"An Intelligence Program We Know Has Helped Save Lives"

by Katherine

Senator Mitch McConnell, via the Corner:

"For example, I imagine it would be awkward for many of my Democrat colleagues to go home and explain a vote to provide sensitive, classified information to terrorists, to shut down an intelligence program that we know has helped save lives, or to allow international courts to define the meaning of Common Article III—rather than the U.S. Congress—and put our troops at risk.

What we do know for sure, without question -- no ambiguity -- is that the current program works and has saved us from terrorist attacks and prevented us from being attacked again at home for over five years. The President needs tools to conduct these programs effectively to protect Americans at home. His proposal for terrorist detainees is one of those important tools. We do not all agree at this point, but we will have that discussion on the Senate floor."

This isn't true. We do not know that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" have saved lives. The President claims that they have, but he is not a disinterested or trustworthy source. Although he was able to selectively declassify the intelligence that he thought best supported his argument, his evidence of the program's "saving lives" was vague and conclusory, and maybe also false.

What we do know for sure, without question -- no ambiguity -- is that the CIA's program has led to prisoners being tortured to death.

Newsweek reported yesterday that in negotiations with Congress, the CIA agreed to drop waterboarding, but is still seeking authorization for the following techniques:

(1) induced hypothermia; (2) long periods of forced standing; (3) sleep deprivation; (4) the "attention grab" (the forceful seizing of a suspect's shirt); (5) the "attention slap"; (6) the "belly slap"; and (7) sound and light manipulation.

Two of these these techniques are implicated in prisoners' deaths--one directly, one less so.

1. Hypothermia

At least one prisoner in CIA custody has died of "induced hypothermia." As Dana Priest reported in March 2005,

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.

The Afghan guards--paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit--dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.

As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic--"hypothermia" was listed as the cause of death--the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive's family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a "ghost detainee," the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.

"He just disappeared from the face of the earth," said one U.S. government official with knowledge of the case.

The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted, two of the officials said....

The Afghan detainee had been captured in Pakistan along with a group of other Afghans. His connection to al Qaeda or the value of his intelligence was never established before he died. "He was probably associated with people who were associated with al Qaeda," one U.S. government official said.

The CIA referred the case to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution, but according to the New York Times DOJ decided not to bring charges.

"Induced hypothermia" seems to have spread from the CIA to the military in Iraq. Tony Lagouranis, a U.S. Army interrogator who served near Mosul, told PBS that the Navy SEALs who used the technique did try to make sure that prisoners wouldn't freeze to death:

some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn't die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.

Despite these precautions, forced hypothermia may have contributed to the death of a 27-year-old Iraqi man named Fashad Mohamed.  Mohamed died in U.S. custody in Mosul, on April 5, 2004.  His autopsy report states on page 1:

This approximately 27 year-old male civilian, presumed Iraqi national, died in US custody approximately 72 hours after being apprehended. By report, physical force was required during his initial apprehension during a raid. During his confinement, he was hooded, sleep deprived, and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood.

The autopsy concludes on page 10 that the cause of death is "undetermined."  There are bruises and cuts suggesting Mohamed was beaten, but "no definitive evidence of any trauma significant enough to explain the death." The report states that cardiac failure and asphyxia also cannot be ruled out, and that "The decedent was also subject to cold and wet conditions, and hypothermia may have contributed to his death."

According to the Washington Post, Mohamed was captured by members of "Navy SEAL Team 7, which was carrying out clandestine operations in Iraq with the CIA." It is not clear, though, whether he was in the SEALs' custody when he was "subjected to cold and wet conditions" or when he died.

2. Forced Standing

The CIA is more directly linked to another prisoner death in Iraq. Mandael al-Jamadi, the detainee whose corpse appears packed in ice in the Abu Ghraib photographs, was killed by CIA interrogator Mark Swanner in November of 2003.

Jamadi died because he was suspended from the window bars in his cell by his arms, a form of torture known as "Palestinian hanging." As far as I know, this has never been one of the "tough interrogation techniques" that CIA interrogators were authorized to use. But Jamadi's death can also be understood as a case of "forced standing" gone wrong--or rather, gone even more wrong. It's bad enough to begin with:

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

Exhaustion and sleep deprivation may effectively yield confessions, but they also cause muscle failure and physical collapse. What if a prisoner collapses, and an interrogator mistakenly believes that he's faking it? What if he interprets it as an act of defiance? How does he force the prisoner to stay standing?

General Alberto Mora warned the Pentagon about what would happen:

If a person being forced to stand for hours decided to lie down, it would probably take force to get him to stand up again and stay standing...Once the initial barrier against the use of improper force had been breached, a phenomenon known as "force drift" would almost certainly begin to come into play. This term describes the observed tendency among interrogators who rely on force. If some force is good, these people come to believe, then the application of more force must be better. Thus, the level of force applied against an uncooperative witness tends to escalate such that, if left unchecked, force levels to include torture, could be reached.

This is exactly what happened in Jamadi's case. As reported by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker:

when the group reached the shower room Swanner told the M.P.s that “he did not want the prisoner to sit and he wanted him shackled to the wall.” (No explanation for this decision is recorded.) There was a barred window on one wall. Kenner and Nagy, using a pair of leg shackles, attached Jamadi’s arms, which had been placed behind his back, to the bars on the window....

The M.P.s’ sworn accounts to investigators suggest that, at least at first, Jamadi was able to stand up, without pain: autopsy records show that he was five feet ten, and, as Diaz explained to me, the window was about five feet off the ground. The accounts concur that, while Jamadi was able to stand without discomfort, he couldn’t kneel or sit without hanging painfully from his arms. Once he was secured, the M.P.s left him alone in the room with Swanner and the translator.

Less than an hour later, Diaz said, he was walking past the shower room when Swanner came out and asked for help, reportedly saying, “This guy doesn’t want to coöperate.” According to the NPR report, one of the C.I.A. men told investigators that he called for medical help, but there is no available record of a doctor having been summoned. When Diaz entered the shower room, he said, he was surprised to see that Jamadi’s knees had buckled, and that he was almost kneeling. Swanner, he said, wanted the soldiers to reposition Jamadi, so that he would have to stand more erectly. Diaz called for additional help from two other soldiers in his company, Sergeant Jeffery Frost and Dennis Stevanus. But after they had succeeded in making Jamadi stand for a moment, as requested, by hitching his handcuffs higher up the window, Jamadi collapsed again. Diaz told me, “At first I was, like, ‘This guy’s drunk.’ He just dropped down to where his hands were, like, coming out of his handcuffs. He looked weird. I was thinking, He’s got to be hurting. All of his weight was on his hands and wrists—it looked like he was about to mess up his sockets.”

Swanner, whom Diaz described as a “kind of shabby-looking, overweight white guy,” who was wearing black clothing, was apparently less concerned. “He was saying, ‘He’s just playing dead,’ ” Diaz recalled. “He thought he was faking. He wasn’t worried at all.” While Jamadi hung from his arms, Diaz told me, Swanner “just kept talking and talking at him. But there was no answer.”

Frost told C.I.A. investigators that the interrogator had said that Jamadi was just “playing possum.” But, as Frost lifted Jamadi upright by his jumpsuit, noticing that it was digging into his crotch, he thought, This prisoner is pretty good at playing possum. When Jamadi’s body went slack again, Frost recalled commenting that he “had never seen anyone’s arms positioned like that, and he was surprised they didn’t just pop out of their sockets.”

Diaz, sensing that something was wrong, lifted Jamadi’s hood. His face was badly bruised. Diaz placed a finger in front of Jamadi’s open eyes, which didn’t move or blink, and deduced that he was dead. When the men lowered Jamadi to the floor, Frost told investigators, “blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on.”

Another prisoner interrogated by the CIA in Iraq, Abdul Jameel, also seems to have died because of injuries suffered when forced into a standing position. You can read a summary of the case by Human Rights First on page 14 of this PDF if interested--I think I am going to spare you another round of graphic quotations from an autopsy.

***

I apologize for all the other graphic blockquotes in this post, but the only way I can think of to cut through all the euphemisms is to be as concrete and specific as possible. They can call it "tough interrogation" or "enhanced interrogation methods" or "an intelligence program that we know has helped save lives", but this is what the Senate is going to be debating for the next few weeks. McConnell thinks I should feel awkard opposing these things? He should feel awkward defending them. I hope there are some Senators who realize this.

There's a quotation which has been stuck in my head since yesterday, from an essay by Ansel Adams in book of photographs he took of Manzanar:

We are, in the main, protected and established in security considerably above other peoples. We take Americanism for granted; only when civil duties such as military service, jury duty, or the irksome payment of taxes, confront us do we sense the existence of government and authority. We go through conventional gestures of patriotism, discuss the Constitution with casual conviction, contradict our principles with the distortions of race prejudices and class distinctions, and otherwise escape the implications of our civilization. America will take care of us, America is as stable as the mountains, as severely eternal as the ocean and the sky!...Only when our foundations are shaken, our lives distorted by some great catastrophe, do we become aware of the potentionals of our system and our government.

This is not a week to take Americanism for granted. Please call your Senators and Representatives. 

Comments

[Ugh]

Apparently torture does work, sometimes,

How does that old saying go? You can torture some of the people all of the time, and torture all of the people some of the time, but you can't torture all of the people all of the time, unless it's Michael Jackson at the Superbowl Halftime Show.

[Slartibartfast]

Are you insinuating anything at all about the famed "wardrobe malfunction", in relation to MJ's possibly-manifold bent?

[Ugh]

I don't think so, though, I'm not thinking too clearly. I was mostly thinking of his show when he was launched out of the floor of the stage (after several other "MJs" were launched out of other stages) and then stood there motionless for like a half hour. Pure torture. Not as bad as Howard the Duck though.

[Slartibartfast]

Oh, gawd, you would have to bring that up.

Howard put the kibosh on any Leah Thompson fantasies I might have (not saying I did, mind you) had.

[Ugh]

Howard put the kibosh on any Leah Thompson fantasies I might have (not saying I did, mind you) had.

Jesus that's right she was in that. And wasn't there a scene where she pulled condomn out of his wallet? Blyeah.

[JakeB]

"Howard put the kibosh on any Leah Thompson fantasies I might have (not saying I did, mind you) had."

"Jesus that's right she was in that. And wasn't there a scene where she pulled condomn out of his wallet? Blyeah."

Don't I have enough nightmares what with the political scene without you two adding to it? It's like Laurel & Hardy except you want us to vomit instead of laugh.