Foreign Policy In Focus

Torture comes in many forms from excruciating pain to death -- of the soul, if not the body -- by a thousand cuts.

Recently the conservative American Enterprise Institute held a forum on the movie Zero Dark Thirty. Its panel was composed of veterans of the Bush torture years: then CIA director Michael Hayden led the panel and was joined by Jose Rodriguez, then head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, and John Rizzo, then the CIA's chief legal officer.

I intend to read the transcript in full, but, in the interim, will respond to William Saletan provocatively titled analysis at Slate, The Case for Torture. The forum on "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) was, he writes

… a chance to examine our own thinking. Do we really understand what the CIA did and why? Was the payoff worth the moral cost? And what can we learn from it? … The stories [Hayden, Rodriguez, and Rizzo] told, and the reasons they offered, shook up my assumptions about the interrogation program. They might shake up yours, too.

Assumptions about the validity of torture were not shaken up on this author's part. But the forum did provide information about torture to which the public might not hitherto have been privy and which might prompt us to fine-tune our arguments against "EITs." For starters, you may have heard this one.

If you refuse to exploit prisoners, you’ll end up killing your enemies instead. All three panelists trashed the Obama-era conceit that we’re a better country because we’ve scrapped the interrogation program. What we’ve really done, they argued, is replace interrogations with drone strikes. “We have made it so legally difficult and so politically dangerous to capture,” said Hayden, “that it seems, from the outside looking in, that the default option is to take the terrorists off the battlefield in another sort of way.”

"Default option?" Why, exactly, are we stuck with one or the other: torture or drone strikes? Talk about your false equivalencies. As for sidestepping the "legal difficulties and political dangers" of torture, the answer isn't drone strikes, but inundating drone strikes, too, with "legal difficulties and political dangers."

Meanwhile, even for someone who has read as much about torture as I have, what follows was news to me. Hayden said that interrogators "never asked anybody anything we didn't know the answer to, while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques. The techniques were not designed to elicit truth in the moment." (Emphasis added.)

What, you ask, was the objective then? Saletan writes that "EITs were used in a controlled setting, in which interrogators [inflicted] misery only when the prisoner said something false."

The point was to create an illusion of godlike omniscience and omnipotence so that the prisoner would infer, falsely, that his captors always knew when he was lying or withholding information. 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.” Thereafter, the prisoner would cooperate without need for EITs. Rodriguez explained: “Once you got through the enhanced interrogation process, then the real interrogation began. … The knowledge base was so good that these people knew that we actually were not going to be fooled. It was an essential tool to validate that the people were being truthful."

To say that torture was intended to tune up (as they say in crime dramas) the suspect for a later interrogation instead of during the "EIT" itself is to put too fine a point on it. In truth, no qualitative difference exists.

Meanwhile, I always wondered how Abu Zubaydah could withstand 83 waterboarding sessions and Khalid Seikh Mohammed (KSM) 183. (See my recent post: Who's Degraded More: the Torture Victim or the Torturer?) The disturbing symmetry in the figures aside, wouldn't a suspect subjected to such torture suffer either a psychotic break, or -- the presence of a doctor notwithstanding -- brain damage? Saletan sheds light on why this apparently didn't occur.

While citing the program’s rules as a moral defense, the panelists also groused that the rules cost them leverage. KSM, for instance, noticed a time limit on waterboarding. “Pretty quickly, he recognized that within 10 seconds we would stop pouring water,” said Rodriguez. “He started to count with his fingers, up to 10, just to let us know that the time was up.”

If Rodriguez is telling the truth, what Zubaydah and Mohammed were subjected to might strike some as less like torture and more like extreme discomfort. We've been accustomed to thinking of waterboarding as existentially frightening -- a near-death experience. Now it seems less like peeling off fingernails or chopping off digits (the film torture du jour) and more like forcing a prisoner to stand, or subjecting him to loud music, cold, or round-the-clock lighting.

In fact, waterboarding for 10 seconds, as with the other practices mentioned, still falls under the heading of torture. But rather than a dramatic act of excruciating pain, torture becomes the accumulation of lesser agonies, not the least of which is the anticipation of the frequent episodes.

Unfortunately, there are those who would react to KSM's torture thusly: "Everyone knows he was responsible for 9/11 and we're supposed to care because he has to hold his breath for 10 seconds?"

If we want to present a credible argument to rebut proponents of torture, we need to be able to differentiate the different levels of torture from a near-death experience to death (of the soul, anyway) by a thousand cuts.

It might seem that, as with the word "genocide," we need to guard against applying the term "torture" with sweeping strokes lest the impact of the concept be diluted. In fact, though, torture is a large umbrella sheltering a world of torments.

Exactly what is waterboarding a prisoner 83 -- or 183 -- times supposed to accomplish?

We recently posted about the railroading of former CIA offer John Kiriakou on flimsy charges of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In the course of his article about the case -- in which he himself was a protagonist -- Scott Shane of the New York Times writes that Kiriakou

… led the team in 2002 that found Abu Zubaydah. … While he had spent hours with Abu Zubaydah after the capture, he had not been present when Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded, a fact he made clear to me and some other interviewers. But based on what he had heard and read at the agency, he told ABC and other news organizations that Abu Zubaydah had stopped resisting after just 30 or 35 seconds of the suffocating procedure and told interrogators all he knew. 

In fact

… the prisoner was waterboarded some 83 times, it turned out. Mr. Kiriakou believes that he and other C.I.A. officers were deliberately misled by other agency officers who knew the truth.

Meanwhile, in 2009, at Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler wrote: "According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo" -- the same memo that revealed how many times Abu Zubaydah had been tortured -- "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003."

Eighty-three times? 183 times? To begin with, there's something insidious about the neat difference of 100 in the number of tortures meted out. Other, more tangible, questions come to mind. Before moving on to the humanistic, what about the sheer logistics? Ms. Wheeler cited a memo that explained

… how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month. …where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water application. … Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you’d need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you’ve waterboarded 90 times–still just half of what they did to KSM.

Next, one wonders why the victim -- much as one resists casting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in this light of a victim, can there be any doubt that our "enhanced interrogation" practices has turned him into a victim, too? -- doesn't die from the relentless assault on his body? Of course, a doctor is present to make sure he lives to be tortured another day. But how many brain cells does near-asphyxiation kill?

Also, even though interrogators were presumably vetted to weed out psychopaths, if the practice alone doesn't suggest unbridled sadism at work, the repetition does. In -- facetiousness alert! -- fairness, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may have been extraordinarily tough as well as holding out for concessions of some sort -- better conditions in jail, treatment of their families.

Or the repetition may have been a measure of the interrogator's frustration with the perceived inadequacy of the tools of torture with which he'd been supplied: "They call this waterboarding and all we're allowed to use is a common water bottle? Let me dunk his entire head in a tub and I'll get answers after his first immersion."

Perhaps, too, the more they tortured, the more they hated themselves and took out their anger on their subjects.

In any event, as Ms. Wheeler wrote:

The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM. 

That doesn’t sound very effective to me. 

In the end -- and while torture by American citizens may have ended, we may still be outsourcing the practice -- the sessions described above certainly fulfilled all the requirements for the frequently cited definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over, ad nauseam). The torturer and the government that empowers him inevitably wind up as degraded as those tortured.

At the Wall Street Journal, John Eww, I mean Yoo, the Bush administration torture facilitator, reviews the new book by William Shawcross, best known for Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the destruction of Cambodia, his investigation of the secret and illegal war that the United States waged on Cambodia from 1969 to 1973. (Thanks to Focal Pointer Michael Busch for bringing the piece to my attention.) Yoo writes that Justice and the Enemy

… mounts a full-throated defense of the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies. Where international critics decry the detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay as a "legal black hole," Mr. Shawcross sees a nation at war exercising its right to capture and hold the enemy. Where human-rights advocates allege the systematic torture of hundreds of al Qaeda prisoners, Mr. Shawcross understands that tough interrogations were needed in the months after the 9/11 attacks to gain intelligence on an enemy that refuses to obey the basic rules of civilized warfare. Where lawyers for 9/11 planners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed portray military commissions as "kangaroo courts," Mr. Shawcross describes military trials that will give terrorists a fairer process than victorious nations have ever given an enemy. "Any German in the dock at Nuremberg would be astonished to learn of his rights, privileges, and entitlements, if he were suddenly transferred by time machine to the court in Guantanamo," he rightly observes.

As you can see, Shawcross has, uh, reversed course since the days he wrote to expose U.S. international crimes. In fact, he caught hell for supporting the Iraq War. In 2003, at the New Statesman, Jason Cowley wrote:

Shawcross is a robust Manichaean: he divides the world between our light and their darkness, between good and evil. He never pauses to question his own prejudices -- about Israel, whose illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza he never mentions; about American imperialism, which he now considers to be at worst benign.

Meanwhile, if you're still in need of emetic, here's a strong dose of Yoo.

Were it not for America's use of military power in the last century, nations in places ranging from Europe to East Asia would not know freedom today. Mr. Shawcross expresses a version of this idea when he observes that "the U.S. military was [in World War II], and has remained, the greatest defender of human rights that the world has ever seen."

When John Yoo praises your work -- "Mr. Shawcross vividly surveys the score of issues arising from the war on terror, and his judgments are sound, because they look to history and practice, not ideology" -- you know it's time to retire or find another profession.

An excerpt from a new analysis at Right Web titled Enhanced Embellishment Techniques:

The death of Osama bin Laden has elicited myriad responses among the policymakers charged with tracking him down, the commentators who pontificated about him, and the millions of people whose lives he touched, however indirectly. The news triggered jubilant celebration, somber reflection, and even a subsequent attack on a Pakistani constabulary that killed scores of military recruits.

Already analysts have begun to ponder what bin Laden’s death will augur for the future of U.S. foreign policy. But this discussion has not resolved the debates over the tactics of the previous decade, not any more than many Americans’ joyous celebrations marked an end to the conflicts spurred on by the highest profile manhunt in recent history. Finding Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound required following a complex trail of intelligence gathered across multiple presidential administrations. In the end, the CIA used intelligence about a man who called himself Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, an alleged courier and confidant of bin Laden, to pinpoint the location of the al-Qaeda figurehead.

Nevertheless, for some pundits and officials, the death of Osama bin Laden represents pure vindication. Indeed, several former Bush administration officials, prominent neoconservatives, and their supporters in Congress and the media have loudly proclaimed that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” were instrumental in locating America’s most wanted terrorist—and in the process they have laid credit at the feet of the previous administration. But their claims have amounted to little more than an embellishment of the historical record and a distortion of the real impact of torture on U.S. policy and security.

Visit Right Web to read the rest of Enhanced Embellishment Techniques. 

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the forty-eighth in the series.

What to make of the Gitmo assessment of Abu Zubaydah, the Saudi-born Palestinian man once described by George W. Bush administration as the “number three” guy in al Qaeda?  The fourteen-page document, released as part of WikiLeaks’ “Gitmo Files” trove, is at once a collection of rumors, contradictory data and bizarre analysis that at the same time, serves as an uncompromising verdict of Abu Zubaydah’s guilt in crimes against the United States.

The memo begins with the bold claim that Zubaydah

Is a senior member of al-Qaida with direct ties to multiple high-ranking terrorists such as Usama Bin Laden (UBL). Detainess has a vast amount of information regarding al-Qaida personnel and operations and is an admitted operational planner, financier and facilitator of international terrorsist and their activities. Detainee participated in hostilities against US and Coalition forces and was involved in several plans to commit terrorist acts against the US, its interests and allies. 

Quite a valuable prisoner, by the looks of it, then. How did the commanding officer, Rear Admiral D. M. Thomas, come to learn all of this information? Not through direct talks with Zubaydah, as the report makes clear at its close: “Due to detainees’ HVD status, detainee has yet to be interviewed.” Instead, Thomas seems to have relied upon claims made by dozens of other detainees—whether at Guantanamo or other sites of extraordinary rendition—while denying Zubaydah’s own claims as patently false.

And as it turns out, it’s Zubayadah’s story that proves most interesting, and at the end of the day, seems the likeliest to be true, even as it too suffers from problems of consistency. The report offers the “Detainee’s Account of Events,” though where this account was delivered is never explicitly made clear. According to Zubaydah’s own testimony, he very much wanted to become an al Qaida operative, but the terrorist outfit wouldn’t let him. 

Detainee stated he was originally a “bad Muslim” who arrived in Afghanistan in 1990-1991. He was determined to attend militant training because he was inspired by the Palestinian cause….Detainee stated that in 1993, following the first Afghan jihad against the Russians, he decided to dedicate his life to jihad.  Detainee noticed that of all the other groups in theater, only al-Qaida remained to continue the jihad struggle. Detainee submitted the requisite paperwork to join al-Qaida and pledge bayat (an oath of allegiance to UBL. Detainee’s application to al-Qaida was rejected.

But in the very next paragraph, Zubaydah offers a slightly different account of his troubles with al Qaeda that merits no mention from the report’s author.

In approximately 1991 or 1992, detainee sustained a head wouldn from shrapnel while on the front lines. Detainee stated he had to relearn fundamentals such as walking, talking, and writing; as such, he was therefore considered worthless to al-Qaida. Detainee asked Abu Burhan al-Suri for permission to repeat the Khaldan Camp training. Detainee did not pledge bayat to UBL and did not become a full al-Qaida member. Detainee refused to make the pledge unless al-Qada agreed to stage an attack inside Israel or mount an operation to help free Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman aka (the Blind Sheik) [sic].

So which is it? Did al Qaeda reject Zubaydah, or did Zubaydah reject al Qaeda? This question is never addressed, much less resolved. Instead, the report details two more meetings between Zubaydah and bin Laden that demonstrate little other than the latter’s distaste for the former.

The question of Zubaydah’s testimony and its provenance is of chief significance. The report notes that shortly after Zubaydah’s last contact with bin Laden—where the al Qaeda chief appears to have shut down the Palestinian’s plan for an attack in Israel—he was picked up by Pakistani security forces “in Faisalabad on 28 March 2002.” In the process, Zubaydah was “shot three time while attempting to escape. Detainee was transferred to US authorities immediately after his arrest and once his condition stabilized, he was transported out of Pakistan.” A few lines later, the memo notes that Zuybaydah was transferred to Gitmo in September 2006, over four and a half years later. So what happened to him in the intervening period?

Quite a lot, as it happens. Unremarked upon in the report is the now established evidence that Zubaydah was flown to the Cuban detention facility in 2002, where he remained for nine months before being shipped off to another CIA interrogation facility in Thailand. There, according to Andy Worthington,

the FBI began interrogating him using old-school, torture-free methods, which had a proven track record. Within a matter of weeks, however, the FBI agents were shamefully discarded by the administration’s most senior officials, who believed that another major attack was imminent, and that only the use of torture would persuade a significant captured terrorist — as Zubaydah was presumed to be — to talk. The job of interrogating Zubaydah was handed over to the CIA, whose new repertoire of techniques consisted primarily of torture, including waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, extreme violence, prolonged isolation, and the use of sustained nudity and loud music and noise.

Zubaydah was returned to Guantanamo in 2006. Shortly thereafter, Zubaydah became a central figure in the ICRC reports documenting American torture practices in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and was the centerpiece of one of the so-called “torture memos” released by the Barack Obama administrations just two years ago this month.

The shocking incidence of mental health disorders suffered by detainees at Guantanamo has been particularly striking in the Gitmo files released thus far by WikiLeaks, and it’s clear from Zubaydah well-documented history that he should be tallied with those prisoners suffering psychological distress. In Barton Gellman’s review of Ron Suskind’s One Percent Doctrine, it’s noted that

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." 

This might explain the slightly varied accounts Zubaydah reportedly gave American intelligence officers of his difficult history with al Qaeda. In any event it’s hard to escape the conclusion, based on the mountain of evidence that has surfaced thus far about Zubaydah’s condition, arrived at by Dan Coleman, the FBI’s chief al Qaeda expert: “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

He’s also still Guantanamo Bay. Despite the government’s own admission that Zubaydah was not, contrary to its earlier bombast, “a 'member' of al-Qaida in the sense of having sworn bavat (allegiance) or having otherwise satisfied any formal criteria that either [Zubaydah] or al-Qaida may have considered necessary for inclusion in al-Qaeda,” it continues to hold him in detention “based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces.” All totaled, Zubaydah has been in American custody going on nine years, and there’s no sense that resolution of his case will occur at any point in the foreseeable future.