Month: April 2009

After covering this nightmare for many years, I can only urge you to read Philip Zelikow's take. He saw what was going on from the inside and this point is essential:

1. The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.

Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans" to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time. The plan employed the combined, cumulative use of many techniques of medically-monitored physical coercion. Before getting to water-boarding, the captive had already been stripped naked, shackled to ceiling chains keeping him standing so he cannot fall asleep for extended periods, hosed periodically with cold water, slapped around, jammed into boxes, etc. etc. Sleep deprivation is most important.

Greg Sargent talks to an intelligence source who says they haven't had any requests from the former veep. Josh Marshall wants to call Cheney's bluff:

…why not take Cheney up on the offer? And not just the handful of documents he wants to cherry-pick but everything. Or perhaps more realistically, assemble a diverse and accountable panel of distinguished Americans who will review the most secret records, lean forward in the direction of disclosure while taking a due account of the need to protect genuine national secrets and simply get about the business of letting us know what happened.

A music video "made up of moving shredded bits of still frames":

Oi Va Voi "Everytime" from Katarzyna Kijek on Vimeo.

Leave the waterboard aside for one moment. What is the effect on a human being of being subjected to the the Bush-Cheney "enhanced interrogation" program? We have two clear data points, and one is an American citizen. Jose Padilla was detained on American soil and put in a US brig and tortured for years. He was subjected to indefinite solitary detention, total sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and, according to his lawyers "hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of 'truth serums.'" You want to know what a broken human being looks like after that? Here you go:

One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office. In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’  …

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”

“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

Here is an account of one detainee at Gitmo – not abu Ghraib, Gitmo:

Last December, documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. also cited an F.B.I. agent at Guantánamo Bay who observed that ''on a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.'' In one case, he added, ''the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.''

Bush and Cheney made all this possible.

It is a Bush administration official on the moment when torture breaks a victim:

The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

From Neil Gaiman’s account of a torturer in hell:

“We will hurt you. And we are not sorry. But we do not do it to punish you. We do it to redeem you. Because afterward, you’ll be a better person … and because we love you. One day you’ll thank us for it.”

War is peace. Torture is freedom. In the end, you love Big Brother.

A reader makes an excellent point:

So here's a question for the torture defenders:

Let's assume that these methods are (1) useful (2) safe when performed under the OLC guidelines (3) necessary to keep as options for the future

 

If so, how could tapes of successful interrogations (or even some which were not successful) not be the single most valuable training tool available to future generations of interrogators? How could they not have any "intelligence value" as a training tool? 

So why were they destroyed? We know why, of course. They shock the conscience and prove that the United States is a torturing nation. Without them, the lies, increasingly threadbare, can nonetheless continue. With the tapes viewable, as with the photos at Abu Ghraib, the war crimes trial begins. And Bush and Cheney go into the dock first.

Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 10.55 am

Am I the only one to free associate from Peggy Noonan's infamous quote last Sunday to the church sex abuse crisis? This is what Noonan said about evidence of torture and war crimes:

“It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, ‘Oh, much good will come of that.’ Sometimes in life you want to keep walking… Some of life has to be mysterious."

Isn't that exactly what the church authorities said when uncovering evidence of child abuse and rape among their own clergy?

“It’s hard for me to look at a great church issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, ‘Oh, much good will come of that.’"

And it's the same reasoning: your loyalty to an institution requires covering up its crimes, not exposing them. But there is one difference: child abuse was not the actual policy of the Vatican. Torture was the actual policy of the Bush White House. And still she walks on.

One of the signs that war criminals acknowledge that what they are doing is wrong is their destruction of the evidence. When high officials in any government are determined to lose or destroy evidence of interrogations, it's a pretty good sign that something is awry. And the key evidence that would illustrate the torture of Zubaydah and KSM would be videos of the torture sessions. Sure enough, these were destroyed.

From Wiki:

In 2005, while head of the Clandestine Service, [Jose A.] Rodriguez ordered that video tape recordings of two 2002 CIA interrogations be destroyed… The tapes reportedly showed two men held in CIA custody, Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, being subjected to a program of 'enhanced' interrogation techniques which included a procedure called "waterboarding". Critics allege these methods amount to torture and the tapes were evidence both protected by court order and the 9/11 Commission.

Although Rodriguez's record has come under scrutiny after it was reported that the destruction of the videotapes was allegedly in defiance of orders from then-CIA Director Porter Goss, he has never been reprimanded…

Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst familiar with Rodriguez and the tapes, commented in a December 23, 2007 Sunday Times story that "(i)t looks increasingly as though the decision was made by the White House.” He also alleged it is “highly likely” that President George W. Bush saw one of the videos.

Did Bush watch one of these torture videos? Can we ask? But I also want to remind readers that this is not the only instance of key evidence of war crimes being lost by the government.

The key case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, also hinged on evidence of his interrogation. Padilla, so far as we know, was not waterboarded, but he was subject to all the other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. And the hard evidence of those interrogations also mysteriously vanished:

The missing DVD dates from March 2, 2004. It contains a video of the last interrogation session of Padilla, then a declared 'enemy combatant' under an order from President Bush, while he was being held in military custody at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. But in recent days, in the course of an unusual court hearing about Padilla's mental condition, a government lawyer disclosed to a surprised courtroom that the Defense Intelligence Agency — which had custody of the evidence — was no longer able to locate the DVD. As a result, it was not included in a packet of classified DVDs that was recently turned over to defense lawyers under orders from Judge Cooke.

The disclosure that the Pentagon had lost a potentially important piece of evidence in one of the U.S. government's highest-profile terrorism cases was met with claims of incredulity by some defense lawyers and human-rights groups monitoring the case. "This is the kind of thing you hear when you’re litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi," said John Sifton, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, one of a number of groups that has criticized the U.S. government’s treatment of Padilla. "It is simply not credible that they would have lost this tape. The administration has shown repeatedly they are more interested in covering up abuses than getting to the bottom of whether people were abused."

What more do we really need to know? And when is this country going to get serious about the war crimes perpetrated by its own government?

A reader writes:

Can we get more disgustingly Orwellian than this:

The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

So, the interrogator isn't "torturing" the subject, he's "liberating" him.

Yes: and the WaPo published it! In the now immortal words of Peggy Noonan: "Sometimes you need to just keep walking."

Faster, Peggy, faster!