The White House Gets Off On Torturing People
The Debate Over Torture
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An Iraqi detainee screams "Allah" while tied down in a "humane restraint chair" at the maximum security section of the Abu Ghraib Prison on Oct. 28, 2005. U.S. Army military police said that he had been given two hours in the chair as punishment. The suspected insurgent, a juvenile, had earlier been moved to the maximum-security section of the prison for 30 days for attacking a guard in another section of the facility.
By Evan Thomas and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Nov. 21, 2005 issue - Interrogators have pondered the uses of torture for centuries. During the Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago, priests obtained the desired results by placing infidels on the rack but had less success with sleep deprivation, which, after three or four days, seemed only to induce hallucinations. Torture still works to extract the truth in the movies and on TV shows like the popular '24,' but not in real life, say the experts. A prisoner who has his fingernails pulled out or his genitals shocked will say (and make up) anything to make the pain stop.
Real-world choices are less black and white. Less violent but still coercive techniques can sometimes be effective. These "enhanced" interrogation techniques, like placing a smelly hood over a prisoner and making him stand or squat naked for hours in a cold and dark room, are called "torture lite." In modern times, these tactics have been used by British intelligence to unravel the command structure of the IRA and by the Israelis to stop Palestinian suicide bombers.
Since 9/11, torture lite has been used by the Americans in the war on terror. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, fearful that another attack was imminent, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "we have to work... the dark side, if you will." Declared the CIA's then Counterterror chief Cofer Black: "After 9/11, the gloves came off." At one point, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it couldn't be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies "organ failure" or "death."
Torture lite has been a sparingly used but essential tool, says a senior Bush aide who spoke anonymously because of the classified nature of the subject. "We're talking about the most successful intelligence gained in the war on terror coming from these programs," he says. Details are hard to come by, but Sen. Kit Bond, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, told NEWSWEEK that "enhanced interrogation techniques" worked with at least one high-level Qaeda operative, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to thwart a plot. Bond would not say which one, but among foiled plots vaguely described by the White House and linked to "KSM" was a scheme to attack targets on the West Coast of the United States with hijacked airlines. The planning for such a "second wave" attack may have been in the early stages. A career CIA official involved with interrogation policy cautioned NEWSWEEK not to put too much credence in such claims. "Whatever briefing they got was probably not truthful," said the official, who did not wish to be identified discussing sensitive matters. "And there's no way of knowing whether what good information they got could not have been obtained by more traditional means." The White House suggests the intelligence obtained has less to do with people and plots and more to do with the structure of Al Qaeda. Because of "the program," as they somewhat spookily describe the CIA's "aggressive interrogation techniques," White House aides say that the United States has a much better idea how Al Qaeda operates around the world.
But at what cost? While many Americans probably don't wish to know too much about the "dark side" of intelligence gathering, the horrific images of tortured detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a terrible toll on America's standing in the world. "It's killing us. It's killing us," says Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whose NEWSWEEK essay on the subject follows this article. As a POW in Vietnam who had his arm broken and worse, McCain knows something about torture. His bill to ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading" interrogation techniques passed the Senate last month 90 to 9. But Cheney, with CIA Director Porter Goss in tow, has been lobbying against McCain. As written, the administration argues, the McCain legislation would tie the CIA's hands in the war on terror and potentially expose CIA operatives to prosecution at home and abroad.
Compromises are possible. "There's a common desire to work this out," says the senior Bush aide. Torture lite—and its bastard child, detainee abuse—are coming out of the shadows into the political arena. Cheney sometimes seems like a quieter version of Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" ("You can't handle the truth!"), and last week President George W. Bush in effect attacked the administration's critics as unpatriotic. Yet there is a growing willingness in the courts and body politic to deal with the sometimes unpleasant questions of how to incarcerate and question suspected terrorists, and not just because John McCain is gearing up to run for president. In Britain last week, Parliament rebuffed Prime Minister Tony Blair's bill to hold terror suspects without charging them for 90 days, and the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled that it will rule on the constitutionality of so-called military commissions set up to try terrorists after 9/11.
The American public seems split. According to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, 44 percent of the public thinks torture is often or sometimes justified as a way to obtain important information, while 51 percent say it is rarely or never justified. A clear majority—58 percent—would support torture to thwart a terrorist attack, but asked if they would still support torture if that made it more likely enemies would use it against Americans, 57 percent said no. Some 73 percent agree that America's image abroad has been hurt by the torture allegations.
Clearly, some sort of rules—some real limits beyond the risk of "organ failure"—are necessary. Otherwise, as McCain warns, America will sink to the level of its worst enemies. A reconstruction of the road to Abu Ghraib shows why: at each step, the Bush administration made understandable decisions to permit the use of harsh interrogation techniques against a few individuals. But the decisions were made in such an atmosphere of secrecy and confusion that the whole process spun out of control and produced atrocities that America may never live down.
The story of the first "High Value Target" captured by U.S. intelligence illustrates some of the dilemmas and pitfalls of interrogating terrorists. When Ibn Al-Shaykhal-Libi, who helped run Qaeda training camps, was picked up in Afghanistan in November 2001, the questioning of detainees was still the province of the FBI. For some years before 9/11, the bureau's "Bin Laden team" had typically handled suspects with a carrots-and-no-sticks approach: grant favors to suspects and their families (one terrorist's son even got a heart transplant), and they'll talk. But after 9/11, fighting Al Qaeda was deemed to be war, not law enforcement, and the usual rules went out the window. The CIA took al-Libi, strapped some duct tape over his mouth and put him on a plane to Egypt, where interrogations are a little rougher than down at FBI headquarters. At the airport, according to Jack Cloonan, a retired FBI officer who handled al-Libi, a CIA case officer went up to the suspected terrorist and said, "You're going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there I'm going to find your mother and I'm going to f—- her."
Sending a suspect off to languish (and possibly be abused) in the prison of a foreign country is called a "rendition." The CIA has done numerous renditions over the years, usually not for the purpose of seeing suspected terrorists subjected to torture, but just to get them off the street while the agency follows up leads from captured documents, laptop computers and the like. In the case of al-Libi, however, the Bush administration was only too glad to make use of the "take" from al-Libi's interrogation, helpfully provided by Egyptian intelligence. Under questioning by the Egyptian authorities (techniques unknown, but not hard to imagine), al-Libi confessed that Al Qaeda terrorists, beginning in December 2000, had gone to Iraq to learn about chemical and biological weapons. This was just the evidence the Bush administration needed to make the case for invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In his famous, now discredited speech to the United Nations in February 2003, the then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the intelligence extracted from al-Libi, referring to him not by name but as a "senior Al Qaeda terrorist" who ran a training camp in Afghanistan.
There was only one problem with al-Libi's story: after the Powell presentation, he recanted it. Overlooking timely doubts raised by some U.S. intelligence officials, particularly at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the ideologues in the Bush administration had used information obtained by torture to mislead the world.
Better, then, for the CIA to interrogate terror suspects on its terms. In April 2002, Abu Zubaydah, a top Qaeda lieutenant, was captured in Pakistan. At first he talked, but then he clammed up. Frustrated, the CIA went to its political masters in the Bush administration to ask: how far could the agency go in interrogating a crucial but reluctant suspect like Zubaydah?
In July 2002, the president's counsel, Alberto Gonzales, convened his colleagues in his cozy, wood-paneled office in the White House. Present were top Justice Department and Defense Department lawyers. Significantly missing were lawyers from the State Department and uniformed military, whose views on interrogation were known to be a good deal more cautious. (The military worries what will happen to captured American POWs in return.) According to a participant at the meeting who declined to be identified discussing private deliberations, Gonzales emphasized that it would be wrong to go over the line, but that America was at war, and it was necessary to "lean forward." (Gonzales has declined to comment.)
One by one, the lawyers went through five or six pressure techniques proposed by the CIA. They approved "waterboarding," dripping water onto a wet cloth over the suspect's face, which feels like drowning. But they nixed mock burials as too harsh.
It has never been clearly established if their methods worked to sweat useful information out of Zubaydah. But a precedent had been established, and interrogators creatively made the most of it. Toward the end of 2002, there was a spike in intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda was preparing another major attack. The CIA had in custody Mohammad al-Qatani, the so-called 20th hijacker who had been refused entry to the United States before 9/11. But al-Qatani, trained in resistance (one method is to memorize and recite the Qur'an over and over), was not responding to the usual interrogation techniques.
So his handlers at Guantanamo Bay obtained permission from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to try new techniques. According to a Southern Command report that came out earlier this year, al-Qatani was forced to perform dog tricks on a leash, was straddled by a female interrogator, told that his mother and sister were whores, forced to wear a woman's bra and thong on his head during interrogation, forced to dance with a male interrogator and subjected to an unmuzzled dog to scare him. At congressional hearings last July, Southern Command's Gen. Bantz Craddock testified that as a result of the use of some of these techniques, the formerly defiant al-Qatani had "provided insights" into Al Qaeda's planning for 9/11.
End Part I
