
close-confinement, water-dousing, waterboarding, the newly revealed “rectal
rehydration,” and various other disgusting and depraved things— and the
totality of their effect when taken together is recounted in numbing, revolting
detail. The effect can only be conveyed by a full reading, through page after
awful page of this five-hundred-page document, which is after all less than 10
percent of the report itself.
What
I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program
was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves,
which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who
were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an
interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism,
had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else for that matter. When it
came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they
were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them
more than $80 million.
The
second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did
so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not
serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have
led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but
from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely.
But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having
obtained essential, lifesaving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had
been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case
is devastating.
HE - This was a central question the Senate investigation
was looking at, wasn’t it? The issue of whether actual intelligence was gained
from torture. In essence, “Was it worth it?”
MD
- From the beginning the CIA had claimed that these techniques were absolutely
essential to saving the lives of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of
thousands of people. Those claims have been made by many people and it is
another revelation of the report that we see CIA people, notably the lawyers,
raising these claims before the program even existed. The lawyers seemed to be
thinking, “This is the only way we’re going to get away with this.” There is a
quote in the report that people would look more kindly on torture—that is the
word used—if it was used to stop imminent attacks. This was the so-called
“necessity defense,” which, as the CIA lawyers put it, could be invoked to
protect from prosecution “US officials who tortured to obtain information that
saved many lives.” This idea was there right from the inception of the program.
HE - So the CIA is already using the word “torture”
in the earliest documents the Senate committee looked at?
MD
- This is before the program even began, in the weeks after September 11, when
CIA lawyers and other officials are talking about using torture. And they use
the word.
HE - And there aren’t any detainees at this point.
MD
- There really aren’t. This is near the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign,
and they didn’t have anyone, certainly not anyone considered “high value.”
HE - Do we get any closer in the report to an
original decision by the Bush administration or the CIA to use torture?
MD
- No, but we do get a hint that there wasn’t such a moment. You expect that
government officials who make the momentous decision to introduce an officially
sanctioned torture program in the United States would have a series of serious
meetings in which they would analyze the history of interrogation as it has
been used by different government agencies. They would consult with allies who
have a history of using these and other techniques, about what works and what
doesn’t. They would make a general study of what is necessary and what is not.
They would consult with legal experts. They would do a number of things.
In
this case, as far as we can tell, most of these things were not done. We find a
bare minimum of policy discussion. We know the CIA did very little if any
research about what would work and wouldn’t. We see no decision tree springing
from the felt actual need to do torture in specific cases, beginning with
prisoners in hand who are unwilling to talk. Talk of torture itself—the wisps
of the discussion, the ghostly mentions of the word—start very early after
September 11, when “high value” detainees are generally not available, let
alone refusing to talk.
HE - We think of Vice President Dick Cheney as the
torture program’s most vocal defender. Is there new insight into his
involvement at the beginning? Or of other members of the executive branch?
MD
- Cheney was the dominant player in the critical argument about the Geneva
Conventions whereby the administration concluded that al-Qaeda and the Taliban
would not be considered POW’s according to Geneva standards—and, most
important, that Common Article Three, which mandates a minimum level of
treatment for all detainees, and this in effect prohibits torture and cruel,
inhuman, and degrading treatment, would not apply either. (The Supreme Court
later rejected this judgment.) So we already knew the vice-president was very
much engaged with the question of whether or not we could do these things.
Where
he first comes in in the actual discussion of techniques of interrogation is
unclear. Because the Democratic majority on the committee agreed to limit the
report to the CIA, we really don’t have definitive answers on who made critical
decisions within the executive branch and when they were made. We have an essential report from the Office of
Professional Responsibility in the Department of Justice about how torture was
approved. We have an extensive and immensely valuable Senate Armed Services
Committee report from 2008 about the
military’s use of torture. And now we have this report, or rather this
executive summary of a report, about the CIA’s use of torture. There are a
dozen or so reports about different aspects of Abu Ghraib. But we still have no
report on how decisions were made in the executive branch, which is obviously
critical.
The
White House, including the offices of the president and the vice-president, and
the National Security Council—these three vital areas of decision-making still
have not been examined. And there’s a reason for that. The Republicans refused
to sign on to the Senate investigation unless these areas were put beyond the
committee’s ken. The original vote by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence to pursue the CIA investigation in 2009 was 14-1, and they got the
Republicans on board by agreeing not to look at the executive. As it was, most
of the Republicans jumped ship and abandoned the report anyway. Now, in their
own 167-page summary of their “minority views,” they attack the report for
“faulty analysis, serious inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of fact” and
argue that the program was essential to gaining vital intelligence that saved
many lives. But they present no convincing evidence.
HE - What about the CIA leadership? One figure who
seems central in some of the documentation is the CIA’s former acting general
counsel, John Rizzo, who I take it was involved in the program from the outset
and stayed in that position through 2009.
MD
- Rizzo, along with other CIA lawyers, seems to have been the point person on
most of these things. And he wasn’t an outside guy. He’d been at the CIA since
the late 1970s, in the council’s office. He’d had a career in the CIA. And he
also was a main author of the 2001 Memorandum of Notification to the president
which gave the CIA broad power to do this—even though it apparently didn’t
specify any specific interrogation techniques. (The president, according to the
intelligence committee report, was not briefed in detail on the actual
techniques until 2006.)
HE - Again, this is right after September 11?
MD
- Yes, George W. Bush signed the Memorandum of Notification on September 17,
2001. It’s the key document and it has never been made public. Even though
everyone takes it for granted that it was the Office of Legal Counsel in the
Department of Justice that permitted the torture program through its so-called
“torture memos” that legalized torture the following summer, the original
permission seems to have come from the Memorandum of Notification, a
presidential document drafted by the CIA itself.
HE - So the CIA is already talking about torture
before they have a suspect in mind, and then when they do finally have a
suspect, a few months later, and this is Abu Zubaydah, this radical course
seems to be projected onto him.
MD
- Abu Zubaydah is the crucial case. He was captured in March 2002 in Pakistan.
He had been badly wounded and had to be hospitalized, but very soon he was
interrogated by two experienced FBI interrogators using traditional
“rapport-building” techniques and he did yield up a good deal of information.
In the view of the FBI interrogators he was compliant and cooperative, and the
information he gave during those initial weeks of talking to the FBI—that
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (aka “Mukhtar”) was the mastermind behind the September
11 attacks, and that a man revealed to be Jose Padilla was plotting to become a
so-called dirty bomber—is the very information that is cited by the CIA to
bolster their claim that they got information through torture from Abu
Zubaydah. The report confirms what the FBI interrogators had long claimed: that
Abu Zubaydah revealed both these pieces of intelligence during their initial
interrogation, conducted, without torture, by using traditional methods.
HE - The FBI interrogators were fluent Arabic
speakers and deeply knowledgeable about al-Qaeda. And they got Abu Zubaydah to
talk through traditional interrogation methods?
MD
- These were the standard FBI protocols—excluding torture—that had long been
used, but the FBI interrogator Ali Soufan was not only experienced with
al-Qaeda, he was by many accounts the best interrogator in the government. He
had interrogated al-Qaeda suspects in the USS Cole bombing.
HE - Abu Zubaydah had been captured by the CIA. How
was it that the FBI interrogated him first?
MD
- It’s interesting. He was the CIA’s prisoner. He was taken to a black site in
Thailand run by the CIA. Initially, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center didn’t
send anyone to interrogate him because, according to Soufan, they didn’t
believe it was Abu Zubaydah. So there was this initial delay, which allowed the
FBI to start on the job of the interrogation.
Only
when the CIA realized it was really Abu Zubaydah did they start to send their
own people. And among these are the former military psychologists James Mitchell
and Bruce Jessen, who, now working as CIA contractors, and actually conducted
that interrogation, and were eventually paid $81 million for their efforts.
There was this period that they overlapped with the FBI, and Ali Soufan, who
recognized them as rank amateurs, objected strenuously. The FBI eventually
pulled out of the interrogation entirely. And this is another reason the
program was such a disaster. Because of it you have the people in the
government who know the most about interrogating al-Qaeda members not even
taking part.
HE - And when the decision to start using torture
is made, the Bush administration is on some level directly involved in the
interrogation of Abu Zubaydah?
MD
- Right after they captured Abu Zubaydah, Bush talked about him publicly, at a
fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut. And already in Newsweek, in April 2002, there was an article about whether Abu
Zubaydah was cooperating or not. And though they are all blind quotes you can
pretty much pick out which are from the CIA and which from the FBI. There’s
this amazing bureaucratic tug of war going on in the press. Here’s this guy at
this black site in Thailand, and meanwhile, both bureaucracies are fighting it
out about whether he should be tortured in Newsweek. It still is astonishing. He’s there, in the hospital,
and officials from the two agencies are being quoted, the FBI saying they’re
getting a lot from the prisoner and the CIA saying they’re not getting
anything.
But
what is fascinating is what seems to have led the CIA to resort to this
improvised, amateurish program. It was the utterly mistaken conviction that Abu
Zubaydah was withholding information about attacks that would have killed thousands
of people. So here we come back to the same theme of actionable intelligence,
needing to use these techniques to find out about plots that would threaten
thousands of people. So we are back to the raison d’être of the program itself.
HE - It sounds like a tautology. They have to
torture Abu Zubaydah so that he will reveal a “ticking time bomb,” and they
need that revelation to justify the use of torture. And the use of torture is
based on the fact that he hasn’t revealed any such plot.
MD
- All came from the conviction that Abu Zubaydah has knowledge of plots to kill
thousands of people, and that conviction stems from an absolutely mistaken idea
of who Abu Zubaydah is. The CIA officers are convinced that Abu Zubaydah is the
third or fourth man in al-Qaeda, which he is not; they are convinced he is this
very important guy that would have this information most vital information on
current planning. But he’s not. He’s not even a member of al-Qaeda. In fact, he
was something like a travel agent for al-Qaeda, which meant of course he had a
lot of useful information. But because the CIA was convinced that he was at the
pinnacle of the organization, they thought that even though he seemed to be
cooperating with these FBI interrogators, he was actively withholding what they
really needed: information about an impending “threat.”
Eventually,
as I’ve described in The New York
Review, he was put under forced sleep deprivation for 180 hours and
waterboarded eighty-three times. It’s extraordinary that the last two times—the
eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings—were imposed on the direct orders
of officials at CIA headquarters, over the strenuous objections of the
interrogators who were performing them. The interrogators judged Abu Zubaydah
was completely compliant: he just had nothing to give up.
It’s
an epistemological paradox: How do you prove what you don’t know? And from this
open question comes this anxiety-ridden conviction that he must know, he must
know, he must know. So even though the interrogators are saying he’s compliant,
he’s telling us everything he knows—even though the waterboarding is nearly
killing him, rendering him “completely non-responsive,” as the report
says—officials at headquarters was saying he has to be waterboarded again, and again,
because he still hadn’t given up information about the attacks they were
convinced had to be coming. They kept pushing from the other side of the world
for more suffering and more torture.
And
finally, grudgingly, after the eighty-second and eighty-third waterboardings,
they came to the conclusion that Abu Zubaydah didn’t have that information. So
when they judged the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah a
“success,” what that really meant was that the use of those techniques, in this
brutal, appalling extended fashion, had let them prove, to their satisfaction,
that he didn’t know what they had been convinced that he did know. It had
nothing to do with him giving more information as he was waterboarded. The use
of these techniques let them alleviate their own anxiety. And their anxiety was
based on complete misinformation. Complete ignorance about who this man
actually was.
You
see this in this report again and again. You see that CIA headquarters is
absolutely convinced that these people know about pending attacks. And what the
torture proves is that they don’t know it. And mostly the reason for this is
that information about current attacks was very, very tightly held. That’s the
way terrorist organizations work. They’re cellular structures, with information
distributed on a need-to-know basis. And unless you manage to capture the
person about to conduct the attack, or Osama bin Laden, you are going to have a
very hard time finding people who know about current attacks.
HE - There are moments of clarity in the report
where CIA interrogators are conceding, internally, that we know astonishingly
little about who these guys are. And yet this huge machinery of torture was put
into place and defended at all costs.
MD
- We translated our ignorance into their pain. That is the story the Senate
report tells. Our ignorance, our anxiety, our guilt, into their pain. It’s one
reason why I think—looking much more broadly at policy—it was a grave error for
President Bush not to replace people in the CIA after September 11. Because you
had an agency that out of its guilt about having failed to prevent those
attacks—guilt that extended from the director down—could think only of
preventing another attack. And while preventing another attack was extremely
important, it wasn’t the only thing. And I think here their hysteria caused
them to operate in an irrational and counterproductive way.
HE - For all the talk of getting urgent information
out of Abu Zubayah, the report suggests that the CIA didn’t actually begin
interrogating him immediately when it took over from the FBI.
MD
- There was this delay of forty-seven days, it was bizarre. There was the
struggle with the FBI, when the CIA comes in and stops the FBI interrogations.
And the report quotes the FBI interrogators as saying to FBI headquarters, “we
tried politely to suggest that valuable time was passing where we could attempt
to solicit threat information.” But then, after the CIA takes over and
transfers him from the hospital back to the black site in Thailand, he is left
in isolation for seven weeks. The real CIA interrogation didn’t begin until
August 4, 2002.
Ali
Soufan, in a recent piece in The Guardian, talks about how insane
it was that they were talking about a ticking bomb, and then just left him
alone, uninterrogated for forty-seven days, even after the FBI had gotten these
other bits of information. It may have been they were preparing what they
wanted to do. It may have been they were waiting for the critical “torture
memos” from the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. The
report doesn’t really explain it.
The
executive summary, among other things, is the story of an agency persistently
shooting itself in the foot. Persistently not getting the information it should
have because of the use of these techniques. These techniques, we should
remember, were not only depraved, immoral, illegal; they were
counterproductive. Put another way, the United States would have been in a
better position to know about al-Qaeda and to prevent future attacks if these
techniques had not been used. This is an amazing statement but I believe it is
the only conclusion that can be drawn from a fair reading of the text.
HE - Does the Senate report change how we think
about the torture program?
MD
- From the beginning, there’s been the story, and then there’s been the
revelations about the story. What was going on has been in front of the country
almost from the beginning. In December 2002, The Washington Post ran on its front page a long article on the “stress and
duress” techniques that the Americans were using in Afghanistan; a few months
later The New York Times
fronted a similar long report. These were followed in the spring of 2004 by the
extensive revelations about Abu Ghraib, and then leaks about torture, including
the torture memos, one of which was leaked to The Wall Street Journal in June 2004. The New York Times wrote about waterboarding in a piece in May
2005. That year also ABC News broadcast a list of the techniques being used at
the black sites, which had been revealed by Dana Priest in The Washington Post and Jane Mayer in
The New Yorker. And we got
another series of revelations during the spring of 2009, after Obama took
office. The extent of the abuses was clearly stated in the Red Cross report,
which we disclosed in The New York Review, and partly as a
result of that publication, government officials said, came the decision to
release the torture memos from the Office of Legal Counsel. And again and
again, we have this reaction on the part of the public, “Oh my God! This is
shocking.” And now we have it again.
But
during this time—since 2005 really—the public debate about torture has been
continuously developing toward a partisan divide. One major party has a clear
position on torture: it is for it. We see a grim flowering of this now with the
publication of this executive summary of the Senate report on torture.
Republicans have come out in a very partisan way in defense of the CIA, and
actually in favor of these techniques. One of the interesting things about the
reaction to the report is that those who have come out to denounce it have done
so in the vaguest terms. They haven’t engaged with it specifically. You simply
have a persistent effort to make the claims for torture’s vital efficacy all
over again. The worst example of this is Dick Cheney, who has essentially said,
and I quote, “the report is full of crap.” He hasn’t bothered to read the
report and doesn’t feel it necessary to engage in any of the specific evidence
of CIA torture and the devastating conclusions about it.
Some
Democrats have come out against the CIA actions. The most aggressive include
Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, Senator Mark Udall,
and Senator Ron Wyden. But many other Democrats have been quiet, including, I
should add, the most important Democrat, Barack Obama, who has been very little
in evidence. Until this week, he has essentially been AWOL. Absent Without
Leave. He hasn’t come out strongly endorsing the report. He has been very vague
when talking about the report. He has said simply, “this is not who we are.”
That is the persistent quote from him, a phrase I find absolutely maddening,
because, What does it mean? I guess it means: “This is not what we would do, if
we were who we said we are.” But we seem not to be who we said we are because
this is what we have done. If what he means is, the CIA shouldn’t have done
this because it is against what Americans believe, he should say that clearly
and definitively. This is, after all, or has been, his public position; that he
refuses to embrace it now, apparently out of fear of antagonizing the CIA, is
shameful. And it is sad proof of how dependent the country now is on the CIA,
from their drones to their paramilitary assassination squads. From having taken
its place as the lead agency in torturing detainees the CIA has become the lead
agency in assassinating suspected terrorists, and that, thirteen years after
September 11, is the reality of the “war on terror.” The president needs them.
Indeed
this quote—“This is not who we are”—in all of its ambiguity is a fine summary
of the president’s position. That and his earlier statement that “we need to be
looking forward and not backward.” When any kind of
accountability—investigation, prosecution, all such activities—are the heart of
looking backward. And he says we need to be looking forward.
HE - The question remains, what kind of
accountability now is possible? Some have noted that the Senate Select
Committee did not include specific recommendations with the report.
MD
- There seems to be an assumption that the recommendations are self-evident—at
least the major one, which is that we should never do this again. Which the
administration has, however squeamishly, also said. But the report should have
had very clear recommendations. And also a summary that said that one of the
main findings of the investigation was not simply the pain imposed on
individuals, or the law-breaking, or the moral reprehensibleness of it. It was
that there was a fundamental corruption of governance, in which the CIA became
this body that persistently lied, not only to Congress, which was supposed to
oversee it, but to the executive branch to which it ostensibly reported.
HE - And even to the Office of Legal Counsel in the
Justice Department. The OLC, which for so long in the public perception has
been understood as a central instrument in the torture program. The report
shows that the lawyers in that office who drafted the “torture” memos were
themselves sort of duped too, is that correct?
MD
- Yes. And indeed that would be an obvious avenue for investigation and
possible prosecution, though the administration shows no interest in pursuing
it. The CIA was actually misleading the Department of Justice. The report shows
that the information given to the DOJ by the CIA in order for the DOJ to make
its determination in the summer of 2002 that these techniques were legal—was
misleading and wrong; notably, that the techniques were not applied as
described but much more brutally, especially waterboarding. John Yoo, the
author of the original torture memo, already told the Office of Professional
Responsibility during their investigation that if waterboarding was performed
as it was described in the press he would not have judged it legal. And the
report shows that indeed the CIA performed the technique in a much more brutal
manner than it admitted to the Department of Justice lawyers.
This
kind of corruption through mendacity has continued, and we see it clearly now,
in this cheerleading society organized by the CIA, consisting mostly of
ex-officials, who have come out publicly not only to defend the agency but also
to defend torture itself. The CIA is not supposed to be lobbying for torture in
the public realm. That’s not what the billions of dollars the taxpayers give it
are supposed to be spent on.
We’re
in this surrealistic world, in which, twelve years after these decisions to use
torture have secretly been made, we’re seeing a public effort at disinformation
spreading throughout the country, through all the media outlets, cheerleading
for torture. It’s quite an astonishing thing: torture, which used to be
illegal, which used to be anathema, has now become a policy choice.
HE - A choice that even now, after the report, some
are still arguing for.
MD
- Exactly. In 2005, when the program, still secret, was beginning to wind down,
a major poll found that 38 percent of the public agreed that torture could and
should be used on certain occasions; now that number, depending on the poll,
has risen to about 50 percent. This means that the original argument, in
defense of “enhanced interrogation techniques” or—in President Bush’s
phrase—the “alternative set of procedures,” has led us down an increasingly
dark dead end. For what is the conclusion here? If torture was such a good
idea, if it was so necessary, if it saved so many thousands of lives when
nothing else could, then why did we stop doing it? Why aren’t we doing it right
now? And I think on the Republican side, some arguments lately have come very
close to asserting this. So we have torture as a policy choice whose popularity
is growing.
It’s
a deeply perverse situation that goes beyond the original choice to use torture
itself. It’s also a result of the ambivalent way this choice was treated by
Barack Obama and his administration. Though President Obama formally abolished
torture with an executive order on his second day in office, his refusal to
take other steps—to approve investigations, prosecutions, or at least a
bipartisan commission—means that only his signature on that executive order
stands between us and the possibility of more torture in the future. If this
issue is raised in the Republican primaries in 2016, I’d expect that most
politicians on that stage will declare themselves firmly in favor of “enhanced
interrogation techniques.” We may not torture now, but because torture has
become a recognized policy choice, it is perfectly conceivable that our
political masters, depending on who they are, might well decide to do so in the
future. This is where we find ourselves, a dozen years after Abu Zubaydah first
was strapped down to that waterboard.
