The US and torture

The Guardian has a story on torture in Iraq (with a follow-up here and look here for the BBC report when the logs first came out):

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

…

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

…

The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador‘s security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.

Anybody who doubts the story first needs to say how Steele came to be in charge despite:

Along with a dozen commandos, there were several American advisers in the room, including James Steele, one of the United States military’s top experts on counterinsurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country’s brutal civil war in the 1980′s. Steele’s presence was a sign not only of the commandos’ crucial role in the American counterinsurgency strategy but also of his close relationship with Adnan. Steele admired the general. ”He’s obviously a natural type of commander,” Steele told me. ”He commands respect.”

…

The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, to which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and its associated paramilitaries included ”extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.” As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.

and:

But while Petraeus headed for the top, Steele’s career hit an unexpected buffer when he was embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair. A helicopter pilot, who also had a licence to fly jets, he ran the airport from where the American advisers illegally ran guns to right-wing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. While the congressional inquiry that followed put an end to Steele’s military ambitions, it won him the admiration of then congressman Dick Cheney who sat on the committee and admired Steele’s efforts fighting leftists in both Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In late 1989 Cheney was in charge of the US invasion of Panama to overthrow their once favoured son, General Manuel Noriega. Cheney picked Steele to take charge of organising a new police force in Panama and be the chief liaison between the new government and the US military.

If the US didn’t condone torture, then why was Steele in Iraq and not in jail? Also, they need to answer why none of the leaders are in jail but the one person most responsible for getting this information out (Bradley Manning) is.

The case against torture

William Saletan has this habit of simplifying things so he can then claim that a compromise is possible. That’s very much evident on this article on torture. Here he doesn’t note that the American Enterprise Institute is a very conservative place (the conference was held there), then he gives the arguments for torture which he says shake up his assumptions on torture:

1. The detention program was a human library.

Ok, you would think Saletan would mention that this is a really bad thing. This is part of the mosaic philosophy which says that it doesn’t matter if a person is guilty of anything, if they were near a battle or crime then they might know something–thus it’s ok to hold them. It means that torture inevitably will mean the torture of innocents.

2. Enhanced interrogation techniques were used to break the will to resist, not to extract information directly.

Umm …. yeah. That’s what torture has always been used for. Torture is punishment. Oh, and this:

More broadly, said Hayden, the goal was “to take someone who had come into our custody absolutely defiant and move them into a state or a zone of cooperation” by convincing them that “you are no longer in control of your destiny. You are in our hands.”

is the whole idea of inducing ‘learned helplessness’ which is again one of the main points of torture–to try to force compliance in the people and society in general.

3. The human library was part of the will-breaking process.

This is explicitly stating that the point of the torture was to generate compliance in the prisoners and society.

4. We had tested enhanced interrogation techniques on ourselves.

This is so stupid it’s amazing they included it. Pretty much anything can be made into torture–making someone stand isn’t torture, but making them stand 20 hours a day is. Also, since one of the points of torture is to generate learned helplessness, a procedure on a nonprisoner can’t be compared to a prisoner.

5. Freelancing was forbidden.

Perhaps (since this is all secret, we have to take their word for it), but the techniques made their way out of the CIA. Once torture becomes acceptable in some cases, it’s inevitable that you get something like Abu Ghraib.

The rest is just as bad, so I’ll stop here. If Saletan was a good writer, he would have also talked to someone who is against torture and they would have noted the things I did (and probably would have said it better). He would also have found that the reasons given in favor of torture here are nothing new and really aren’t very good arguments.

Update: Lindsay Beyerstein looks at the column.

Punishment for torture?

If this goes through I will be very very happy:

A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that the United States, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, wrongly imprisoned an American under a law designed to keep trial witnesses from fleeing and that since there was evidence that the government may have willfully misused the law against him, his case should go to trial.

Judge Edward J. Lodge, who was appointed by President George Bush, issued his rulings late on Thursday in the longstanding case of Abdullah al-Kidd, an American who was seized at an airport in 2003, imprisoned for 16 days, repeatedly strip-searched and left naked in his cell. The Justice Department had sought to have his trial request summarily dismissed and denied having misused the law in detaining him.

This is fairly typical of the game played then:

Magistrate Williams, who granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation the warrant to arrest Mr. Kidd while he was at Dulles Airport outside Washington on his way to Saudi Arabia in 2003, also said that the information given to him to justify the arrest was misleading. He was told that Mr. Kidd had a first-class one-way ticket and had received more than $20,000 from Mr. Hussayen. In fact, Mr. Kidd had an economy-class round-trip ticket, and the payment was salary for work he had done for Mr. Hussayen’s company.

In addition, the F.B.I. agent failed to mention that Mr. Kidd was a citizen, born and raised here, that his wife and son and many family members were in the United States and that he had never failed to cooperate with the F.B.I. Mr. Kidd was on his way to Saudi Arabia to work on his doctorate in Islamic studies, not to escape trial testimony.

There’s more here:

In a pending civil lawsuit, Osama Awadallah, a college student in San Diego, says he was badly mistreated while held as a material witness in New York. He has since been charged with perjury, which he denies.

In court papers, Mr. Awadallah described handcuffs so tight that his hands bled, a cell so cold his body turned blue, a series of humiliating strip searches and extreme hunger for lack of food that his faith allowed him to eat. He was, his lawsuit says, beaten by guards at the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center.

And, as with other techniques of the time, it might have been counterproductive:

Mr. Hamud said the use of material witness law has discouraged people from sharing information with the authorities. At least two men who approached the police with information were then detained as material witnesses.

Jose Rodriguez Jr. is proud that he tortured

Charles Pierce has a nice write-up on the interview of Jose Rodriguez on 60 Minutes:

The sociopath is touring a book, Hard Measures, wherein he explains that we all likely would be dead if a bunch of pet lawyers in the Bush Administration hadn’t greenlighted his efforts to drag the country down to into the cellars of the Lubyanka. He will make a nice piece of change on this book, which, thanks in part to the efforts of this administration, he never will have to spend on lawyers.

He includes some of the disgusting things Rodriguez says, but my favorite is this:

Lesley Stahl: You have some people out there who were taken to black sites. They were subjected to terrible treatment. And they hadn’t done anything. I mean they were taken mistakenly. They disappeared. What about them?

Jose Rodriguez: No doubt when you are involved in complicated covert action programs like this one, that some mistakes will be made.

There are two ways that this is so terrible. First, he is unconcerned that innocent people were tortured. Also, this was not a mistake:

The initial panicked rush to “round up prisoners,” which was replicated in Iraq during the first months of the insurgency in the summer and fall of 2003, led to what Wilkerson calls an “ad hoc intelligence philosophy” developed to “justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy.”

Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance…. All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals—in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential.

And remember that one of the main reasons that people were tortured was to find an al-Qaeda link to Iraq. Thanks to Bush and Obama, nothing will happen to these lovely people who disgraced the US.

Torture and state secrets

The Obama administration is going after another leaker:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former Central Intelligence Agency officer with disclosing classified information to journalists about the capture and brutal interrogation of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah — adding another chapter to the Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks.

In some sense, it’s hard to feel bad for this guy since he was one of the advocates of torture. The reason I care is the same prosecution would have occured if the guy had leaked the information to show the government was doing something illegal. What makes this irritating is the fact that the Obama administration has not gone after any of the people who actually tortured or allowed torture. Glenn Greenwald notes the problem here. John Cole comments here.

Torture of US citizen

Here’s another reason the US tortured people (as well as to find the non-existent link between al-Qaeda and Iraq):

Chicago attorney Mike Kanovitz, who is representing the plaintiff, says it appears the military wanted to keep his client behind bars so he couldn’t tell anyone about an important contact he made with a leading sheik while helping collect intelligence in Iraq.

Well, this person must have been a possible terrorist themselves:

Attorneys for the man, who speaks five languages and worked as a translator for Marines collecting intelligence in Iraq, say he was preparing to go home to the United States on annual leave when he was abducted by the US military and held without justification while his family knew nothing about his whereabouts or whether he was alive.

The government says he was suspected of helping pass classified information to the enemy and helping anticoalition forces get into Iraq. But he was never charged with a crime, and he says he never broke the law and was risking his life to help his country.

Court papers filed on his behalf say he was repeatedly abused while being held at Camp Cropper, a US military facility near the Baghdad airport dedicated to holding “high-value’’ detainees, then was suddenly released without explanation in August 2006.

Wait, he was a US citizen who was held and tortured for nine months without charge? That would seem to be unconstitutional, which is probably why his suit against Rumsfeld has been allowed to go forward. It would be great if it succeeded.

Update: President Obama is no slouch when it comes to this type of stuff (via Glenn Greenwald). He has pushed prosecution of whistle blowers more than President Bush (remember Bradley Manning?):

The Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks has hugely raised the stakes for whistle-blowers. Mr. Drake is among five people charged with disclosing secrets to the news media under Mr. Obama, compared with three under all previous presidents.

including this case where the prosecution was based on documents that probably should not have been classified:

The document Mr. Leonard singled out was an N.S.A. e-mail entitled “What a Success” that was among classified material Thomas A. Drake, a former senior N.S.A. official, was accused of illegally storing at home and disclosing to The Baltimore Sun. Before Mr. Drake’s scheduled trial in June, prosecutors dropped the major charges against him under the Espionage Act. Mr. Drake admitted to a misdemeanor, got no prison time and paid no fine. The judge, Richard D. Bennett of Federal District Court in Maryland, berated prosecutors for how they handled the case.

Mr. Leonard had agreed to testify for the defense without pay as an expert in government classification, saying the e-mail should never have been classified. The N.S.A. declassified the e-mail before trial, but its contents are still protected by court order. Mr. Leonard was allowed to read the e-mail but cannot disclose its contents other than to say it contained no secrets.

“I’ve never seen a more deliberate and willful example of government officials improperly classifying a document,” he said.

And his administration still believes that some cases should be dropped on their say-so if it involves state secrets:

The state-secrets claims came in a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations brought in February on behalf of three Muslims—two Americans and one Egyptian national living in California. The suit followed revelations that an FBI informant, Craig Monteilh, infiltrated a mosque in Irvine, Calif. Monteilh allegedly made audio and video recordings, left behind listening devices, and collected phone numbers and e-mail addresses from mosque attendees. He drew suspicion by regularly attempted to engage them in discussions about violent jihad, the lawsuit says.

The government filings Monday said the portion of the case pertaining to Monteilh’s actions could likely be litigated without invoking the state secrets privilege, but the broader claim of religious discrimination in FBI investigations in the region should be dismissed.

and notice the explanation by the DOJ:

 Schmaler stressed that DOJ does not condone religious discrimination. ““The department and the FBI do not tolerate racial, religious or ethnic profiling of any kind and their policies prohibit investigations of individuals based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment, or based solely on their religion, race, ethnicity or national origin,” she said.

So, in a suit that claims the DOJ the administration discriminated based on religion, the DOJ says that can’t be prosecuted because they don’t. Ok, I’ll take their word on it.

TSA security

There’s been abit of an uproar about the new security guidelines and procedures at airports.

It’s funny in a way since most people didn’t have a problem with torture or wiretapping or indefinite detention without habeus corpus or the no-fly list. It’s because they they think they’re the ‘good guys’ and have ‘nothing to hide’. They assume that anyone who is accused is guilty (well, unless a liberal says so).

Here THEY have to go through the drill–it’s almost as if people assume they might be guilty of something. I try to look for allies, but really if a person didn’t have a problem with torturing and indefinitely detaining someone because someone accused them of terrorism, then they should just shut up about this.

Innocent people were tortured to death because of someone’s accusation. The Obama administration has said they can kill a US citizen without a trial even if they’re not on a battlefield or an imminent threat. And this is what causes an uproat? Really?

But, but torture

Hm, it seems that the FBI is getting information even though they’re not torturing him (also see here):

The two agents moved to Abuja, the capital, “to gain an understanding of the suspect,” and ultimately located two family members of Mr. Abdulmutallab, the official said. The relatives, whom the official declined to identify, agreed to cooperate because they “disagreed with his efforts to blow up American targets.”

The agents and the two family members flew back to the United States on Jan. 17. They met with the F.B.I. to discuss a way forward. After meeting with Mr. Abdulmutallab for several days, the official said, the family members persuaded him to talk to investigators.

“The intelligence gained has been disseminated throughout the intelligence community,” the official said, adding, “The best way to get him to talk was working with his family.”

 Now some people will claim that the information could have been gotten more quickly if torture had been used (notice, she doesn’t talk about this, but how else would they have convinced him to talk if he said he wouldn’t?). The problem here is two-fold: the first is that the relatives would not have helped if Abdulmutallab had been tortured or sent to a military tribunal:

“One of the principal reasons why his family came back is because they had complete trust in the US system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately,” the senior official said. “And that they would be as well.”

The idea is that we don’t just want any information, but information that can be corroborated and then followed up on. To do that, they need the support of lots of other people and they would be less likely to get that if those people didn’t trust the US; the second is that it might not have been legal to send him to a military tribunal

Some have argued that had Abdulmutallab been declared an enemy combatant, the government could have held him indefinitely without providing him access to an attorney. But the government’s legal authority todo so is far from clear. In fact, when the Bush administration attempted to deny Jose Padilla access to an attorney, a federal judge in New York rejected that position, ruling that Padilla must be allowed to meet with his lawyer. Notably, the judge in that case was Michael Mukasey, my predecessor as Attorney General. In fact, there is no court-approved system currently in place in which suspected terrorists captured inside the United States can be detained and held without access to an attorney; nor is there any known mechanism to persuade an uncooperative individual to talk to the government that has been proven more effective than the criminal justice system.

which is why it’s never been done:

“Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the practice of the U.S. government, followed by prior and current Administrations without a single exception, has been to arrest and detain under federal criminal law all terrorist suspects who are apprehended
inside the United States,” Holder writes

Notice at the bottom of the Post’s article that this is also working elsewhere:

The approach appears to closely follow the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of David Coleman Headley, a Chicago resident accused of serving as an advance man for the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Headley has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, but federal prosecutors and defense attorneys have said he has been sharing information with the FBI for months about his alleged contacts with terrorist-linked groups overseas.

Update: Nick Baumann has a good post here.

A real world question about torture

People who defend torture always seem to come around to the ticking time bomb question (in fact, the Bush administration thought a nuke had been smuggled into NY City). The idea that we should shape our policy around a on in a billion happenstance doesn’t seem to bother them (if a person saved New York City from a nuclear bomb using torture, do they really think that person would be put in jail?). They also never seem to get around to the question about what actually happened, so I’ll present it here:

• the FBI was involved in the initial questioning of high level detainees and says the people were cooperating. The FBI also says that no crucial information was obtained through torture.
• the CIA then took over and started to use rougher treatments. At this point the FBI dropped out, because they thought the treatment was illegal. The CIA says they also got good information, but people at CIA headquarters insisted on even rougher treatment.
• one of the main reasons the administration pushed torture was to get information on an al-Qaeda-Iraq link (and the administration did approve of the treatment at all stages–see hereto see how it migrated from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib).
• by the way, this was torture. You’ll note that even fairly mundane things, like standing, can become torture.
• torture spread throughout Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo and ended up including many innocents (they were needed to corroborate evidence). The innocent had no way to get out (well unless they died).
• the torture has meant that some cases have been dropped (read the article–the cases weren’t even being prepared).
• interrogators think that torture increased the number of terrorists (as do others).
• the torture also causes psychological problems for the interrogators (at least one committed suicide so she wouldn’t be involved).
• more than 100 detainees in US custody have died, including many from torture.

This is what actually happened. The real world question is whether you’re ok with this.

As you’re thinking, remember that there are alternatives that work.

More on Binyam Mohamed

Back in February, the Obama administration had argued that a case against Boeing should be dropped because it might reveal state secrets. They lost that argument with an appropriate judicial rebuke:

The court said the government could ask judges to conduct a case-by-case review of whether the disclosure of specific documents would jeopardize national security. But allowing the executive branch to shut down an entire lawsuit whenever an official says its subject is classified would be a “concentration of unchecked power” and lead to abuses, it said.

“According to the government’s theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the C.I.A. and its partners from the demands and limits of the law,” wrote Judge Michael Daly Hawkins.

Now it seems the Obama administration has again mirrored the Bush administration, this time by threatening to withhold secret information if a British court makes US interrogation procedures public:

The letter warned that if the British government “is unable to protect information we provide to it, even if that inability is caused by your judicial system, we will necessarily have to review with the greatest care the sensitivity of information we can provide in the future.”

The letter also said the “seven paragraphs at issue are based upon classified information shared between our countries,” and that “public disclosure of this information reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the United Kingdom’s national security” if the United States withheld intelligence information in the future.

Since it would inevitably do damage to the US, the Obama administration is putting state secrets above public safety. This is all very weird for a president that says he wants transparency.

Now Obama is against release of photos

President Obama is now against the release of photos that show the abuse of prisoners:

President Obama declared yesterday that he would try to block the court-ordered release of photos showing US troops abusing prisoners, abruptly reversing his position out of concern the pictures would “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

…

Obama, explaining his change of heart on releasing the other photos, said they had already served their purpose in investigations of “a small number of individuals.” Those cases were all concluded by 2004, and the president said “the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken.”

The Pentagon conducted 200 investigations into alleged abuse connected with the photos in question. The administration did not provide an immediate accounting of how they turned out.

I don’t see how this would hurt US military forces if Obama released the photos and said something like:

‘That this happened is shameful. This will not happen under my administration and I pledge to investigate these cases until the perpetrators and those who allowed this to happen are punished.’

The problem is that Obama has said he doesn’t want to look back. If the people who made this possible aren’t punished then it will probably hurt the US.

I do seem to criticize Obama more than I praise him, but I do think he has done a good job so far. He is pushing to: pass universal health care; is pushing for carbon trading and more renewable energy; is for ending the ‘war on drugs’; pass a credit card bill. These are all important things that I also support.

More on torture

Via Tom Tomorrow, Mark Danner has two long reports on torture based on the Red Cross’ report. Together they make it obvious that there was torture (and show how simple things become torture: standing, sitting, being in a box, …) and how the Bush administration used the debate on torture to to turn the discussion away from how they had failed. I have been thinking that torture is the simple answer to complex questions that we want–instead of the steady, long involved process of gathering information and connecting events, why just torture someone. Mark puts it all together in this paragraph (this comes near the end of the first article):

The gloves came off: four simple words. And yet they express a complicated thought. For if the gloves must come off, that means that before the attacks the gloves were on. There is something implicitly exculpatory in the image, something that made it particularly appealing to officials of an administration that endured, on its watch, the most lethal terrorist attack in the country’s history. If the attack succeeded, it must have had to do not with the fact that intelligence was not passed on or that warnings were not heeded or that senior officials did not focus on terrorism as a leading threat. It must have been, at least in part, because the gloves were on—because the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s, in which Congress sought to put limits on the CIA, on its freedom to mount covert actions with “deniability” and to conduct surveillance at home and abroad, had illegitimately circumscribed the President’s power and thereby put the country dangerously at risk. It is no accident that two of the administration’s most powerful officials, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, served as young men in very senior positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. They had witnessed firsthand the gloves going on and, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, they argued powerfully that it was those limitations—and, it was implied, not a failure to heed warnings—that had helped lead, however indirectly, to the country’s vulnerability to attack.

This explains why Cheney is so involved in advocating for torture–it means it wasn’t the Bush administration’s fault that 9/11 happened.

This bit shows how torture spreads (from the second article):

The initial panicked rush to “round up prisoners,” which was replicated in Iraq during the first months of the insurgency in the summer and fall of 2003, led to what Wilkerson calls an “ad hoc intelligence philosophy” developed to “justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy.”

Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance…. All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals—in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential.

I saw the consequences of this policy in Iraq, in the fall of 2003, when “neighborhood sweeps” and “cordon and capture operations” in “hot areas” led to wholesale arrests of young men. These men, about whom nothing was known apart from the fact that they were young and lived in a neighborhood deemed “hot,” were flex-cuffed, hooded, and promptly sent to Abu Ghraib, where they…sat. Interrogators were overwhelmed, mostly with prisoners who simply had no intelligence to impart. The interrogators were well aware of this, of course, but in part because officers of the combat units who made the arrests sat on the boards that had to approve prisoner releases, it was almost impossible to release prisoners once they had been brought to Abu Ghraib. “Certain [Coalition Forces] military intelligence officers told the ICRC,” according to a 2004 Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib, “that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.”

The articles also note that the executive branch was in on the CIA interrogations every step. And that Democrats had a chance to stop this and didn’t.

This article in the NY Times shows how the media helped the Bush administration push their argument:

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”
…
During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.

Why did the US torture?

As more information comes out, it becomes more and more difficult to know why the Bush administration turned to torture. This op-ed by an FBI interrogator notes that they got information without using torture:

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

The claim that torture didn’t get any important intelligence is backed up by ex-FBI director Mueller:

In an interview with Vanity Fair last year, the F.B.I. director since 2001, Robert S. Mueller III, was asked whether any attacks had been disrupted because of intelligence obtained through the coercive methods. “I don’t believe that has been the case,” Mr. Mueller said. (A spokesman for Mr. Mueller, John Miller, said on Tuesday, “The quote is accurate.”)

The torture also meant that the FBI and CIA didn’t work together, since the FBI wouldn’t allow these techniques to be used (since they knew it was torture and illegal). Lack of communication between the CIA and FBI helped allow 9/11.

For those who don’t believe there was actual torture involved, Hilzoy has a good post noting that part of the point in the interrogations was to engender learned helplessness:

Whatever their origins, people who suffer uncontrollable events reliably see disruption of emotions, aggressions, physiology, and problem-solving tasks. These helpless experiences can associate with passivity, uncontrollability and poor cognition in people, ultimately threatening their physical and mental well-being.

Greg Mitchell looks at the story of a US interrogator in Iraq who committed suicide because she was so apalled at the methods (for some reason the army covered this up).

So, why did the US turn to terrorism? This story by McClatchy gives two reasons:

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

…

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

Lovely, we tortured people to try to prove a non-existant link. In some ways, it actually says something good about the agents (well, except for the going along with torture part): they never said there was a link.

It also says something a bit better about the military lawyers:

Rumsfeld approved extreme interrogation techniques for Guantanamo in December 2002. He withdrew his authorization the following month amid protests by senior military lawyers that some techniques could amount to torture, violating U.S. and international laws.

Military interrogator, however, continued employing some techniques in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

183 times in a month?

I have always thought that someone should go to jail for the torture by US agents, but I used to think it should only be the people who set it up. Now, I’m not so sure:

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.
…
The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

183 times in a month? Anyone should know that this is torture. It’s obvious, that’s why the FBI pulled back:

By mid-2002, several former agents and senior bureau officials said, they had begun complaining that the CIA-run interrogation program amounted to torture and was going to create significant problems down the road — particularly if the Bush administration was ever forced to allow the Al Qaeda suspects to face their accusers in court.

Some went to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, according to the former bureau officials. They said Mueller pulled many of the agents back from playing even a supporting role in the interrogations to avoid exposing them to legal jeopardy, in the belief that White House and Justice Department opinions authorizing the coercive techniques might be overturned.

Hmm, I guess the FBI knows that the Nuremberg trials had shown that ‘I was just following orders’ is not a defense. Emptywheel has more, including the facts that the agents used waterboarding more than they were supposed to and used a worse version than they were authorized to. President Obama has said he won’t charge any of these people? Why? Ex-CIA director Hayden and ex Attorney General Mukasey worry that CIA agents will fear recriminations. Agents should worry if they do something this obviously illegal.

Update: Harvey Silvergate has an editorial about this:

A CIA agent, operating in good faith, could readily consider such DOJ advice to be a binding legal opinion that he could safely follow. And in our legal system, based on an ancient Anglo-Saxon moral and legal tenet incorporated into our own criminal codes, a wrongdoer may be punished only if he knowingly and intentionally committed an act that he believed to be illegal.

Hmm, this might be a good point except the CIA agents went further than the legal advice allowed and the FBI refused to participate, showing that reasonable people could see that the memo’s argument might easily be wrong.

Bush Justice Department memos released

The memos written by the the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Council have been released by President Obama. This is a good thing, but Obama is still holding to this:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

Let’s see, suppose a few years ago I went into a building and took some stuff acting on the guidance of a neighbor who said it was ok. Some people might think I should be charged with robbery, but not Obama–with the current economic problems, now is not the time to revisit old crimes that could cause dissension. Really, does that make sense? If a crime was committed, someone should pay–I agree that the people following the advice of the OLC probably shouldn’t, but someone should. Also, remember that the interrogations started before these memos came out.

I also like the unwitting irony with this statement:

Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, cited his experience after taking part in the unpopular Vietnam War. “We in the intelligence community should not be subjected to similar pain,” he said.

If you take away the first sentence it would sound like he was saying that people in the intelligence community shouldn’t be tortured.

And, of course, people in the Bush administration are defending the practices:

The release of these opinions was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy. Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001.

You see they hope we have forgotten that the intelligence community had all the information needed to have an idea something like the 9/11 attacks were possible. The Patriot act and these ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques were not needed. And then they follow it up with the usual ‘they do it too’  and ‘it wasn’t that bad’ childen’s arguments:

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Of course, they ignore that the knowledge that the US tortures helped al-Qaeda get followers is ignored. And they ignore that people were tortured to death by the US (they pretend that allowing these rules for the CIA had nothing to do with what happened at Abu Ghraib, but the rules inevitably flowed down the chain–it was policy).

Of course, they can’t resist attacking those of us that wanted the disclosure:

In addition, there were those who believed that the U.S. deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001.

You know what Mukasey and Hayden can jump off a cliff. They’re the ones who are saying the US should act like the terrorists. Good riddance to them.

Update: I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the writers of the memo lied about conclusions of a sleep study so they could say it was ok to use extended sleep deprivation.

You also won’t be surprised to learn that the Bush administration decided to turn to torture even though interrogation was working and:

A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been “unnecessary.”

Quoting a 2004 report on the interrogation program by the C.I.A. inspector general, the footnote says that “although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within C.I.A. headquarters still believed he was withholding information.”

Typical, the bosses think they know more than the people actually doing the job. Of course the CIA types weren’t exactly great:

His interrogation, according to multiple accounts, began in Pakistan and continued at the secret C.I.A. site in Thailand, with a traditional, rapport-building approach led by two F.B.I. agents, who even helped care for him as his gunshot wounds healed.

Abu Zubaydah gave up perhaps his single most valuable piece of information early, naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom he knew as Mukhtar, as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot.

A C.I.A. interrogation team that arrived a week or two later, which included former military psychologists, did not change the approach to questioning, but began to keep him awake night and day with blasting rock music, have his clothes removed and keep his cell cold.

But I guess the higher ups just wanted to punish him more.

Torture memos to come out?

This (via Kevin Drum) would be a good thing:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against “high value” Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA.
…
The debate about torture ramped up again last week with an account in the New York Review of Books about a secret International Red Cross report that was delivered to the CIA in February 2007. The report, according to journalist Mark Danner, quotes detainees describing, often in gruesome detail, how they were locked in coffin-size boxes; swung by towels around their necks into plywood walls; and forced to stand naked for days while their arms were shackled above their heads.

If President Obama releases these memos, then perhaps he will revisit some of his problematic orders about state secrets. That would be really good.

Another reason why arbitrary detention is so bad

I would have liked this article by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, a lot better if it had come out when this was all happening. Many of the things he mentions are now widely known, but this really shows what can happen when you don’t follow the rules:

The fourth unknown is the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals–in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.

So not only did officials know that innocent people were being detained, but it was part of a plan. Makes one glad to be an American.

Bush vs. Obama on State secrets

The Justice Department has now released some of the memos written after 9/11 by the Bush administration. Some of it is simply stunning:

The legal memos written by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel show a government grappling with how to wage war on terrorism in a fast-changing world. The conclusion, reiterated in page after page of documents, was that the president had broad authority to set aside constitutional rights.

Fourth Amendment protections against unwarranted search and seizure, for instance, did not apply in the United States as long as the president was combatting terrorism, the Justice Department said in an Oct. 23, 2001, memo.

“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote, adding later: “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

On Sept. 25, 2001, Yoo discussed possible changes to the laws governing wiretaps for intelligence gathering. In that memo, he said the government’s interest in keeping the nation safe following the terrorist attacks might justify warrantless searches.

and also:

A newly released Bush administration legal memo from 2002 claimed that the president has an unfettered right to transfer suspected terrorists to other governments without regard for whether they would be subject to torture

I’m actually wondering if this stuff was released now to get our attention away from this almost as stunning bit:

So on Friday, in a move that Al-Haramain’s lawyer called “mind-boggling”, the Obama administration told the federal court, once again, that it did not have the authority to order the government to make the critical document in the case available to the organization’s lawyers. The decision to reveal the document, wrote the government, “is committed to the discretion of the Executive Branch, and is not subject to judicial review.”

Not only does that defy the court once again, but there’s a catch: the court already has the document, which was filed months ago under seal. What’s more, the lawyers for Al-Haramain have already seen it; it was inadvertently turned over to them back in 2004, when the government was busy trying to prove that Al-Haramain was funnelling money to terrorists.

…

In other words, the government lawyers threatened to physically remove the document from the court files if the Judge insists that he has the right — as he already ruled he has — to allow Al-Haramain’s lawyers to see it.

(go read the article for the bits that explain this). Obviously, this is at a different level than saying the President could ignore or overrule the First and Fourth amendments, but were these Obama administration lawyers really saying they might send the FBI or other group to break into a judge’s office?

6/5/09 Update: The latest is:

A federal district court judge in California yesterday dismissed a slew of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that allegedly helped the U.S. government engage in warrantless wiretapping.

Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco dismissed the cases because Congress explicitly gave the telecom companies immunity from civil suits in a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

…

Meanwhile, in a separate ruling in the Al-Haramain case, Judge Walker ruled that the defunct Islamic charity can proceed with its case against the government even without the document that the Obama administration has been trying so desperately to conceal. That document — which the government inadvertently disclosed to Al-Haramain’s lawyers — establishes that the organization was wiretapped, its lawyers say.

More on ‘State Secrets’

I talked about the Binyam Mohamed yesterday. Since then, the NY Times has put out an article with this important bit (bold added):

“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.

“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.

Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”

Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.” The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.

Other people have also talked about this (Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, and Hilzoy among others) and agree that this is very troubling. Here are a few ways that the government could have argued that would have been acceptable:

• parts of the evidence shouldn’t be brought into open court, because it would expose important state secrets (where the Judge could see the information and decide)
• the case against Boeing shouldn’t go forward, because they are incidental to the charge (they might have provided transport without knowledge of the case)
• ask for more time to review the case

It is not acceptable that they argue that the entire case should be dropped because they say so–especially in this type of case where it’s being argued that a secret program did illegal things. It would be disastrous if a government could get away with whatever it wants just by slapping a secrecy tag on it. It’s still early and this is only one case, but the way it was argued does not bode well.

Obama and State Secrets

Last Thursday, I said that I was a little worried because the Obama administration had continued a Bush administration policy of using a ’state secrets’ argument to dismiss cases. Then I said that we would see more with their arguments in the Binyam Mohamed case. That happened today and now I’m definitely worried:

A year ago the case was thrown out on the basis of national security, but today the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard the appeal, brought by the ACLU.

A source inside of the Ninth U.S. District Court tells ABC News that a representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn’t changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.

This

ABC News’ Jason Ryan reports that Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said of the case, “It is the policy of this administration to invoke the state secrets privilege only when necessary and in the most appropriate cases, consistent with the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Reynolds that the privilege not ‘be lightly invoked.’”

sounds good, but this is now the second case where the Obama administration came down on the side of keeping secrets against allowing a trial to go forward. I’m sure the Obama adminstration will be better than Bush’s but not so far.