“Authority Crisis Roils America”: Police Abuse, Torture And Authoritarianism Run Amok
There is so much that’s horrifying about what’s now simply called “the torture report,” the redacted summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into years of unforgivable CIA abuse post-9/11. But one thing that recurs disturbingly often is anal rape imagery: examples of “rectal feeding,” of rectal exams that used “excessive force,” and “at least one instance,” according to the report, of threatened sodomy with a broomstick.
Am I the only one who thought about Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was not just threatened but actually sodomized with a broomstick by the New York Police Department’s Justin Volpe in 1997? The torture report’s release, in the wake of grand juries failing to indict police officers who killed unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and right here in New York, where Louima was tortured, reminds us of the danger of unaccountable state power.
Yet an undercurrent of authoritarianism in American culture — and a particular American deference to authority figures who are supposed to “protect” us – threatens to let it go unchecked.
To be fair, many Americans are horrified by the torture report’s revelations. And many Americans believe police officers should be held accountable when they use excessive force and harm or kill Americans, of any race. But there’s a disturbing impulse evident lately, to excuse abuses of power on the part of those who are charged with protecting us, whether cops or the post-9/11 CIA. “I don’t care what we did!” former Bush flack Nicolle Wallace shrieked on “Morning Joe” Monday. And she spoke for too many Americans. (Though not for her former boss Sen. John McCain.)
I watched the debate over the torture report unfurl all day Tuesday, online, in print and on television. All the coverage focused on a few questions: whether Sen. Dianne Feinstein is right that torture didn’t work; whether the report might produce blowback by our enemies; whether the CIA is being scapegoated for Bush administration decisions. There was shockingly little emphasis on the fact that torture is illegal and a war crime, banned by the Geneva Conventions, a U.N. Convention against torture ratified under a supportive Ronald Reagan, and by Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C of the U.S. Code.
So much in the torture report should appall Americans, above and beyond the many details of depravity. CIA officials lied about who they had in custody. They lied about what they were doing. They destroyed evidence. They tortured two of their own informants. At least 20 percent of the people they detained, as examined by investigators, were held wrongfully. They paid $81 million to two psychologists who knew nothing about al-Qaida, terrorism or the war against them. They didn’t fully brief President Bush until April 2006, after 38 of 39 detainees had already been interrogated.
This should be an issue that unites civil libertarians on the left and the right – as should excessive force by police — but the authoritarian impulse is stronger on the right. Libertarianism also seems overwhelmed by the prevailing resentment of President Obama, and the changing America that he represents. Still, it’s amazing: Even as wingnuts deride Obama as a fascist and a tyrant, they applaud excessive force by police officers and CIA officials.
It’s also amazing that it’s taken two years to get a redacted executive summary of the “torture report” released. Let’s remember that we’re merely talking about sharing information about the Senate’s investigation into torture, not about indicting or punishing anyone. At least grand juries considered whether to indict Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo in the killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. There has been no such process regarding CIA torturers.
Which is not to say the grand jury process in Ferguson or Staten Island delivered justice to those men’s families. Nor have the families of John Crawford and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, African-Americans killed by police while holding toy guns, even gotten a fair and clear accounting of how their sons died. Young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than white men, yet white people’s confidence in police fairness, and doubts about cops’ racial bias, have never been higher, while African-Americans’ is understandably at a record low.
Thankfully Abner Louima’s attackers were punished; Volpe is serving 30 years in prison, and Louima won a settlement of $8.7 million – the largest police brutality settlement in New York history at the time. The Louima rape happened to take place under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has emerged as the chief defender of cops who kill in the last two weeks. Giuliani’s career is an example of how the authoritarian impulse in American politics often prevails.
I don’t know why the worst element in law enforcement – locally and globally – turns to rape when left unchecked. But since rape is about power, it may be the ultimate example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Weirdly, the incorrigible neocon Danielle Pletka made a reference to rape, or at least the botched Rolling Stone story on rape, in the New York Times, when attacking the Senate’s torture report. “It has become the norm,” she complained, “to act based on false reports; to close fraternities because of rapes that may or may not have happened; to release terrorists because it is inconvenient to keep them.”
How strange that Pletka would reference rape in this context. Or maybe not. The right-wing backlash that defends torture and police abuse also agitates to restore a culture that blames rape victims for what happened to them, and excuses all but the most violent sexual assault as boys just being boys. Human progress is marked by the rejection of all such abuses of power; it feels like we’re living in a time when such progress is stalled, temporarily.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 10, 2014
“Miscreants Escaping Accountability”: The Senate Torture Report; Crimes Without Punishment
With the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11, the final defense of the indefensible by its perpetrators, advocates, and publicists is falling apart before our eyes.
Not only did “enhanced interrogation,” the Nazi euphemism adopted by the Bush-Cheney administration, employ methods outlawed and prosecuted by our country for more than a century, such as waterboarding; and not only did those “activities,” as Dick Cheney called them, violate American law, the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the conventions on torture; but we now know with great certainty that the agency executed this secret program with horrific incompetence — and that it produced nothing of significant value.
Indeed, the Senate Intelligence report concludes, contrary to the boasting of Cheney and many others, that torture was proved “not an effective means of gathering intelligence,” let alone saving millions of Americans from jihadi plots, and actually “complicated and in some cases impeded the national security missions.” The overseers of the torture program, themselves of dubious competence, were unable even to assess the impact or effectiveness of their orders.
As Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations points out, the CIA itself has admitted, in its otherwise aggressive response to the SSCI, that it lacked the “structure, expertise, and methodologies” to “systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our covert programs. They literally didn’t know what they were doing. But they were doing grave damage to themselves and to us.
Unavoidably, the Senate Intelligence report dwells on the details of these true nightmares, revealing facts that anyone would regret learning: the “rectal rehydration” of detainees by shoving food up the wrong way, with the infliction of excruciating pain; the “black sites” where detainees were held for months in total darkness, loud music constantly playing, and only a bucket for their waste; the cells where detainees suffered such freezing temperatures that at least one died of hypothermia overnight; the beatings, the near-drownings, the constant infliction of pain, hunger, and threats of rape and murder.
According to the report, some episodes of interrogation were so blatantly sadistic and so obviously criminal that the men who witnessed them actually wept. More than one officer broke down and fled, through retirement or transfer, while the White House and the Pentagon continued to lie about the extent – and the supposed necessity – of these unprecedented crimes. Those lies were designed to prevent investigations or oversight from revealing the horrific facts that are now emerging.
Yet despite a long and ongoing cover-up –and notwithstanding the specific revelations highlighted in the report – the basic outline has been known since 2009, when portions of the CIA inspector general’s report on torture were released by the Obama Justice Department in 2009.
Back then, the spy agency’s own investigation – in the words of a Bush appointee and torture enthusiast — “[found it] difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks.” In other words, the agency could never prove any instance when the sole justification for these gross violations of US and international law – breaking up a plot targeting American lives – had been fulfilled since 9/11. And unsurprisingly, that is still the case.
The searing issue we now confront, as a society governed by law, is that these lawbreakers will not be prosecuted or even required to testify publicly about their grave offenses. The Obama administration is apparently willing to expose their lawlessness, but unable to do anything to punish it. Even the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, has abandoned any hope of prosecutions, noting that the torturers have in effect been pardoned. Romero has urged President Obama to make those pardons official – which would at least stamp the actions of the torturers and their accomplices as crimes.
What we have needed for years, but evidently will never get, is a truth and reconciliation process that might have granted freedom from prosecution to witnesses who testified publicly, honestly, and completely about the crimes of the Bush administration. Instead, those miscreants will escape accountability altogether – except in the pages of history, where the Senate Intelligence report will indict them over and over again.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 10, 2014
“An Affront To Our National Values”: The Gigantic Disaster Of The CIA’s Torture Program
The Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary of its report on the CIA’s use of torture in the years after the September 11 attacks, which took place at “black sites” in foreign countries (the full report can be read here). While we’ve known a good deal about this for some time, many of the details are new, and I want to focus attention on a few of them to make a particular point about this program and how we’re debating it today.
The picture the CIA itself and Bush administration officials have always tried to paint of the torture program is one of highly trained professionals using carefully considered, perfectly legal techniques that were limited and humane, and produced valuable intelligence that directly saved American lives. When you read the Senate report, however, you see something very different: people who essentially had no idea what they were doing.
Their task was urgent, and their fear was genuine, but in that urgency and fear they brutalized prisoners, withheld information and in some cases lied outright to other agencies of government (including Congress, the State Department, and the White House), and generally made a mess of things. There’s no other way to put this: the torture program was a gigantic disaster; if this weren’t a family newspaper I’d use a word that starts with “cluster.”
First, let me quote from the executive summary of today’s report, about one of the black sites:
Conditions at CIA detention sites were poor, and were especially bleak early in the program. CIA detainees at the COBALT detention facility were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste. Lack of heat at the facility likely contributed to the death of a detainee. The chief of interrogations described COBALT as a “dungeon.” Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique. At times, the detainees at COBALT were walked around naked or were shackled with their hands above their heads for extended periods of time. Other times, the detainees at COBALT were subjected to what was described as a “rough takedown,” in which approximately five CIA officers would scream at a detainee, drag him outside of his cell, cut his clothes off, and secure him with Mylar tape. The detainee would then be hooded and dragged up and down a long corridor while being slapped and punched.
One of the detainees at this site was left overnight shackled to the wall and naked from the waist down in near-freezing temperatures. The next morning he was found dead of hypothermia.
Now let me cite a couple of the specific cases. This an email from a medical officer present for the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah:
The sessions accelerated rapidly progressing quickly to the water board after large box, walling, and small box periods. [Abu Zubaydah] seems very resistant to the water board. Longest time with the cloth over his face so far has been 17 seconds. This is sure to increase shortly. NO useful information so far.. ..He did vomit a couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It’s been 10 hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing. We plan to only feed Ensure for a while now. I’m head[ing] back for another water board session.”
In addition to waterboarding, Zubaydah was subjected to extended use of stress positions, which are designed to produce excruciating pain. At the end of the intensive period of interrogation, CIA officers declared the torture a success — not because Zubaydah had actually given up information on upcoming attacks, but because the officials decided they had completely broken his will and satisfied themselves that he had no such information to give.
Quite naturally, what concerned interrogators most was the prospect of future attacks. However, in multiple cases, they were faced with prisoners who were cooperative and supplied intelligence on things like the structure of al-Qaeda, but if the prisoner said he had no information about upcoming attacks, that would be taken as proof that he should be tortured further.
A significant amount of the report focuses on the site known as Cobalt, which is described not only as a horrific “dungeon” but a place where personnel rotate in and out and few seem to have any idea what they’re doing. Here’s the result of a visit there by a military legal advisor:
The U.S. military officer also noted that the junior CIA officer designated as warden of the facility “has little to no experience with interrogating or handling prisoners.” With respect to al-Najjar specifically, the legal advisor indicated that the CIA’s interrogation plan included “isolation in total darkness; lowering the quality of his food; keeping him at an uncomfortable temperature (cold); [playing music] 24 hours a day; and keeping him shackled and hooded.” In addition, al-Najjar was described as having been left hanging — which involved handcuffing one or both wrists to an overhead bar which would not allow him to lower his arms — for 22 hours each day for two consecutive days, in order to “‘break’ his resistance.” It was also noted al-Najjar was wearing a diaper and had no access to toilet facilities…According to the CIA inspector general, the detention and interrogation of Ridha al-Najjar “became the model” for handling other CIA detainees at DETENTION SITE COBALT.
But it wasn’t always the on-site interrogators pushing the interrogations to be more brutal. In one case cited by the report, the interrogators judged that a detainee named Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was implicated in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, was being cooperative and forthcoming, based on their interactions with him and the fact that he was giving information on things like the structure of al-Qaeda. But he claimed that he didn’t have any information on upcoming attacks. The interrogators’ superiors at CIA headquarters wrote to them, “it is inconceivable to us that al-Nashiri cannot provide us concrete leads…. When we are able to capture other terrorists based on his leads and to thwart future plots based on his reporting, we will have much more confidence that he is, indeed, genuinely cooperative on some level.”
In other words, the idea that the prisoner simply didn’t have information on upcoming attacks was inconceivable to them. So they sent an untrained interrogator known for his temper to the site, who proceeded to do things like threaten the prisoner with a gun and an electric drill.
When that also failed to produce information on upcoming attacks, a contractor psychologist visited and created a new interrogation plan, based on yet more brutal techniques. This led the CIA’s chief of interrogations to inform his colleagues that he was retiring. In an email, he wrote, “this is a train wreak [sic] waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.” Eventually, everyone concluded that al-Nashiri didn’t have any information on upcoming attacks.
That’s just a bit of what’s in the report. One other interesting detail that jumped out at me was that on a couple of occasions, interrogators used mock executions, a favorite psychological torture technique of the Iranian regime.
We should note that many in the CIA dispute the details, particularly whether they were dishonest in their dealings with other agencies. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that the United States of America initiated a program of torturing prisoners that was planned and executed by people who knew next to nothing about interrogation.
As John McCain — who was subjected to some of these same torture techniques as a prisoner of war in Vietnam — said about this report: “The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.” Many in his party don’t share that belief.
And even the White House can’t seem to bring itself to call this by its true name. Today I was on a background call with a group of senior administration officials, and they were asked repeatedly why they seemed so reluctant to use the word “torture,” even after President Obama admitted that “we tortured some folks.” One official replied, “We’re not going to go case by case in a report like this and try to affix a label to each action.” But they do affix a label: “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which they used again and again, accepting the euphemistic label the Bush administration affixed to it.
The White House certainly deserves credit for ultimately supporting the release of this report (even if they seemed reluctant to do so). For all the protestations of the CIA, Bush administration officials, and their supporters, a few things are beyond dispute. George W. Bush and the people who worked for him made torture the official policy of the United States government. The program that carried out their wishes was an unholy mess. It was an affront to all the values that this nation is supposed to stand for. And it made it much easier for terrorist groups to recruit new adherents.
And there are a lot of people talking on television, writing op-eds, and even running for office who sound like they’d be only too happy to do it all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 9, 2014
“All Were In The Moral Sewer”: Don’t Let The Bush Administration Off The Hook For Torture
There’s a new report out today from McClatchey on the CIA’s torture program based on that Intelligence Committee report. They got a closer look at it than journalists have before, so there are some more details. But there’s a danger in how this could be interpreted that will serve to let people who were complicit in the torture program off the hook, so we need to be careful about how we deal with this information. But first, here are their bullets:
- The CIA used interrogation methods that weren’t approved by the Justice Department or CIA headquarters.
- The agency impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making regarding the program.
- The CIA actively evaded or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
- The agency hindered oversight of the program by its own Inspector General’s Office.
And now to put this in context:
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found that the methods wouldn’t breach the law because those applying them didn’t have the specific intent of inflicting severe pain or suffering.
The Senate report, however, concluded that the Justice Department’s legal analyses were based on flawed information provided by the CIA, which prevented a proper evaluation of the program’s legality.
“The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” the report found.
Several human rights experts said the conclusion called into question the program’s legal foundations.
“Proper legal analysis” my ass. This paints a picture that is completely at odds with everything else we know about what was going on in the Bush administration at the time. The report would have us believe that Bush administration lawyers came up with a reasonable, well-grounded definition of torture that allowed the CIA to interrogate people in an “enhanced” way, but the CIA went rogue and tortured their prisoners. I’m sorry, but that’s a joke.
The truth was this: the administration wanted to torture people. Lawyers in the White House Counsel’s office, then run by Alberto Gonzales, wrote a series of memos justifying it, using positively laughable logic and arguments sending a clear message to any official who might have a prisoner in their custody that you could do just about anything you wanted to him, and we’ll back you up by saying it wasn’t really “torture.” For instance, the infamous “Bybee memo” argued that it’s only torture if you’re acting with “specific intent” to cause pain and suffering, and if the causing of pain and suffering isn’t the intent for its own sake, but rather that using the pain and suffering to extract information is your intent, then presto, you’ve only tortured with “general intent,” and therefore you haven’t actually tortured. Bybee also wrote that though the statute forbidding torture mentioned the infliction of “severe” pain, we could construe pain to be “severe” only if it rose “to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant bodily function.” In other words, if I take a pair of pliers and tear out your fingernails, then I haven’t actually inflicted “severe” pain on you, because you’re still alive, your organs are intact, and you can still use your fingers. And therefore there hasn’t been any torture.
And that wasn’t even the only one; there was another infamous memo from John Yoo arguing that, in effect, if the president orders it, it’s not torture. This is the kind of “legal guidance” the CIA was getting from the White House. So the idea that they just went too far and exceeded the legal justification for what they were doing is baloney. The CIA may have been lying about what kinds of intelligence the torture was yielding, and they may even have been lying about exactly what methods they were employing. But everything they did—every waterboarding session, every use of stress positions, every use of sleep deprivation, and even every impromptu beat-down that may have occurred—happened because George W. Bush, through the lawyers who reported to him, told the CIA that it was A-OK to torture prisoners.
Bureaucratic conflicts between agencies are certainly of interest to historians. But the last thing we should ever do is let a report like this make us absolve anyone of responsibility for the torture program. The President, the Vice-President, the lawyers, the CIA—they all dove into that moral sewer together.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 11, 2014
“Macho Chest-Thumping Myth”: Sorry, Dick Cheney, Torture Doesn’t Work
I’ve written a couple posts now predicting that a Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation practices during the Bush years would show that the CIA’s foray into torture just didn’t work. Also, that the CIA lied about the effectiveness of waterboarding and other controversial techniques. Now we have a test of that prediction — not the Intelligence Committee report itself, which is still under wraps, but a bombshell in the Washington Post that quotes people with firsthand knowledge of the report. Lo and behold:
A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.
The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.
“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”
Importantly, the Senate report apparently also recommends no prosecution for these war crimes. That’s depressing, if not very surprising.
You might be wondering: How was I so prescient? In fact, I deserve no credit: that torture during the Bush era yielded no valuable intelligence was completely obvious from the beginning, despite what Dick Cheney might have you believe. All you had to do was pay attention to people who have studied torture carefully. Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College, did just that in his masterpiece Torture and Democracy (see here and here). Rejali found that torture is good for two things: intimidation and extracting false confessions. As an intelligence-gathering mechanism, it’s much worse than worthless. You get no good intelligence, while what you do get is decidedly bad, including a corrosion of the legitimacy of security agencies and a weakening of the foundation of liberal democracy itself.
Micah Zenko makes a good point that the major issue when it comes to torture is that it is blatantly illegal, immoral, and unethical. He’s right that the rule of law — not to mention basic decency — ought to land every torturer in federal prison.
But it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that it is also ineffective. The ethos of the Bush-era CIA was “know-nothingism,” as Paul Krugman put it at The New York Times, “the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise.” These national security officials see themselves as the hard-headed tough guys who won’t let the pathetic moral qualms of liberal cowards keep them from doing the dirty work that keeps us safe. (This is a real-life version of Jack Nicholson’s famous “You can’t handle the truth!” scene in A Few Good Men.) Breaking the law, then, is a Badge of Seriousness, of a willingness to do what is necessary no matter the cost.
It’s critically important, therefore, to break forever this macho chest-thumping myth. Anyone who advocates torture shouldn’t be met only with moral condemnation, but also contemptuous jeers for being such a naive dupe. The members of the CIA torture cabal aren’t tough. They aren’t keeping us safe. They are a pack of incompetents who don’t know what they’re doing.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 1, 2014
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