Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Political paralysis over torture
By Alfred W McCoy
For "more physical and psychological stress", CIA interrogators used coercive
measures such as "an insult slap or abdominal slap" and then "walling",
slamming the detainee's head against a cell wall. If these failed to produce
the results sought, interrogators escalated to waterboarding, as was done to
Abu Zubaydah "at least 83 times during August 2002" and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad
183 times in March 2003 - so many times, in fact, that the repetitiousness of
the act can only be considered convincing testimony to the seductive sadism of
CIA-style torture.
In a parallel effort launched by Bush-appointed civilians in the Pentagon,
secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld gave General Geoffrey Miller command of
the new American military prison at Guantanamo in late 2002 with ample
authority to transform it into
an ad hoc psychology lab. Behavioral Science Consultation Teams of military
psychologists probed detainees for individual phobias like fear of the dark.
Interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploiting what they saw
as Arab cultural sensitivities when it came to sex and dogs. Via a three-phase
attack on the senses, on culture and on the individual psyche, interrogators at
Guantanamo perfected the CIA's psychological paradigm.
After General Miller visited Iraq in September 2003, the US commander there,
General Ricardo Sanchez, ordered Guantanamo-style abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
My own review of the 1,600 still-classified photos taken by American guards at
Abu Ghraib - which journalists covering this story seem to share like Napster
downloads - reveals not random, idiosyncratic acts by "bad apples", but the
repeated, constant use of just three psychological techniques: hooding for
sensory deprivation, shackling for self-inflicted pain, and (to exploit Arab
cultural sensitivities) both nudity and dogs. It is no accident that Private
Lynndie England was famously photographed leading an Iraqi detainee leashed
like a dog.
These techniques, according to the New York Times, then escalated virally at
five special operations field interrogation centers where detainees were
subjected to extreme sensory deprivation, beating, burning, electric shock and
waterboarding. Among the thousand soldiers in these units, 34 were later
convicted of abuse and many more escaped prosecution only because records were
officially "lost".
'Behind the green door' at the White House
Further up the chain of command, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, as
she recently told the Senate, "convened a series of meetings of NSC [National
Security Council] principals in 2002 and 2003 to discuss various issues ...
relating to detainees". This group, including vice president Cheney, attorney
general John Ashcroft, secretary of state Colin Powell and CIA director George
Tenet, met dozens of times inside the White House situation room.
After watching CIA operatives mime what Rice called "certain physical and
psychological interrogation techniques", these leaders, their imaginations
stimulated by graphic visions of human suffering, repeatedly authorized extreme
psychological techniques stiffened by hitting, walling and waterboarding.
According to an April, 2008 ABC News report, Ashcroft once interrupted this
collective fantasy by asking aloud, "Why are we talking about this in the White
House? History will not judge this kindly."
In mid-2004, even after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, these principals
met to approve the use of CIA torture techniques on still more detainees.
Despite mounting concerns about the damage torture was doing to America's
standing, shared by Powell, Rice commanded agency officials with the cool
demeanor of a dominatrix. "This is your baby," she reportedly said. "Go do it."
Cleansing torture
Even as they exercise extraordinary power over others, perpetrators of torture
around the world are assiduous in trying to cover their tracks. They construct
recondite legal justifications, destroy records of actual torture and paper the
files with spurious claims of success. Hence, the CIA destroyed 92
interrogation videotapes, while vice president Cheney now berates Obama
incessantly (five times in his latest Fox News interview) to declassify "two
reports" which he claims will show the informational gains that torture offered
- possibly because his staff salted the files at the NSC or the CIA with
documents prepared for this very purpose.
Not only were Justice Department lawyers aggressive in their advocacy of
torture in the Bush years, they were meticulous from the start, in laying the
legal groundwork for later impunity. In three torture memos from May 2005 that
the Obama administration recently released, Bush's Deputy Assistant Attorney
General Stephen Bradbury repeatedly cited those original US diplomatic
"reservations" to the UN Convention Against Torture, replicated in Section 2340
of the Federal code, to argue that waterboarding was perfectly legal since the
"technique is not physically painful". Anyway, he added, careful lawyering at
Justice and the CIA had punched loopholes in both the UN Convention and US law
so wide that these Agency techniques were "unlikely to be subject to judicial
inquiry".
Just to be safe, when Cheney presided over the drafting of the Military
Commissions Act of 2006, he included clauses, buried in 38 pages of dense
print, defining "serious physical pain" as the "significant loss or impairment
of the function of a bodily member, organ or mental faculty". This was a
striking paraphrase of the outrageous definition of physical torture as pain
"equivalent in intensity to ... organ failure, impairment of bodily function or
even death" in John Yoo's infamous August 2002 "torture memo", already
repudiated by the Justice Department.
Above all, the Military Commissions Act protected the CIA's use of
psychological torture by repeating verbatim the exculpatory language found in
those Bill Clinton-era Ronald Reagan-created reservations to the UN convention
and still embedded in Section 2340 of the federal code. To make doubly sure,
the act also made these definitions retroactive to November 1997, giving CIA
interrogators immunity from any misdeeds under the Expanded War Crimes Act of
1997 which punishes serious violations with life imprisonment or death.
No matter how twisted the process, impunity - whether in Britain, Indonesia or
America - usually passes through three stages:
1. Blame the supposed "bad apples".
2. Invoke the security argument. ("It protected us.”)
3. Appeal to national unity. ("We need to move forward together.")
For a year after the Abu Ghraib expose, Rumsfeld's Pentagon blamed various
low-ranking bad apples by claiming the abuse was "perpetrated by a small number
of US military". In his statement on May 13, while refusing to release more
torture photos, Obama echoed Rumsfeld, claiming the abuse in these latest
images, too, "was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals".
In recent weeks, Republicans have taken us deep into the second stage with
Cheney's statements that the CIA's methods "prevented the violent deaths of
thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people".
Then, on April 16, Obama brought us to the final stage when he released the
four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture, insisting: "Nothing will be gained
by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past." During a visit to
CIA headquarters four days later, Obama promised that there would be no
prosecutions of agency employees. "We've made some mistakes," he admitted, but
urged Americans simply to "acknowledge them and then move forward." The
president's statements were in such blatant defiance of international law that
the UN's chief official on torture, Manfred Nowak, reminded him that Washington
was actually obliged to investigate possible violations of the Convention
Against Torture.
This process of impunity is leading Washington back to a global torture policy
that, during the Cold War, was bipartisan in nature: publicly advocating human
rights while covertly outsourcing torture to allied governments and their
intelligence agencies. In retrospect, it may become ever more apparent that the
real aberration of the Bush years lay not in torture policies per se, but in
the President's order that the CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The
advantage of the bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of
course, that it did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating
Washington from the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely
practiced.
There are already some clear signs of a policy shift in this direction in the
Obama era. Since mid-2008, US intelligence has captured half a dozen al-Qaeda
suspects and, instead of shipping them to Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons,
has had them interrogated by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies.
Showing that this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon
Panetta announced that the agency would continue to engage in the rendition of
terror suspects to allies like Libya, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia where we can, as
he put it, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment". Showing the
quality of such treatment, Time magazine reported on May 24 that Ibn al-Sheikh
al-Libi, who famously confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided
al-Qaeda with chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to senate
investigators, had committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell.
The price of impunity
This time around, however, a long-distance torture policy may not provide the
same insulation as in the past for Washington. Any retreat into torture by
remote-control is, in fact, only likely to produce the next scandal that will
do yet more damage to America's international standing.
Over a 40-year period, Americans have found themselves mired in this same moral
quagmire on six separate occasions: following exposes of CIA-sponsored torture
in South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran (1978), Honduras (1988) and then
throughout Latin America (1997). After each expose, the public's shock soon
faded, allowing the agency to resume its dirty work in the shadows.
Unless some formal inquiry is convened to look into a sordid history that
reached its depths in the Bush era, and so begins to break this cycle of
deceit, expose and paralysis followed by more of the same, we're likely, a few
years hence, to find ourselves right back where we are now. We'll be confronted
with the next American torture scandal from some future iconic dungeon, part of
a dismal, ever lengthening procession that has led from the tiger cages of
South Vietnam through the Shah of Iran's prison cells in Tehran to Abu Ghraib
and the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
The next time, however, the world will not have forgotten those photos from Abu
Ghraib. The next time, the damage to this country will be nothing short of
devastating.
Alfred W McCoy is the JRW Smail Professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of
A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on
Terror(Metropolitan Books), which is also available in Italian and
German translations. Later this year, Policing America's Empire: The
United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, a
forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of overseas
counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here
at home.
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