An exhaustive, five-year Senate investigation of the CIA’s secret interrogations of terrorism suspects renders a strikingly bleak verdict of a program launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, describing levels of brutality, dishonesty and seemingly arbitrary violence that at times brought even agency employees to moments of anguish.
The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee delivers new allegations of cruelty in a program whose severe tactics have been abundantly documented, revealing that agency medical personnel voiced alarm that waterboarding methods had deteriorated to ‘a series of near drownings’ and that agency employees subjected detainees to ‘rectal rehydration’ and other painful procedures that were never approved.
The 528-page document catalogues dozens of cases in which CIA officials allegedly deceived their superiors at the White House, members of Congress, and even sometimes their own peers about how the interrogation program was being run and what it had achieved [‘curveballs’].
(Washington Post, December 9, 2014)
The above is an overview of the damning indictment the Senate Intelligence Committee laid out against the CIA in a report released yesterday.
But I should add that, in addition to waterboarding and rectal rehydration/feeding, which involved pureeing food and force-feeding it up the rectum of detainees, CIA interrogation methods included:
- sleep deprivation for as long as 180 hours (while standing or being frog marched naked);
- all manner of extreme sensory deprivation; mock executions;
- standing on broken legs and being hog-tied and strung up in all kinds of stressful/painful positions for inhumane lengths of time; and
- marathon interrogation sessions (using all manner of threatening language, including threats to rape and kill detainees, and to do the same to their children and mothers).
And bear in mind that the CIA subjected to these methods far too many detainees who not only had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11, but were not even members of al-Qaeda.
It is particularly noteworthy that, in a Congress where positions on every issue fall along partisan lines, this report enjoys bipartisan support – with Democrats represented by chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, and Republicans by former presidential nominee and member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
More to the point, though, this report makes such cogent, compelling, and comprehensive reading that I feel compelled to admit that I was wrong to express such categorical support for the interrogation methods it indicts.
Here, for example, is what I wrote after Obama ordered the CIA to end these interrogation methods just days into his presidency in January 2009:
Obama’s presidency is now doomed if terrorists pull off another 9/11-style attack. Especially because this would stand in damning contrast to one of the only redeeming features of Bush’s purportedly failed presidency, namely, that he protected the American people from such an attack.
Until Obama leads the country through seven years without another terrorist attack, I am going to accept President Bush’s word that the enhanced interrogation techniques he approved were absolutely indispensable in foiling numerous attacks and saving thousands of American lives. The proof is in the pudding….
And frankly, I don’t give a damn if, by some subjective application of international law, those techniques amount to torture. It certainly beats the alternative!
(“CIA Memogate: Protecting the American People or Betraying American Values,” The IPINIONS Journal, April 23, 2009)
Foremost, my conversion is informed by the fact that I am far more impressed by Obama preventing another 9/11 for six years without torturing people, than I am by Bush doing so for seven years by torturing people. Not to mention that Obama’s six years without such an attack fatally undermines the Bush-era argument that torturing terror suspects was necessary to keep America safe.
But, in light of this fact, I was also moved by McCain’s restatement of his longstanding opposition to these interrogation methods. Here, in part, is how he delivered it, like a veritable testimony, on the Senate floor following yesterday’s release (and bear in mind that he’s a former POW who was himself tortured in Vietnam):
I believe the American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values…
I know that victims of torture will … say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering… Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored…
But I dispute wholeheartedly that it was right for them to use these methods, which this report makes clear were neither in the best interests of justice nor our security nor the ideals we have sacrificed so much blood and treasure to defend.
(C-SPAN, December 9, 2014)
Some argue that disclosing these secrets will alienate America’s friends and embolden its enemies. Except that this rings hollow in light of the secrets Wikileaks and Edward Snowden disclosed; to say nothing of those the CIA itself disclosed in June 2007 with the declassification of its “Family Jewels,” which included revelations about assassinating foreign leaders, wiretapping journalists, reading private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, and undermining anti-war activists. Not to mention that hostage-beheading terrorists hardly need incitement to unleash more jihadist rage against Americans.
To be fair, Republicans on the Committee issued a rebuttal report, in which they maintain not only that the indicted methods do not constitute torture, but that they were indispensable in protecting the United States from another 9/11 attack. In fact, all defenders insist the CIA’s interrogation methods cited in this report do not constitute torture because the Bush Administration signed off on them. The incriminating irony seems lost on them that this is rather like Nixon insisting the activities cited in the particulars of impeachment against him do not constitute high crimes and misdemeanors because he, the president, ordered them.
Alas, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might say, the “known knowns … known unknowns … and unknown unknowns” inherent in claims and counterclaims in this respect are such that partisans will be debating the efficacy of these interrogation methods till kingdom come. But I refer you to a November 20, 2005, article in the Los Angeles Times, headlined “How the U.S. Fell Under the Spell of ‘Curveball’, to get a sense of just how willing the CIA is to make exaggerated claims about the efficacy of plainly flawed intelligence … even if the consequence is war (hint: Iraq’s WMDs).
All the same, I would be guided in this not by what current CIA Director John Brennan says (even though it speaks volumes that he’s littering his defense of the agency with words like “regret … mistakes…abhorrent…unknowable…moving on.” Instead, I would be guided by what former CIA Director David Petraeus says:
Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. That would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.
(ThinkProgress, May 5, 2009)
In the meantime, I’d rather stand with Feinstein and McCain in defending American values against the presumptions and practices documented in their report, than with those who see nothing wrong with these presumptions and practices, presumably because, for them, America can do no wrong. Indeed, their rebuttal makes one think that these Republicans would argue that the internment of Japanese Americans was indispensable in helping the United States win World War II.
Except that, while I’m in this confessional mood, I should also confess to developing grave concerns about Obama’s drone policy, which is killing thousands of innocent Muslims in a “clean-hands” effort not to interrogate, but to execute terror suspects. Frankly, it takes a willful suspension of common sense to think that killing terror suspects in drone strikes, with all of the collateral killing and property damage that entails, is more conscionable than torturing them at “black sites,” no matter how morally repugnant the methods used.
All I can say is: God help Obama’s legacy when a Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee publishes a comprehensive report on his drone policy.
For the record, I think it’s better to use CIA operatives to infiltrate terror groups to disrupt operations and provide actionable intelligences for Special Forces to capture high-value terror suspects: those captured should be interrogated using the reportedly more humane and effective FBI or Army Field methods; those who resist should be killed in direct combat fashion. But drone strikes should be reserved for clearly identified terrorist training camps or terrorists mobilized in combat formation away from civilian areas.
In other words, if terrorists are hiding out in residential neighborhoods, where capturing them would entail too much risk, then surveil them until they can be captured or killed under more acceptable conditions.
That said, I agree with Obama that it would serve no national interest to prosecute the interrogators who tortured terror suspects on orders from their CIA handlers.
After all, those handlers not only gave the interrogators a wink and a nod; but, by keeping Congress and the White House (where these methods were initially green lighted) “in the dark,” they also gave that which all politicians covet in such cases, plausible deniability.
Moreover, nothing in this report impeaches the prevailing assertion that the sole intent of those implicated (from the interrogator in the field to the president in the White House) was to extract actionable intelligence for one noble purpose: to keep the country safe … no matter how demonstrably misguided that purpose might seem in hindsight.
So here’s to learning from history, as well as from our own mistakes.
Related commentaries:
CIA memogate…
Obama droning terrorists…
CIA family jewels…
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Wednesday, at 6:22 a.m.