On the City Journal website, Heather Mac Donald responds to my and Marty Lederman’s dissent from her anti-anti-torture article. She writes:
The Fay and Schlesinger reports provide no evidence for the proposition that the CIA’s very aggressive secret methods allegedly used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammad influenced either the interrogation rules at Iraq or the prisoner abuse.
Huh? That’s the entire central point of both reports. Reading her piece, it’s not obvious she has read the reports at all. She frames her argument by asserting that the “narrative” of the migration of torture techniques from Gitmo to Iraq is an invention of the press and liberals. In fact, that entire narrative is that of the offical government reports themselves. The very word “migrate” is Schlesinger’s coinage. She writes: “The decision on the Geneva conventions was irrelevant to interrogation practices in Iraq.” Every single report on the abuses says the exact opposite.
THE TRUTH: Here’s Lederman’s useful summary of what the reports actually say:
The reports explain in detail that the interrogators at Guantanamo, and the conflicting and confusing set of directives from the Pentagon for GTMO, ‘circulated’ freely to Afghanistan and then to Iraq (Schlesinger 9). Lieutenant General Sanchez, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force in Iraq, approved techniques going beyond those approved for GTMO, ‘using reasoning’ from the President’s February 7, 2002 directive on unlawful combatants (id. at 10). The ‘existence of confusing and inconsistent interrogation technique policies,’ including a ‘proliferation of guidance and information from other theatres of operation,’ and the fact that personnel involved in interrogation in GTMO and Afghanistan ‘were called upon to establish and conduct interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib,’ all contributed ‘to the belief that additional interrogation techniques were condoned in order to gain intelligence’ (Jones 15-16; Fay 8, 10, 22). ‘The lines of authority and the prior legal opinions blurred’ (Fay 10), and ‘DoD’s development of multiple policies on interrogation operations for use in different theatres or operations confused Army and civilian Interrogators at Abu Ghraib’ (Fay Finding No. 7).
The point is that the category of “unlawful combatant” “migrated” from Guantanamo and the CIA to Iraq and the general military, as did the non-Geneva methods of interrogating them. Was this the intention? We simply don’t know.
HAS SHE READ THE REPORTS? What we do know is that all the reports specifically say that the relaxation of existing CIA rules, ostensibly for very few cases, had a huge impact on the general conflict. The hundreds of incidents of torture that we know about (and we don’t know everything because much of the CIA’s operations were off-limits even to the official investigators) are inexplicable without this. We know that the Pentagon distributed the new rules widely – and that brutality occurred across the theater of war thereafter. The only way Mac Donald can avoid the obvious question as to how all these torture incidents then occurred is simply by pretending that none of them happened at all. Mac Donald further says of Abu Ghraib: “Though [the photos] showed the sadism of a prison out of control, they showed nothing about interrogation.” In the first paragraph of the Schlesinger report, we read: “We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.” Mac Donald also argues that “For the record, I explicitly reject torture in my article.” That’s true. But it’s only true because, for Mac Donald, even “water-boarding,” the technique that Condi Rice has explicitly insisted on retaining for the CIA, is not obviously “torture”:
Later, the CIA is said to have used ‘water-boarding’ – temporarily submerging a detainee in water to induce the sensation of drowning – on Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Water-boarding is the most extreme method the CIA has applied, according to a former Justice Department attorney, and arguably it crosses the line into torture.)
“Arguably crosses the line?” Mac Donald makes Jay Bybee look like the Dalai Lama.
THE BOTTOM LINE: What’s my bottom line, she demands? It is, I repeat, to stick to non-coercive techniques, as laid out in Geneva and U.S. law. Imagine that: obeying the law of the land. (And I know of no solid cases where the use of torture has led to actionable and useful intelligence in any case.) By the way, that’s Bush’s official position as well. More important, my bottom line is to send a very strong signal that anything else will not be tolerated. Bush should have fired Sanchez and Abizaid and Rumsfeld and Miller immediately after getting the first reports from Abu Ghraib. He didn’t. Even when the photos surfaced, he refused to discipline anyone truly responsible. When more and more reports of torture emerged, he had another chance to fire the generals and officials responsible for conflicting messages and winking at abuse. Why didn’t he? Or do we really want to know the answer to that question?
The Dish 