Still More Torture

by hilzoy

From ABC (h/t Katherine):

"Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March 2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence officers and supervisors.

They say they are revealing specific details of the techniques, and their impact on confessions, because the public needs to know the direction their agency has chosen. All gave their accounts on the condition that their names and identities not be revealed. Portions of their accounts are corrobrated by public statements of former CIA officers and by reports recently published that cite a classified CIA Inspector General's report. (...)

The CIA sources described a list of six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" instituted in mid-March 2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use the techniques:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

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.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch."

Great. And, as others have said before, it doesn't even work:

"The techniques are controversial among experienced intelligence agency and military interrogators. Many feel that a confession obtained this way is an unreliable tool. Two experienced officers have told ABC that there is little to be gained by these techniques that could not be more effectively gained by a methodical, careful, psychologically based interrogation. According to a classified report prepared by the CIA Inspector General John Helgerwon and issued in 2004, the techniques "appeared to constitute cruel, and degrading treatment under the (Geneva) convention," the New York Times reported on Nov. 9, 2005.

It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough," said former CIA officer Bob Baer.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and a deputy director of the State Department's office of counterterrorism, recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust … than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets."

One argument in favor of their use: time. In the early days of al Qaeda captures, it was hoped that speeding confessions would result in the development of important operational knowledge in a timely fashion.

However, ABC News was told that at least three CIA officers declined to be trained in the techniques before a cadre of 14 were selected to use them on a dozen top al Qaeda suspects in order to obtain critical information. In at least one instance, ABC News was told that the techniques led to questionable information aimed at pleasing the interrogators and that this information had a significant impact on U.S. actions in Iraq.

According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals.

His statements became part of the basis for the Bush administration claims that Iraq trained al Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. Sources tell ABC that it was later established that al Libbi had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

"This is the problem with using the waterboard. They get so desperate that they begin telling you what they think you want to hear," one source said."

They monitor this closely, but there have been, um, mistakes:

"When properly used, the techniques appear to be closely monitored and are signed off on in writing on a case-by-case, technique-by-technique basis, according to highly placed current and former intelligence officers involved in the program. In this way, they say, enhanced interrogations have been authorized for about a dozen high value al Qaeda targets — Khalid Sheik Mohammed among them. According to the sources, all of these have confessed, none of them has died, and all of them remain incarcerated. (...)

According to the sources, when an interrogator wishes to use a particular technique on a prisoner, the policy at the CIA is that each step of the interrogation process must be signed off at the highest level — by the deputy director for operations for the CIA. A cable must be sent and a reply received each time a progressively harsher technique is used. The described oversight appears tough but critics say it could be tougher. In reality, sources said, there are few known instances when an approval has not been granted. Still, even the toughest critics of the techniques say they are relatively well monitored and limited in use.

Two sources also told ABC that the techniques — authorized for use by only a handful of trained CIA officers — have been misapplied in at least one instance.

The sources said that in that case a young, untrained junior officer caused the death of one detainee at a mud fort dubbed the "salt pit" that is used as a prison. They say the death occurred when the prisoner was left to stand naked throughout the harsh Afghanistan night after being doused with cold water. He died, they say, of hypothermia.

According to the sources, a second CIA detainee died in Iraq and a third detainee died following harsh interrogation by Department of Defense personnel and contractors in Iraq. CIA sources said that in the DOD case, the interrogation was harsh, but did not involve the CIA."

Last but not least, this article contains explicit confirmation that sometimes, extraordinary rendition is actually aimed at having prisoners tortured. This was clear before -- you don't render prisoners to Uzbekistan for their health -- but now it is clearly stated:

"There have been several dozen instances of rendition. There have been a little over a dozen authorized enhanced interrogations. As a result, the enhanced interrogation program has been described as one encompassing 100 or more prisoners. Multiple CIA sources told ABC that it is not. The renditions have also been described as illegal. They are not, our sources said, although they acknowledge the procedures are in an ethical gray area and are at times used for the convenience of extracting information under harsher conditions that the U.S. would allow."

So, as we have known all along, our country is run by people who are willing to throw away common human decency and the moral high ground, decades of adherence to international law, our reputation for something resembling a concern for human rights, and an awful lot of hearts and minds for the sake of inaccurate information. So let me just say, for the record:

Toughness in the war on terror is not about advocating the most appalling things possible; nor is unwillingness to use appalling methods a sign of weakness or naivete. Toughness requires the willingness to think hard about what will actually produce the results you want to produce and what will not. Sometimes, what needs to be done is morally wrong. In that case, you have a genuine conflict. But sometimes what needs to be done is also the principled thing, and opposition to doing the principled thing comes not from some genuine need, but from other people's need to prove their anti-terrorist credentials by advocating savagery. At times like this, the hardest thing to do, and the one that requires genuine courage, is to advocate doing the decent thing regardless.

We are in the hands of people who don't recognize this: who live in a fantasy world in which you don't need to think before you take action, and in which striking a tough pose is all that matters. And, as always, other people are paying the price. Those other people include not just terrorists like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, but innocent detainees, and also our own troops, who pay the price when civilians decide on policies that make people hate us.

That we chose leaders who don't know the difference between posturing and reality is to our lasting shame.

Comments

[dmbeaster]

But didn't Georgie tell me the US doesn't do torture -- its just bad apples?

Liar.

[Brad R.]

Hil- calling attention to this makes you a loser-defeatist. Just thought I'd say.

[Katherine]

I remember saying when it was first reported by Jane Mayer that the al-Libbi case was the perfect little parable about everything that was wrong with the Bush administration's war. Little did I know how perfect--Mayer reported that he had confessed under torture in Egypt, been cited in Powell's UN speech, and later recanted. I didn't know then that he was waterboarded in US custody, that both the DIA and CIA disbelieved his testimony months before Powell used it in front of the UN.

Well, actually, he's only half the parable--the Arar case, which demonstrates torture leading to false information leading to the torture an innocent person, is the other half.

[lily]

I saw the TV news coverage of this while visting my boyfriend's mom. I have very little exposure to the MSM, so it was an interesting experience for me. I triedn to gage how a person who routinely watches TV news would react, but I really can'ttell. Paul's mom ignored it (she's deaf) and her visitng nurse registered no reaction. I got the impression from the way the story was presented that the CIA was using torture against vey bad, evil, scarey people who had to be tortured--the news story did not make it clear that people were confessing to thingsd they didn't do. It was not clear from the presentatioon that the CIAguys were objecting to the agency's tactics.
It is very frightening to me how poorly stories like this are covered.

[Bernard Yomtov]

Orin Kerr at Volokh has posted this news as well.

Read the comments if you have a strong stomach.

[LizardBreath]

I was just coming over here to mention the Volokh comments. I was going to jump in, but couldn't figure out what I could possibly say to them.

[bob mcmanus]

I was reading a comment over at Volokh's to the effect of not caring about KSM but worrying about a slippery slope. A very conservative thought entered my mind, like a earwig. There was a discussion at unfogged about whether virtue was divisible, whether one could sustain nine virtues while abandoning one. The consensus was that Aristotle said no.

I guess the point here is that the abandonment of standards, practices, rules in one area of behavior creates a general corruption that shows up in an unrelated activity. Torture leads to contractor corruption, deficit spending, cronyism.

[ral]

Ah, bob, but which is cause and which effect?

I took a stab at reading the comments over there, too. It's not news that there are people who are willing to justify torture. These arguments flared in the comments on Political Animal back when the Abu Ghraib photographs were first published.

So far, anyway, at least President Bush still feels compelled to proclaim that "we do not torture." Alas, one can't say the same for Dick Cheney.

[bob mcmanus]

"Ah, bob, but which is cause and which effect?"

Deficit spending, judicial activism, and late-term abortions leading inexorably to torture? Conservatives might like that analysis.

But as I understand, and I may have misspoken in my last comment, in virtue ethics there is no cause-and-effect, no slippery slopes, no prioritization of the virtues, no partial corruption. You are in grace or in sin, virtuous or wholly corrupt.

Most of us are wholly corrupt, most of the time.

[PghMike]

There are some very interesting questions here. What this article basically says is that one of the most important sources mentioned in Powell's UN speach, al Libbi, provided the information used in the speech only after being tortured by Americans.

Any half-way intelligent person would know that this means that the information is likely to be false. Did Colin Powell know that the information he presented was obtained through torture? If not, who decided to filter out that detail? How about Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld?

Using information extracted by torture to justify a war, without telling anyone that the information was extracted by torture, and thus much less reliable than it would otherwise appear, is a crime.

This cries out for a real investigation.

[some of the people]

"Most of us are wholly corrupt, most of the time."

Others of us just dream.

[Katherine]

They also knew in advance that Libi was probably not telling the truth. At least, the CIA and the DIA had both said so. I don't know if Powell knew.