“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
“Are You Ready For Some Terror?”: The Irrational Republican ISIS-Ebola Brigade
I don’t know if Ebola is actually going to take Republicans to victory this fall, but it’s becoming obvious that they are super-psyched about it. Put a scary disease together with a new terrorist organization and the ever-present threat of undocumented immigrants sneaking over the border, and you’ve got yourself a putrid stew of fear-mongering, irrationality, conspiracy theories, and good old-fashioned Obama-hatred that they’re luxuriating in like it was a warm bath on a cold night.
It isn’t just coming from the nuttier corners of the right where you might expect it. It’s going mainstream. One candidate after another is incorporating the issue into their campaign. Scott Brown warns of people with Ebola walking across the border. Thom Tillis agrees: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got an Ebola outbreak, we have bad actors that can come across the border. We need to seal the border and secure it.” “We have to secure the border. That is the first thing,” says Pat Roberts, “And in addition, with Ebola, ISIS, whoever comes across the border, the 167,000 illegals who are convicted felons, that shows you we have to secure the border and we cannot support amnesty.” Because really, what happens if you gave legal status to that guy shingling your roof, and the next thing you know he’s a battle-hardened terrorist from the ISIS Ebola brigade who was sent here to vomit on your family’s pizza? That’s your hope and change right there.
Nor is it just candidates. Today the Weekly Standard, organ of the Republican establishment, published an article called “Six Reasons to Panic,” which includes insights like “even if this Ebola isn’t airborne right now, it might become so in the future,” and asks, “What’s to stop a jihadist from going to Liberia, getting himself infected, and then flying to New York and riding the subway until he keels over?” What indeed? This follows on a piece in the Free Beacon (which is the junior varsity Weekly Standard) called “The Case For Panic,” which argued that the Obama administration is so incompetent that everything that can kill us probably will.
Even if most people aren’t whipped up into quite the frenzy of terror Republicans hope, I suspect that there will be just enough who are to carry the GOP across the finish line in November. When people are afraid, they’re more likely to vote Republican, so it’s in Republicans’ interest to make them afraid. And you couldn’t come up with a better vehicle for creating that fear than a deadly disease coming from countries full of dark-skinned foreigners. So what if only two Americans, both health care workers caring for a dying man, have actually caught it? You don’t need facts to feed the fear. And they only need two and a half more weeks.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 17, 2014
“Keeping Its Viewers In The Dark”: Fox News Causes America To Fixate On The Wrong Things
A grisly beheading at a food plant in Moore, Oklahoma last week reinforced some Americans’ greatest current fear: that the Islamic State terrorist group has infiltrated the U.S. Murder suspect Alton Nolen severed the head of his victim, just as an ISIS killer severed the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker, among many other victims of the Islamist group. Coupled with Nolen’s reported ties to Islam, that was enough to warrant FBI involvement. Although the agency hasn’t yet determined Nolen’s motive, it doesn’t believe that he represents a further threat to us by ISIS or Islamists. But Fox News sees things differently.
“Sounding the jihadist alarms, Fox News and the right-wing media are eager to label the ghastly crime an act of Islamic terror,” writes Eric Boehlert on the liberal watchdog website Media Matters. “Law enforcement officials, however, aren’t in the same rush, noting that the attack came immediately after Nolen was fired and stating that they’ve yet to find a link to terrorism.”
Boehlert goes on to contrast Fox News’s coverage of the Oklahoma beheading with its coverage of an actual terrorist attack. On Sept. 16, marksman and anti-government extremist Eric Frein allegedly murdered one cop and attempted to kill another two. Hiding out in the Pocono Mountains, officials say Frein is “extremely dangerous” and perhaps in possession of an AK-47.
“We have a well-trained sniper who hates authority, hates society, hates government, and hates cops enough to plug them from ambush. He’s so lethal, so locked and loaded, that communities in the Pocono Mountains feel terrorized,” said Philadelphia columnist Dick Polman. According to the criminal complaint, Frein also collected “various information concerning foreign embassies.”
According to Boehlert’s research, Fox News only mentioned Frein and his killing spree six times in the two weeks since the shooting, and in none of those reports were the assassin’s anti-government sentiments even noted.
Ever since 2008, when Barack Obama began his first term in the White House, Fox News has been building a narrative to destroy him and his legacy. The president is routinely portrayed as having an alarmingly lax stance toward terrorism. Some conservative pundits even stoop so low as to emphasize his middle name, Hussein, to rile up Islamophobic viewers. If details of a story — or the story itself — don’t align with Fox’s ulterior purpose, they’re omitted.
Just as the most important news of the day receives front-page coverage in newspapers, it tends to be allotted the most time in newscasts, signaling its relative importance. Fox News has dedicated hours upon hours to covering the Oklahoma beheading. With such headlines as “Terror in the Heartland,” Boehlert argues, Fox politicized a tragic killing, which investigators reckon was nothing more than a disgruntled ex-employee gone berserk.
“In other words,” notes Boehlert, “on Fox News a Muslim who killed a co-worker in Oklahoma and who remains in police custody represents a much bigger story than a suspected anti-government assassin who killed a cop and remains on the run, eluding hundreds of law enforcement officials while terrorizing a Pennsylvania community.”
The Fox coverage of Nolen’s crime was only the latest in a long history of journalistic misconduct (if the word “journalistic” even applies). To tarnish Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state as well as her reputation before the next presidential election, the network aired almost 1,100 segments on Benghazi across five programs between the date the attack occurred and the formation of a select committee last May to investigate it, according to another Media Matters report. Even though no evidence of a cover-up was found over the course of 13 hearings and 50 briefings, 41 percent of Republicans continue to call Benghazi the biggest scandal in U.S. history, according to the results of a PPP poll.
Fox News had been equally powerful in convincing its viewers of the voter fraud “problem” in America, a problem “more rare than death by lightning,” a study by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice finds. Nevertheless, Fox spearheaded the crusade for the enactment of voter ID laws – motivated, one can reasonably assume, to suppress Democratic votes.
The results of a 2013 Gallup poll showed Fox News to be the nation’s leading news source, while a 2012 survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind revealed viewers of Fox News to be worse informed than even those who watch no news at all.
In April, CNN’s Peter Bergen observed that since 9/11, “extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies … have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology.” But because the top dogs at America’s No. 1 right-wing news channel are better served touting the improbable threat that ISIS poses to the homeland, the network elects to keep its viewers in the dark, distracting them from actual threats: the millions of unlicensed guns, unabated climate change, armed anti-government fanatics, and, of course, all the irrational fixations of Fox News.
By: Aimee Kuvadia, an editor and freelance journalist; The National Memo, October 2, 2014
“There’s No Terrorist Shaolin Temple”: Why Are We Afraid Of The Returning Expat Terrorist?
One of the common refrains we hear in the reporting on ISIL is that officials are worried that Americans will go to Syria or Iraq, fight with ISIL, and then return here to launch terrorist attacks on the United States. As a discrete category of terrorist threat, this is something very odd to be afraid of.
It isn’t that such people might not have the motivation to carry out a terrorist attack. But if they went to fight with ISIL, they probably already had the motivation. Ah, but what about the things they learned there? This morning, I heard a reporter on NPR refer to such returnees employing their “newfound terrorist skills” against the United States. But what skills are we talking about? If you want to learn how to make a bomb, you don’t have to go to Syria to acquire the knowledge. There’s this thing called “the internet” where it can be found much easier.
The way these potential attackers are talked about, you might think that launching a terrorist attack is something you can only achieve after years of intensive training in an arcane discipline, the secrets of which are closely held by wise old masters who deign to impart them only to carefully chosen initiates. But there’s no terrorist Shaolin temple. If all you want to do is kill some Americans and sow chaos, it’s actually not that hard. A couple of knuckleheads like the Tsarnaev brothers could do it.
This is an entirely separate question from whether ISIL as an organization wants to carry out an attack within the United States, because if they do, they don’t need someone with an American passport to execute it. Anyone here on a tourist visa could do it (in 2013, just under 70 million international visitors came to the U.S.).
The point is that there are any number of reasons a person might decide to launch a terrorist attack against the United States. While it’s entirely possible that an American could fight with ISIL and then get sent back to plant a bomb somewhere, that eventuality is no more likely than an American who has never left his home town becoming angry over U.S. foreign policy and deciding to lash out in the same manner. There are no “terrorist skills” you can’t get here at home. So as a matter of policy, the returning expat terrorist is pretty far down the list of things we need to worry about.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 24, 2014
“A Victim Of The True Intent Of Terror”: How Lindsey Graham Succumbed To The Tactics Of Terror And Embarrassed His Nation
If the objective of terrorism is to create fear in the minds and hearts of those who once walked the earth secure in the belief that their government will protect them from evil, Senator Lindsey Graham must now be presented as Exhibit A in the case to be made that the terrorists have, at least in the matter of Senator Graham, won.
Appearing on Fox in June of this year, Graham made the argument that America’s willingness to take on the ISIL challenge with a military response wld help head off another 9/11 style attack—not an irrational point of view at a time when we were coming to grips with the arrival of this new, well-funded and well-organized enemy.
A short time later, Graham was back on TV raising the ante.
As Simon Maloy points out over at Salon.com, “In August, Graham was invited to Fox News Sunday to talk terrorism, and upped the Islamic State’s fantasy body count to an entire city’s worth. “
Said Graham, “When I look at the map that Gen. Keane described, I think of the United States. I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorists’ ability to operate in Syria and Iraq.”
Somehow, in just a matter of weeks, Graham’s fears had escalated from concern over a 9/11 style attack to an entire American city going up in smoke at the hands of the ISIL forces. A bit much, in my opinion, but at least one could make a somewhat credible argument that terrorists seeking to destroy an American city might have the means to accomplish such an objective.
But that was nothing when compared to what was to come.
This past Sunday, Graham was making another of his seemingly never-ending appearances on Sunday morning TV when he looked at the camera, eyes ablaze in a fashion that brought to mind the frantic visage of Howard Beale, and exposed for all to see the terror that had come to grip his soul—
“This is a war we’re fighting! It is not a counterterrorism operation. This is not Somalia. This is not Yemen. This is a turning point in the war on terror. Our strategy will fail yet again. This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.”
I can agree with the Senator on his assertion that the battle to be fought in Northern Iraq and Syria is not akin to our experiences in either Somalia or Yemen. Like Graham, I thought the President was off-base when he sought to use our experiences in Yemen and Somalia as a point of comparison when describing what we might expect in the battles to be waged against the Islamic State.
I can also agree that this is, indeed, a war that we are now fighting, despite the huge amount of wasted ink and airtime that has been dedicated to useless discussions over those in the administration willing to use the word ‘war’ versus those who chose, initially, not to do so.
Sadly, I would also have to agree that Graham may be right about one more thing—this may indeed be a turning point in the war against terror, but certainly not the turning point Graham has in mind.
When a United States Senator appears before the world and reveals that he has grown positively unhinged and fully terrified at the prospects of our entire American population being wiped out by an organization infused and infected with a poisonous and murderous ideology, the terrorists have most assuredly succeeded in their efforts to terrorize Senator Lindsey Graham.
It is that fact that I now fear could be the turning point in the war against terror as it is now a United States Senator who seeks to put terror into the hearts of his countrymen where those committed to using that particular weapon of war have largely failed in their efforts.
One can only imagine the satisfaction terrorists around the world must have experienced at that moment when Lindsey Graham displayed how the latest example of a vicious terror campaign had, indeed, succeeded in infecting the mind and heart of someone who sits at the very highest levels of the United States government.
That feeling of inevitable satisfaction on the part of those who wish the world pain and evil comes at the expense of my own profound embarrassment that one of our nation’s leaders—and I could not care less which party that leader represents— would get in front of a camera and expose himself as a victim of the true intent of terror.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 16, 2014
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