A "Disappointment"

by publius

In reading over Bush’s press conference transcript, I was almost starting to feel some sympathy for him.  Until I got to this part, which responded to a request to identify his mistakes:

There have been disappointments.

Abu Ghraib, obviously, was a huge disappointment, during the presidency.

A “disappointment.”  That’s the type of language parents use when they catch their kids drinking.  It implies that they didn’t really have control.  The parents certainly didn't cause anything -- they were just disappointed that their very high standards weren’t being met.

That’s not at all what we have here though.  President Bush – authorizer of illegal torture – is not entitled to use the word “disappointment” to describe Abu Ghraib, as if it were some frat party gone horribly awry.  Abu Ghraib was – as both Jane Mayer and the Senate Armed Forces Committee (pdf) have extensively documented – the direct result of the President’s and his top officials’ authorization of torture.  And he knows it – and everyone else knows it too.

Indeed, what’s striking is how obvious the trail from SERE to Abu Ghraib is to anyone who cares to look.  It's almost embarrassingly clear.

The SERE tactics, as Sullivan notes, were designed to help the American military withstand illegal torture.  Here’s how the report (p.2) describes them.  See if any of these tactics sound vaguely familiar when thinking about the pictures from Abu Ghraib:

The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy’s SERE school, it included waterboarding.

Wow.  What a crazy coincidence that a few bad low-level apples just happened to mimic – precisely – Chinese Communist torture tactics.

Anyway, everyone should read the report to see the trail in all its glory.  But the nickel version goes something like this:  There’s a division with the Defense Department (DoD) – JPRA – that oversees the SERE tactics and the resistance training.  Beginning in December 2001 and beyond, the JPRA briefed, trained, and instructed both senior DoD officials and Gitmo interrogators. 

Amazingly, after Gitmo interrogators were actually flown to the US to be trained by JPRA people, SERE tactics started popping up at Gitmo.  Some months later, the Gitmo commander traveled to Iraq to toughen up interrogations of detainees.  Lo and behold, these very same tactics started popping up in Iraq as well.  No one could have predicted ...

The migration of the SERE tactics also generated legal disputes, and extensive and corroborating paper trails all along the way.  And the chronology works out perfectly – the OLC memos appeared precisely when they were needed.  (That's why the country should, at the very least, establish a 9/11-style Commission to investigate.  We need to gather and organize the remaining evidence, hopefully for future prosecutions down the road). 

When the Abu Ghraib torture came to light, all of these people knew exactly what had happened.  And I suspect it scared them.  Indeed, one of the few silver linings of the Abu Ghraib debacle is that several of these people probably had some sleepless nights in April 2004 wondering if they would be criminally prosecuted.  (They started sleeping easier, though, when Kerry pretty much avoided torture with a 10-foot pole throughout the campaign.)

But getting back to Bush, he knows all this history too.  He knows that he – and his senior officials – authorized the very tactics that showed up in Abu Ghraib.  If he was truly “disappointed” about anything, it was that people in the prison were stupid enough to take pictures of what the administration had tried so hard to keep from the public eye.

But they did.  And more than anything else - more than 9/11 or Katrina -- the image of the anonymous hooded figure with electrodes on his genitals will best capture the Bush legacy.  He and his administration morally stained this country -- and that's a damned spot that won't be coming out.

Comments

[Mr Duncan]

I think what he meant was he was disappointed that it got reported. He has not so much control over that.

[watchinginwonder]

Definitely what Mr. Duncan said.

[Observer]

Publius:

I agree with most of that. But I've got a slightly different gloss on what Bush meant by "a disappointment."

The policies authorized by high-level administration officials were clearly designed to sanction the use of coercive methods of interrogation, including some that can only be described as torture. But the key word there is interrogation. At Abu Ghraib, the guards went a step further. The abuse was initially sanctioned by interrogators who were looking to 'soften up' the prisoners, but it quickly spun out of control. The vast majority of what was done was quite simply sadistic. It served no real function, even in the minds of its perpetrators.

So when he says that "Abu Ghraib, obviously, was a huge disappointment," it's particularly revealing. It's not torture per se that's a disappointment. As best anyone can tell, he doesn't regret the torture of prisoners, so long as it serves (at least in his mind) an instrumental purpose. What he regrets is the application of the very methods his administration authorized for use in interrogations when they served no purpose other than the entertainment of the torturers. The disappointment is that things got out of hand - that, inexplicably to him, poorly-trained and inadequately-supervised troops failed to understand which human rights abuses were terrific, and which were disappointing.

What's interesting to me about this is that, eight years on, Bush is still locked into a mode of rigid self-justification. He doesn't seem able to understand the relationship between his decisions and their consequences. "I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not," he explained, "but they were -- things didn't go according to plan, let's put it that way." And that's the Bush mindset, in a nutshell. So long as his intent was pure, the consequences, however inevitable, cannot be considered mistakes. There's a total disconnect. You can authorize torture, and then be disappointed by human rights abuses. You can pressure your intelligence agencies to provide evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and then announce that "not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment." There's even a tiny element of pathos; it seems to be slowly dawning upon him that most of his decisions have resulted in horrific consequences, and yet he seems entirely incapable of understanding why that happened.

Six more days. I can't wait.

[Ugh]

How about the disappointment that more than seven years after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden is still around and merrily sending out audiotapes, Mr. President Dead-or-Alive?

[Nell]

It's true that the tortures used to train troops to resist in the SERE program were turned on the prisoners in Guantanamo and spread from there to Bagram and the military prisons in Iraq. But that's a partial and sanitized narrative of U.S. torture that accompanied the "war on terror".

First, many of the most damaging torture techniques used were not copied or learned from the Chinese who tortured U.S. prisoners during the Korean war. They were developed by the CIA through an extensive and long-lived program that began in the late 1940s and incorporated the results of agency-sponsored scientific research as well as incorporating techniques used by the Soviets, the Nazis, and the Japanese. This program is the focus of Alfred McCoy's definitive A Question of Torture.

The whole line fed to Jane Mayer by some CIA sources that "we found ourselves in September 2001 without any expertise in interrogation" is an astoundingly bold whopper considering the agency's, and parts of the U.S. military's, long-standing involvement with torture. It asks us to wipe out what's known about the joint CIA-military Phoenix program in Viet Nam, the at least three decades during which U.S. military instructors trained thousands of Latin American military officers in torture at the School of the Americas, and the teaching of torture techniques to police and paramilitary worldwide by CIA and agency-trained contractors.

Second, the risks of teaching torture supposedly for defensive purposes were obvious decades ago. (This is a phenomenon common to many "for defensive purposes only" programs -- biological weapons research, for example). Early in the SERE program, some Green Berets trained in it promptly turned the tortures on Vietnamese prisoners.

Third, physical abuse and tortures of the classic no-research-needed kind began in Afghanistan as soon as there were prisoners to abuse, and were routine at least through the first two years of Operation Enduring Freedom. John Walker Lindh was tortured by Marines, and not for interrogation purposes, within a day of his discovery by U.S. forces. Troops in Afghanistan (and Iraq) believed that they were avenging the September 11 attacks, and they were encouraged in that belief by the President and their chain of command.

Fourth, the relationship between U.S. Special Forces and the CIA is quite fluid, given that Special Forces personnel can be and regularly are temporarily detailed to the agency. This makes the "CIA exception" a mile wide, and all the more urgent to end. The Special Forces-run task force in Iraq (variously known as Task Force 121, TF 5, and several other shifting covers, reported on by Seymour Hirsh in 2004 and Eric Lichtblau in March 2006) used one of Saddam Hussein's former torture centers for the same purpose, along with a number of other houses throughout Iraq -- all with yards big enough to land helicopters. There is no evidence that the secretive task force has ceased operations.

Links to sources can be found in posts tagged 'torture' at my blog, and at the site of Valtin, a psychologist who focuses on the issue and periodically cross-posts at Daily Kos.

[George Tirebiter]

Feel sympathy for that prevaricating, arrogant sack of shit? Never, not me.

[Hogan]

Jon Stewart explains the true meaning of disappointment (starting around 4:30).